I Was a Teenage Grognard

I have a confession to make. I was a teenage grognard. It’s something I’ve long repressed, but Thanksgiving weekend back home I fell off the wagon and I fear there may be no help for it. Deep down I think I like it.

So what is a grognard, you ask? What deep and terrible secret have I been keeping? A grognard is a wargamer. The name was a term of affection that Napoleon bestowed on his grizzled veterans, the ones who had been with him from the Peninsula campaign to the snows of Russia to the rain-soaked fields at Waterloo. In a sense, I’ve been to those places too. On many a day after school you would have found me hunched over a topographical map overlaid with a hexagonal grid, pushing around dozens if not hundreds of little pieces of cardboard with cryptic markings, rolling dice, and consulting charts and a rulebook, thick and closely typed. The materials were crude indeed, but in retrospect I realize these were some of my first virtual realities. Books too, I suppose, but this was different. This was interactive. You would have seen me huddled over a mess of maps and markers, but I would have been busy turning Blucher’s flank at Ligny or plotting the movements of the third armored corps racing across the Sahara desert, or even (this was the eighties) working to counter a sudden Soviet air drop into the cities of western Europe.

Let’s get a few things straight. Wargames are not Dungeons and Dragons. I played my share of weekend D&D, but wargames were a solitary obsession: the rulebooks were thicker, the action was, if possible, even more opaque and plodding, and I alone among my friends seemed compelled by the chimera of interactive history. We’re not talking about miniatures (i.e., toy soldiers) here either. Miniatures are a type of wargame with their own often intricate rule sets, and they’re gorgeous to behold. I coveted them. But I had neither the money, nor the patience and skill to acquire and paint rank after rank of lead figures, or mold and shape the sandtable terrain on which they did battle. The games I played were manufactured by companies you probably won’t have heard of unless you were part of the hobby: Avalon Hill (most famous perhaps for a once-popular game called Diplomacy), the late great SPI (already defunct by the time I started gaming in the early eighties), Victory Games, GDW, and a handful of others. Dollar after dollar of first my allowance and then my after-school jobs went into acquiring these cardboard universes.

Wargaming, let it be said, has nothing to do with warmongering, or the glorification and celebration of war. For one thing, a good simulation—watching what happens when you send a column of troops across a wide open field to break an enemy position—you know it’s suicidal but this is the bottleneck for the entire front and there’s no other option—can teach someone more than reading can about the irreducible brutality of warfare, from sticks and stones to tactical nukes. But wargames were admitedly interesting to me for less high-minded reasons. They’re almost irresistible for anyone interested in military history, especially alternative history: could I have done it better? Would things have turned out differently if the German armor wasn’t a hundred miles away up the coast from Normandy? If Pickett’s charge had worked? If it hadn’t rained the night before Waterloo, bogging down Ney’s cavalry? Wargames are also of obvious interest to people who appreciate the art of modeling and simulation; a wargame, like any game, is a mechanism, a finely-tuned formal system. At the heart of a good wargame is a delicately wrought balance between playability and historical accuracy. But wargames foreground the interplay among their internal components, like a watch with its movement exposed, through their conspicuous apparatus of charts and tables, endless lists of modifiers and special cases. (No surprise, then, the cross-over between wargamers and computer geeks.)

Perhaps most of all, though, wargames fed my interest in narrative, which in turn has something to do with why I eventually went to graduate school in English and not military history. Here, I realize, I’m treading on a raging debate in contemporary game studies (that may or may not have taken place according to the latest accounts), but my wargame experience compels me beyond a shadow of a doubt to believe that games can be, can become, narrative. A key move or assault, a well-played defense, a deft maneuver or a tenacious holding action: some badly-printed die-cut little cardboard square (labeled “Second Armored Division”; “Third Platoon”; “82nd Airborne”; “The Horse Guards”) would take on a life of its own as the rest of the game ebbed and flowed around its aura. I played the games solitaire and tried not to take sides—I never deliberately made a “bad” move or fudged the dice—but if a favorite unit was suddenly cut down by enemy fire or suffered an ignominious defeat I was shaken by it.

There is, of course, a thriving grognard subculture on the Web, though the hobby is but a shadow of its former self (you can read that story here if you want to: “A Farewell to Hexes”). Last weekend at my parents’ house I dug some games out the closet in my old room and spent an hour flipping through the rulebooks and maps. Most of it was opaque to me. Most games, like Wellington’s Victory (a grand tactical level simulation of Waterloo involving thousands of units, four maps, and requiring upwards of fifteen hours to play) I know I’ll never touch again. I certainly don’t have the time, or the space, or even the will to ramp back up on the rules. Nor do I necessarily have any more patience or skill (or money) for miniatures than I once did. And as I now realize from reading Scott McCloud, as tantalizing as the brightly colored miniatures were in an HO model train kind of way, there’s a reason why I found the cardboard and paper so compelling: closure, the way we imaginatively project our own idiosyncratic verisimilitudes onto more abstract modes of representation. So I left Wellington’s Victory but took some of the simpler Napoleonic games back with me, and have since passed an hour or two at Marengo, Wagram, and Quatre Bras (yes, the old SPI versions). I also think I’ll play Squad Leader again, Avalon Hill’s brilliant simulation of World War II infantry combat that struck a near perfect balance between playability and realism. There was little chance of holding the ridge, but Major Everson had one last desperate hope. The remains of one platoon he sent to the far slope to screen the enemy advance. Corporal Kelly, meanwhile, a veteran of over a dozen major actions with a rucksack full of antitank mines led a second, smaller group to spring a trap for the enemy armor moving slowly up the sunken road. It might work. Probably not, but it might—the terrain was in their favor. Just then the first shells from a previously hidden gun battery began bursting around Everson’s command post . . . I think I might also pay a visit to Dream Wizards up in Rockville, a legendary game store that I used to read about in the hobby’s magazines. Or maybe I will start collecting a few miniatures after all, slowly. And yes, of course, I’ve been researching computer wargames, though a part of me resists: the whole point is to get up and away from the keyboard.

My present professional self finds no lack of ways to critique the project of using grids and rules and dice to “simulate” the ghastly phenomenon of war. It’s hard to read critical theory, or for that matter read a newspaper in today’s world and still want to be an armchair general. No surprise that when I went to grad school I left the games at home. But in the six degrees of separation that are the hexagonal grid of life, nothing is truly isolate. The author of “A Farewell to Hexes” turns out to have a blog I sometimes read. In fact, I suspect there may be one or two ex-grognards lurking on my blogroll (I’d love to hear from you). And perhaps one day these flimsy pieces of bellicose cardboard will be my springboard to some future project.