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DURHAM -- Amos Rozier and Matt Vernon stood at attention, their bed rolls slung across their shoulders, their musket rifles at their side, in order arms.
The command came and Rozier and Vernon methodically but quickly loaded their weapons, slammed their ramrods down the muzzles, primed their rifles and then turned and fired, just like the Civil War soldiers they were supposed to be.
"That's pretty cool," said 11-year-old Jeremy Blankenship as he looked at the puff of rifle smoke still hanging in the air and took his hands off his ears in what had been a reasonably successful attempt to muffle the loud crack of the shots.
Kids and dozens of their elders were entranced by the re-enactment Sunday of a Confederate Army enlistment camp at the Bennett Place State Historic Site. They got a chance to sign up to become new recruits, get "inducted" into service, eat some hardtack and wander around the open tents and smoldering campfire of the enlistment station.
"This was the atmosphere you would have seen at an enlistment camp, a recruiting station, at the outset of the American Civil War," Site Manager John Guss told those who had gathered by the flimsy tents. "If you signed up here, you would have signed your life away, so to speak, to the Confederate Army."
For that, Guss added, "you would be paid -- possibly -- $13 a month." And you probably would have had to bring your own bed roll.
Bennett Place, the site in 1865 of the largest troop surrender of the Civil War, increasingly has scheduled hands-on special events like the enlistment camp. James Erickson, wearing a "Legends of the Confederacy" T-shirt, said he'd brought his two boys often to the site.
"This is history, right here, that they should know," Erickson said. "It's not like something in history books. Here you really know it all happened and you can really believe it."
Vernon, a historic interpreter at the site, understood how people feel.
"It's a lot of fun to get out here and experience the way folks would have lived," he said, as he stirred the campfire with a poker. "This way you really get a sense of how difficult things were -- even things like cooking."
Earlier Sunday morning, Vernon said he had learned to make skilly-gilly.
"It's hardtack soaked in water for a time then flash fried in bacon grease," he said. "It sort of tastes like funnel cake left out for a few days. It's good stuff."
