Students reenact Civil War battles with water balloons

By Jean Reid Norman

Friday, April 17, 2009 | 7:14 p.m.

War is hell, but it can also be wet.

At the end of the annual Martha P. King Elementary School Civil War reenactment today, Sgt. Jared Mooney marched from the battlefield back to the classroom in his Confederate uniform, bedraggled and a bit damp.

“It’s sad, pretty hard,” he said. “I lost a few of my friends. I lost one of my brothers and my dad. It was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done.”

The purpose of the water balloon-fueled reenactment is to teach King’s fifth graders about the Civil War and slavery.

“What did you learn today?” teacher Robin Borden asked her students as they walked down B Street from the Boulder City High School football field, the site minutes earlier of the Battle of Fort Sumter.

“War isn’t good,” a voice pipes up.

It didn’t help that their side lost.

Mooney, maintaining his character of Confederate sergeant, said he lost an entire way of life. The only gain, he said, was food from the supplies of the Union Army, which Gen. Ulysses S. Grant provided after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered.

This is the type of learning that was intended, said Harold Coe and Claire Tobler, former King teachers who began the annual tradition and who continue in their roles as Grant and Lee, respectively.

“When you do, you truly learn,” said Coe, who is now an administrator in the Clark County School District. “They get deep, rich learning, and I hope they take that and extend it and become experts.”

The learning began today with the kindergartners and first graders from Andrew Mitchell Elementary School, who sat as still as they could in the bleachers to watch the hour reenactment.

As two replica cannons fired off loud but harmless rounds, the first graders of Janice Ross’s class plugged their ears.

When the Confederacy won the Battle of Fort Sumter, the first battle of the Civil War, Payton Walker looked up at Ross and asked, with a concerned look, “Don’t we win?”

“The Confederates just won that battle,” she whispered back. “The U.S. wins the war.”

Tobler, who retired from teaching 10 years ago, told the parents and children in the bleachers that their presence was similar to how the battles went during the real Civil War.

“There wasn’t any entertainment, so people came to see the battle just as you did. But they saw blood,” he said.

Students dressed in American Red Cross uniforms tended to the fallen, and a couple of the doctors were hit, the first graders noticed. A couple of others couldn’t help hurling a water balloon in the heat of battle.

For the naval battle of the ironclads, the Monitor vs. the Merrimack, the fifth graders bobbed up and down to simulate waves before they were ordered to fire.

During Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, where 50,000 soldiers died over three days, the gray-clad students charged and fell in three separate lines.

That turned the tide of the war, but the fighting continued for two more years, Coe said.

For the 23rd time, Tobler as General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. For the 23rd time, a student portraying Lincoln was shot by a student portraying John Wilkes Booth, and a student portraying Mary Lincoln Todd screamed and mourned.

And for the second time since they began elementary school, the students of Ross’s class witnessed this slice of history.

Ross said it’s an early exposure to the Civil War, and she tries to emphasize to the youngsters the kindness of the generals to one another during the surrender, when Grant gave Lee food from the Union Army supplies to feed Confederate soldiers.

Kindergartner Reese Kalastro and first-grader Paige Kalastro may have learned a bit more from the reenactment than some of their peers. They helped their fifth-grade sister, Maddison,, memorize her lines.

“Now they’re waiting for their turn,” their mother, Brooke Kalastro, said.