The Civil War was about wrenching choices. It was about following orders.
It was about giving “the last full measure of devotion,” as Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address.
And for Phil Caskey, it’s about the light of awareness.
That’s what the University High School social studies teacher sees every time and every term in the faces of his students when he delves into the Civil War.
It was the war that pitted North against South, while making a state out of West Virginia.
Today and Saturday, on the grounds of the sprawling school on Baker’s Ridge, you’ll have a chance to see what it was like to have been in the middle of it all.
Caskey is hosting the second annual UHS Civil War Encampment at the school. Falling in will be the reenactors, with their period-correct uniforms and weaponry.
The daily struggle of soldiers in both blue and gray will also be depicted.
That includes the medical treatment of battlefield wounds — to the hardtack candy that’s almost as tough to conquer as the reenactors themselves, who won’t break character the whole time.
Oh, they’ll talk to you, marveled several Monongalia County Board of Education members who dropped in at last year’s camp.
You’ll just have to address those in uniform as if it’s 1863 — and not 2018.
You’ll also need to be ready to smell the cordite as rifles (with blanks) will be discharged as part of the activities.
“It’s experiential learning,” Caskey said. “You hear it, you feel it, you smell it.”
Today’s encampment is open only to UHS students and eighth-graders from Clay-Battelle, Mountaineer Middle and Westwood Middle schools.
On Saturday, though, the public can get into formation from 9 a.m. until the soldiers break camp, at 3 p.m.
Provided Caskey can line up enough reenactors (he was still working on that), a mock-skirmish will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday.
If the soldiers fall short, Caskey will direct them to do a firing line.
“Either way, I want people to smell that cordite and hear those guns,” he said.
Last year, he won the Outstanding Teacher of American History award from the West Virginia Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 2016, the Civil War Trust named him National Teacher of the Year.
Caskey was hearing the drumbeats for education way before that.
He holds degrees in journalism and sports management from WVU, where he worked as an associate sports information director in the university athletic department for 11 years.
The former sports guy strode to the front of the classroom in 2012 as a teacher, after earning a master’s in secondary education from his alma mater.
Caskey grew up in the Civil War’s backyard.
“I was just fascinated with every aspect of it,” the Martinsburg native said.
“The soldiers, the campaigns, the generals … We were born of battle. The only one. If there’s no Civil War, there’s no West Virginia.”
