My name is Jean Henri Chandler. I'm 37 years old and a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana. I would like to introduce myself to the members of this list, for those who might be interested.
My background is non academic. I am an enthusiastic amateur historian and have always had a great deal of interest in military history and weapons and armor in particular. I have a few semesters of University training but I never achieved a degree of any kind (not even a high school diploma). I have read quite a bit, for a layman, about medieval warfare, and I do have a considerable degree of experience in both real street fighting and play-sparring, about which I will explain a bit more. I am also familiar with many military strategy and simulation games, particularly the old cardboard chit, table top variety such as used to be published by the [censored] of Avalon Hill and SPI. I did a tour in the Army in the late 1980's. Air Assault School in Kentucky, Combat Medic school in San Antonio, and a three year tour in Germany in an Artillery unit. I have had almost every menial blue collar job imaginable in my life, but since the mid 90's I have been employed as a Database programmer. These days I work for a small insurance firm.
My practical weapon sparring experience is with what you would call here boffers. During the 1980's and early 1990's I was an on again off again member of a an informal (to put it mildly) non historical sparring group with little formal education but a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. What we lacked in formal training we made up for in fearless enthusiasm and a fairly sincere interest in finding out what worked and what didn't. We took on all comers, from "experts" of the asian martial arts (very few actually were) to college fencers, to boxers and wrestlers, to frankly, any psycho who walked down the street and wanted to try to knock one of us out.
We called this activity "sham battles". I think it was a bit differen't from the normal 'boffer' type play that you see. We used fairly heavy armor, almost all non historical stuff made up from scavenged sports equipment, motorcycle gear, duct tape, and scrap rugs, foam rubber, and sheet metal. Think ren faire meets road warrior. We also used almost any kind of weapon which could remotely be made marginally safe, such as hunting bows with tennis balls on the tips of the arrows, nets, lassos, flails, fire extinguishers, fireworks... really almost anything that didn't seem certain to maim or kill someone. Over the years we had a few encounters with some local SCA groups here in New Orleans (though most were based out in the suburbs) and they always considered us "too freestyle" and too violent. Our best guys could always beat their guys.
People did sometimes get hurt, it wasn't a very responsible group. The activity started among a bunch of reckless, unsupervised teenagers who evolved into reckless, unsupervised young adults, and we generally engaged in it, often drunk, in dangerous places (such as the cities many maze like graveyards, mugger haunted Armstrong park, and the then abandoned Jax Brewery) where were not allowed to be.
The people involved in this sparring group were mostly hard core punk rockers, and we engaged in the activity at least partially as a method of honing our street fighting skills for the many unpleasant encounters we had on a daily basis with all of the more bellicose examples of more mainstream cultural factions, all of whom hated us: redneck tourists, street gangsters, pinky ring wearing mobster wannabees, long haired hessians, frat boys, bikers. I suffered many severe beatings in those days, but I honestly believe that the very intense stick sparring we did on a regular basis greatly improved our chances in real fights where despite almost always being outsized and outnumbered, we usually more than held our own.
Now that I'm old and decrepit, and have a relatively easy white collar job, I no longer contemplate the sublime joy of the barroom sucker punch on some well diserving loudmouth redneck with the same relish I once did. Instead, I prefer to channel my martial instincts into Historical research and tinkering with game systems, both on the computer and for paper and pencil. I like to think my more colorful experiences have lent a certain slightly unique perspective on hand to hand combat, perhaps even enough to make up to some small extent for my considerable lapses in academic knowlege, though I could well be deluding myself. I paid a heavy price for some of those experiences, it helps to think they were worth something.
But here is where the last of the red flags have finally gone up. The majority of you gentle readers and arms enthusiasts, like most right-thinking people, were probably already against me as soon as I admitted not having a degree, drinking, or worse yet being a punk rocker, (and, certainly, a 'punk' in nearly every perjorative sense ot he word), and now even the last few open minded hold outs here will no doubt have mentally filed me in the 'round file' as soon as they read the word 'game'. What can i do but dig myself deeper into the hole. Yes, I do 'tinker with', and in fact occasionally play, role playing games.
Role playing games have a richly diserved reputation for banality, if not pure evil, among genuine historians and even military re-enactors, (let alone true renaisance martial artists!) but lets face it, most people with any knowlege at all about medieval arms and armor learned it from Role Playing Games. Certainly, the vast majority of what they learn is, to put it mildly, pure bullshit, but the fact remains this is the vector. Without getting into this in detail at this point, let me just say that my goal is to try to influence the culture of role playing games, so that they have a bit more of the type of the influence that I think strategic and tactical war games have had, in other words, toward actually disseminating a bit more of a realistic understanding of history in general into the culture at large.
This is my goal here on this list. I have some special projects I am working on and I'm trying to find out everything I can about classical and medieval combat. I have done a lot of research myself, though due to a limited budget I cannot alas afford the kind of library I would like to have. In addition to the vast resources avalable on the internet, have found many of Ewart Oakshott's (RIP) books to be very useful, The Archeology of Weapons sit's in a place of honor on my shelf, as I did the Martial Arts of Renaisance Europe which originally lead me to find what was then called HACA, the excellent Art of War treatises on Classical, Medieval and Rennaisance Warfare by Hans Delbruck, Christian Toblers translation "Secrets of German Medieval swordsmanship", John Warrys Warfare in the Classical World, and the various osprey press books to be useful specific military references to name a few, and various general histories, direct and interpreted, from Herodotus to Thucydidies, to Ceasars diaries, Tacitus' germania and agricola, Bernal Diaz account of Cortez conquests, the various sagas and ettas, to Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror, again just to name a few (and please pardon my atrocious spelling).
Though I have gleaned much from these worthy tomes, I am left with many unanswered questions, which I hope I am not wrong in guessing, some of the wiser and better educated ladies and gentlemen on this list might be able to help provide some guidance in.
This is who I am, and this is my purpose.
By the way, genuine Rip to Oakeshott, he was someone I looked up to, albiet from a great distance. I hope he is in Valhalla with another recently passed hero of mine, Joe Strummer. I look forward to getting to know the people who post to this forum.
Jean Henri Chandler
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