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A couple of days before I attended what was advertised as a “40-hour, continuous light-infantry simulation,” I told my therapist about it.
She looked perplexed, as if she thought it was a bad idea.
I stopped covering the war in Ukraine about a year ago, and here I was, going to report on a fictional battle in southern Oklahoma where the combatants dressed like NATO and Russian forces.
The battle, called the “Fall of Salsk,” seemed important to cover as part of my new beat, which examines gun culture and policy in the United States and elsewhere. Here were hundreds of people fighting in a pretend war, a hobby known as airsoft, with very real-looking guns that shoot plastic pellets.
While we had written about airsoft events before the Covid-19 pandemic, the hobby’s growing popularity in the United States amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed relevant — and telling. How can people pretend when the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II is claiming thousands of lives a month?
What I found was a strange level of dissonance among the young, American participants who had been fed selective social media posts portraying a real, overseas war. I couldn’t help thinking of a version of a saying from the war I fought in over a decade ago as a young enlisted infantry Marine: “America isn’t at war. The Marine Corps is at war. America is at the mall.”
I arrived at the event, put on by a company called MSW, or MilSim West, on a Friday afternoon. I wore body armor with a “press” patch affixed and carried my rucksack, a green bag that was with me in 2021 during the evacuation of Kabul and that sat in the corner of hotel rooms in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, while it was shelled relentlessly in 2022.
The photographer Meridith Kohut, a veteran of bloody conflicts in South America, was with me and wore body armor as well. We were both role-playing journalists and reporting as actual journalists, something we needed to specify continuously when talking to participants over the next day or so.
As the roughly 300 participants checked in, slowly forming the ranks of pretend NATO and Russian forces that would battle in the Oklahoma woods, I was greeted by a kaleidoscope of memories from the last 25 years of my life.
Some of the participants were still in high school. They reminded me of myself, young and eager to go off to war, or at least to “see the elephant.” Many were content with pretend war, but some wanted to join the military. Their ignorance of a war overseas was little different from my own as a teenager. I don’t think I knew where Kandahar was until I got off the plane there in 2008.
Other participants were serving. One National Guard soldier I spoke with was stationed on the U.S.-Mexico border; another was in the Army infantry.
The commands among the event’s cadre, which was mostly made up of former U.S. military combat veterans acting as platoon leaders and battlefield shepherds, sounded almost verbatim like orders given during any military field exercise. Packs were stacked in neat rows, and fake battle rifles leaned on trees as troops adjusted their gear.
One 20-year-old participant named Jared, acting in the role of a Russian soldier, traveled to the event from outside Dallas; his uniform included a belt buckle common among Russian troops currently serving in Ukraine. The last time I had seen a similar buckle was in 2022, on the cold floor of the morgue in the Ukrainian town of Trostyanets. It was on the belt of a dead Russian soldier.
That moment embodied the surreal nature of the event for me: this fake world, or “fantasy,” as Josh Warren, the co-founder of MilSim West, put it, rubbing against the edge of my past realities.
I wanted to know where participants obtained their cosplay outfits and accouterments. So I reached out on Instagram to a military surplus store run by a man in Ukraine, who sells the uniforms of Russian soldiers captured off Ukraine’s battlefields to people around the world.
The seller didn’t provide his real name. He was hiding from draft officers and actively avoiding being sent to the trenches, a phenomenon I covered with my Ukrainian colleagues in 2023.
He assured me, with a smiley face emoji, that the uniforms he sold to “airsoft enthusiasts” weren’t from dead Russian soldiers but recovered from “abandoned positions” or “prewar reserves.”
I thanked him for his time, but couldn’t help imagining Jared, barely a few years into adulthood, wearing that dead Russian soldier’s belt and running around the Oklahoma woods without a care in the world.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a national correspondent for The Times, covering gun culture and policy.
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