War re-enactors get no respect

For the past 30 years, I've been urging my students to put themselves in the shoes of people who lived in the past. So why do we make fun of Americans who do that as a hobby?

I'm talking about military re-enactors like Eric Frein, the 31-year-old man suspected of killing a police officer and wounding another at a state police barracks in northeastern Pennsylvania last month. A few weeks into the manhunt for Mr. Frein, news organizations reported that he played a Serbian soldier — "Istocni Vuk," he called himself — in a unit that re-creates Eastern European armies from the Cold War era.

Mr. Frein studied Serbian and Russian languages and even smoked Serbian cigarettes, as investigators discovered when they searched his home. They also believe that the skills Mr. Frein acquired in re-enactments might have helped him elude the hundreds of law enforcement officials who are looking for him.

And if you look at the blogosphere, you'll see how this news changed the way we look at Eric Frein. He's not just an anti-government extremist — as was reported earlier — but instead a "war nut," one of those "losers" who spends his time and money pretending to be somebody else. These guys can't tell the difference between real and pretend, or so the argument goes, and that's why Eric Frein mutated from a phony soldier into an actual killer.

Nonsense. Unlike Mr. Frein, who was frequently out of work, most war re-enactors are law-abiding citizens holding down solidly middle-class jobs. And unlike the kooks of Internet caricature, they're fully capable of separating fantasy from fact...