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Around Town

Playing G.I. Joe

By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 13th, 2007 issue

I wasn’t too nervous when the young boy standing at the other side of camp hoisted a German anti-tank missile launcher onto his shoulder and aimed in my general direction.

Boys will be boys, I thought. And the Panzerfaust — as the World War II weapon is called — was decommissioned. I was pretty sure of that. At the least, its blowback would throw the kid’s shoulder open, sending the warhead streaking into the clear, blue sky.
Invited by Ivan Mackerle, profiled in these pages last month, I spent the weekend of June 8–10 in the company of some 40 Czech men and their grab-bag collection of running military vehicles from World War II. They had jeeps mostly, but also the occasional motorcycle, troop transporter and scene-stealing amphibious assault vehicle.
Playing soldier — most were dressed in vintage military uniforms, with American GIs being the popular choice — has a fervent following here. But this was the first meeting of its kind in the countryside near Litoměřice, north Bohemia.
The weekend’s main event was a convoy through several towns, including the fortress town of Terezín, which the Nazis turned into a concentration camp during the war. Cruising at a steady 30 kilometers (19 miles) per hour and waving large American flags, the convoy drew stares and waves and dropped the jaws of several little boys. It felt vaguely like invasion.
Never fully a part of the convoy — no uniform for me — when the men would stop in town to exhibit their wares, I’d wander off for coffee, looking to shake the plum brandy from the night before. (A friendly drunk German, dressed as an American, came within whiskers of cutting me with a Bowie knife.) Maybe the convoy wouldn’t have left me, but several times I had to run to catch it as my ride began pulling out.
After the convoy, we returned to our campground beside a pond-size inlet off the Labe River, in the shadow of a marina whose manager is a WWII aficionado. In what was the weekend’s favorite pastime — except drinking and bonding over motors — the amphibious jeeps would crawl down the rocky slope and splash into the bay, dropping their propellers and tooling around to general delight.
Delight to everyone except environmentalists, maybe. As one attendee later confessed, it’s getting harder and harder to find berths for the jeeps because of tough EU-imposed regulations.
“It used to be easy,” he said. “But now …”
With all the smoke belching from the jeeps, it’s not hard to understand the concern. By Sunday morning, the river water seemed more viscous and reflective than it had when I jumped in 24 hours earlier. Maybe it was just scum stirred up by the night’s passing thunderstorm.
It would have been an easy weekend for this kind of ambivalence: We were riding about in Volkswagen Schwimmwagens, originally designed for the Waffen-SS; several friendly people I met wore Nazi caps, complete with swastikas. You can get lost in this moral terrain, wondering when play becomes something more.
It comes down to intent. And the only intent I ever felt was the pleasure of driving in a hard sun — living, for a weekend, in a way out of the ordinary. As Ivan said to me as we packed away his Schwimmwagen at weekend’s end: “Now, we are normal people again.”
The night before, we were far from ordinary. I hopped into Ivan’s jeep and we drove into the river for a midnight cruise. Ivan and his son, Danny, had discovered a hole in the hull that weekend, which Danny monitored with a headlamp to see how much water had accrued.
We didn’t sink then, driving around the islands, waving to campers and watching the insects skitter about in our headlights. Danny shut the lights off, and in the darkness we heard only our guzzling motor as it echoed across the pond and into the Labe, flowing on its lazy course to Germany.

Paul Voosen can be reached at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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