Fort Ticonderoga re-enacts dramatic battles

FIVE Septembers ago, my 8-year-old son returned from a trip to Fort Ticonderoga with my husband, euphoric from a weekend of war re-enactments. My 5-year-old daughter had stayed behind with me in Brooklyn, neither of us interested in watching grown men pretend to shoot one another.

My son, Dean, was already planning another trip to that 18th-century fort, in New York State, above Lake Champlain near the Vermont border, and insisted we go with them. Paulina and I shrugged, though I was more than uninterested, my pacifist leanings making me hostile to the idea. But over the following winter and spring, Dean waged a major campaign against our defenses. Paulina and I surrendered, and the following summer, we found ourselves at Fort Ti, as the regulars call it....