[revwardoc]

Like I said, it was at least entertaining, the clothing was very good (except for some of the uniforms) and the portrayal of life in the rural south was also OK except that everyone was just too damned clean and had perfect teeth. One great special effect they used was the cannonball coming straight at "you" and they guy who lost a leg to a cannonball. They used a real-life amputee for that. They fitted him with a temporary prothesis loaded with blood packs and hooked it up to an inertia reel that snapped it off. COOL!

Speaking of cannonballs, during the initial artillery bombardment of Breed's Hill, which was very ineffective, there was an incident where a lucky shot took the head off a militiaman causing much consternation and fear in the rest of the men building the battlements. Col. William Prescott, commander of the 9th Massachusetts Regiment, in order to calm the men, began walking back and forth on top of the battlements telling the men that it was a "million-to-one-shot" and couldn't happen again. Fortunately for him , it didn't, but, since the Americans had a severe shortage of cannonballs, a bounty was put on them which every eager farmboy wanted to collect. Since the British ships in the harbor couldn't elevate their guns to the proper height, the shots literally bounced uphill towards the American position. One man made the fatal decision to "catch" one on the bounce. When his leg went along with the bouncing ball, the others felt it better to wait until the ball stopped rolling. A tough lesson.