TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) – From the walls of Fort Ticonderoga to the shores of the Delaware River, a group of U.S. Marine Corps-led officers is spending the week visiting Revolutionary War battlefields, rehashing old campaigns and applying centuries-old lessons to situations facing today’s commanders.

“How do I keep my fort from falling? How do I maximize the things I have?” said Maj. Melanie Mercan of Detroit, ticking off some of the hypothetical questions prompted by Thursday’s visit to Fort Ticonderoga, located on the southern end of Lake Champlain 85 miles north of Albany.

Mercan is among the 18 active-duty or retired military personnel making a three-state tour as part of a course given at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Va. Most are Marines, but the Navy, Army, Air Force and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency also are represented.

There’s also a redcoat in the mix – Maj. Harry Thomsett of the Royal Marines – who had to endure some good-natured razzing from his American comrades earlier this week during a tour of the Lexington and Concord battle sites outside Boston.

“Sam Adams is no hero of mine,” he quipped during a break Wednesday at the Saratoga Springs hotel where the group is staying.

But Thomsett also earned praise from the Yanks for the Brit perspective he brings to the battlefield tours. He and the other officers slogged through slush in Massachusetts and hiked up a mountain here in 12-degree temperatures to get an 18th-century grunt’s view of the terrain.

“It’s better than sitting through a power point presentation and falling asleep,” Thomsett said.

“We definitely have an appreciation of what the Continentals went through back then,” Marine Maj. Lew Vogler said after Thursday’s visit.

After reading up on the British and American campaigns of 1775-1777, the group began a campaign of their own to visit battle sites in Massachusetts, upstate New York and New Jersey. Their weeklong trip will take them from “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” to Washington’s crossing of the Delaware at Trenton, N.J., with visits to three New York battlegrounds in between – Ticonderoga, Saratoga and Bennington, which is actually in New York near the Vermont line.

The trip is led by retired Marine Lt. Col. Jack Matthews, the college’s associate dean of academics. During the tour, the participants take on the roles of British and American commanders, attacking or defending their decisions, he said.

“It’s replete with lessons” for today’s officers, said Matthews, a Vietnam veteran who grew up in Watervliet, near Albany.

“It’s about decision making,” said Vogler, an infantry officer from Quantico. “We study how they made decisions on their battlefields. We are very soon going to be making those decisions.”

Several of the officers have served in Iraq, and they said many of the challenges commanders faced here in the 1700s – long supply lines, language barriers, guerrilla warfare – are being encountered today by U.S. forces overseas.

“The nature of war doesn’t change,” Thomsett said. “The technologies change, but overall the nature doesn’t change.

The trip is known in the military as a “staff ride,” a term from the early 20th century when Army officers led subordinates on horseback rides to Civil War battlefields to study strategy, tactics and maneuvers.

Nick Westbrook, director of Fort Ticonderoga, said the site has served as an open-air classroom for budding military leaders for nearly 200 years. The fort changed hands six times in less than 30 years after its construction by the French in 1755. The fort fell into disrepair in the 1800s, even as visiting British officers and American military academy students walked the terrain to study the 18th-century battles and campaigns.

“We believe that young Robert E. Lee was here in the 1830s, when he was a cadet at West Point, to study the ruins at Ticonderoga,” Westbrook said.

Restored in the early 1900s by the wealthy family that owned the site, Fort Ticonderoga today is a popular tourist attraction in the Lake Champlain-Lake George region.

For the past decade, it has hosted seminars for active-duty soldiers and officers enrolled in the Pentagon’s leadership and education programs. Military personnel from Army Rangers to former Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe have walked the fort’s ramparts or bushwhacked through the surrounding forests.

“This is a kind of a three-dimensional military textbook for the tactics of the day,” he said.

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On the Net:

Marine Corps Command and Staff College: http://www.mcu.usmc.mil/csc/

Fort Ticonderoga: http://www.fort-ticonderoga.org