This treatise presents the interpretative research on newly created sources which emerged from oral-historical interviews with protagonists from an association of military re-enactment of diverse conflicts from the 18th through 20th centuries, which are active primarily in the Czech Republic, but also in Central Europe,
and also with a relating group of narrators who serve in the Czech Army´s Active Reserve. The vast majority of research on military
re-enactment focusses on the research into three interconnected
problems of authenticity, historical authority, and reflexivity self-consciousness). However, this text focusses newly on the problem of loyalty. Interviews are aimed at the experience of this specific group of narrators with their military service, performed at the time of normalization and transformation after 1989, especially
in relation to the issue of ambivalent loyalty to the political regime
for which they took an oath during their military service. This experience is analysed in relation to non-contradictory and strong
loyalty, felt to the experienced and performed values, which were perceived as being key values for historical military cultures of a specific re-enactment period or conflict, by which the participants express their loyalty through similar rituals of a military oath. The key research question is how this loyalty, experienced in relation
to historical military culture (at one sub-group of narrators even interconnected with their membership in the Active Reserve), relates, in a conflicting way, to the loyalty which was required to the former Czechoslovak People´s Army, or to later forces of democratic Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, during compulsory military service performed by the narrators.