This letter is in response to Peter Carrube’s call for boycott on the Civil War reenactment (Simi Valley Acorn , Nov. 6).

We need peace-loving, flowertoting, insulated, pudgy, spoiled Americans. I’m one, too. But I’m a vet.

I’m a U.S. Marine Infantry veteran and of the U.S. Army. I did not give those years for the love of war, but for the hate of war, to protect peace.

I did so to actively contribute to peace in this free land and to give it to others who haven’t served. That’s what we veterans do.

I took my daughters to the Civil War reenactment in Moorpark for the first time last year. My eldest was learning about it in school. I expected to see glorification of war and went in there with a bit of an attitude just like Mr. Carrube.

My attitude was changed.

The volunteer reenactors are educated, and they’re teachers. They do not glorify war. They show how tough it was in those times.

They become living history for our education. Shootouts in line formations? Cannons firing chains to cut down troops? The cost in lives? How they lived and died?

You can read it in a book, see it in a movie, but you can only feel it when the smell of gunpowder singes your nostrils.

This specific war resulted in a first hard step toward freedom from slavery for many and the beginning of the end of racism, but how hard was it? Go see.

See? To close our eyes and ears from the education the Civil War reenactment provides for us is the true travesty. To prejudicially insulate ourselves from getting a better feel for what it took to earn freedom is unfair and unbalanced.

Veterans today walk around free knowing they’ve earned the right to a feeling of “job well done.” Such can never be felt by Civil War veterans, because they have never seen, but only dreamed of, the fruits of their sacrifice.

So in the least, respectfully, make it a point to go see a Civil War reenactment to further shave your ignorance and increase your awareness.

As my daughters said when we left, “Oh, my god.” They have become more aware.

The reenactments no more glorify war than the cross encourages crucifixion; it is about the nature of and the reason for the sacrifice, lest we lose the lesson and miss the point. Guy Nohrenberg Simi Valley