Well, take wars for example. These days they don’t even know what war to get into, how to get there or who the enemy is. The dress code is way below par and they don’t even know when to go home for dinner. Is it any wonder they can’t win one?
Oh for the time when things were different.
OLD WAR STORIES
By
Victor Epp
Kids growing up in wartime when the war is someplace else have a different slant on things than they would if there was bombs and grenades going off around their ears. That’s only natural. They have no way of understanding the pain and suffering endured by innocent victims and the soldiers who get sent into battle as cannon fodder for somebody else’s ideology. Either way, for kids there’s always a real obsession with how it ought to be. To eight and ten year olds, it’s just another adventure game.
Well what’d you expect in wartime anyway? I mean, the dads and uncles and big brothers are all away overseas. The women are working in factories and warehouses. The grandmas are collecting lord knows what all for the war effort. There’s soldiers and sailors and airmen in uniforms everywhere. That’s got to affect how kids think and how they play, even when the war is far away across the ocean - especially when it’s that far away. With the radio blaring news about the war, and newspaper headlines announcing this victory and that battle, there was enough fodder there to fuel the imagination until kingdom come.
I swear most communities were cleaner and tidier those years than before or since, because if a picket would just happen to come off of somebody’s fence, it immediately turned into a rifle. All you needed was a Swede saw to shape it and an auger and drill bit for the trigger hole and you were in business. Folks didn’t leave empty cardboard boxes around either. They made the best tanks and airplanes and jeeps and who knows what all else. You could even draw pictures on them. Not only that, but when you got into a pitched battle with the enemy, they would really get wrecked, which made it all the more realistic. Once they were battered beyond any use, you could always put them in the burn barrel, which is more than you can say for the real McCoy.
We probably fought every battle there ever was, and likely did it better than anybody’s army. Oh, we died, and got limbs blown off and had our positions destroyed, just like the real thing, but we always managed to get it over with in time for supper or to go and deliver our newspapers. The only real casualties besides our weapons and equipment were our clothes. Well, that and our egos if we happened to have been the enemy that day. That was a bummer - being the enemy, I mean. It meant you had to lose of course, and the only way you could get any respect out of it was to die with flair. It got so you could be a sniper, shot out of a tree and fall, screaming all the way to the ground, roll and writhe around a bit, and never be the worse for wear.
Of course there was always your neighborhood klutz around who couldn’t dodge a pebble without getting hurt. I remember this one kid, Skinny Butler - his dad was in the army, overseas. He was kind of weird anyway, maybe because he was stuck in the middle of all those women. Seems there was always two or three aunties around the house. Unless you knew the family, you were never sure who his mother was. There were women coming and going around that house all the time. They all had boyfriends too, mostly soldiers. That was a whole other source of entertainment, watching the romantic goings on. From my vantage point, I could always peek around the front corner of our house across the alley and through the neighbors’ empty lot to the Butlers’ back porch. There was always somebody saying hello or goodbye with a sense of urgency - regular soap opera, it was.
Well, Skinny liked to play war too, and he was no chicken either. But he had a penchant for the olden days, stuff like Robin Hood, King Arthur, and stuff like that. Heck, what did I care? War was war and we were both battle-hardened veterans. We could make bows and arrows and swords as easy as Lügers and Sten guns. In fact, we could even make crossbows if we had a mind to. Stan Cater made one once out of a piece of two by four and an old car leaf spring and some clothes line cable he found at the dump. It took three guys to cock the bow and when it went off, it split the arrow right down the middle without even moving it off the groove, that’s how powerful it was. We were pretty well smart enough not to fool around with the thing after that.
Anyway, getting back to Skinny and me, these ‘Olden Days’ war games would start out nice enough. Skinny had the language down pat too. He loved to attack ‘yon’ hill and ‘smite’ the enemy. The two of us would terrorize the empty field behind the auto body shop, through the ditch and over the railway tracks and into the school yard ‘til there was no place left for the enemy to hide. Well, you could only do that for so long before you needed something more than your imagination for an enemy. I mean, it was just no challenge that way. So, Skinny and me, we’d choose up sides - just the two of us. Not that we were mad at each other, but at least that way, we’d have a real enemy to ‘vanquish’. Big mistake.
The thing was, we’d start off kind of formal like, just the way we figured proper knights would do. Sometimes we’d even have newspaper or cardboard tied to our arms for armor. Before long, we’d find ourselves getting more enthusiastic as our imaginations got pumped up and sure enough Skinny would end up with a nosebleed. Then we’d end up having to stay in our own yard for a day or two. You’d think we’d have learned.
See, Skinny had three problems when it came to playing these games. First, he was full of bravado - that’s just the way he was. Of course, he was bigger than me so it came quite natural. Second, he was about as clumsy as they come. That sure don’t help nothin when you’re a knight of the round table. Third, he had a very sensitive nose. I swear that if you yelled at him loud enough, his nose would start to bleed. Actually, he had a fourth problem, which was the worst of all, the one that kept getting us both into trouble. He couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He always knew it was coming. First he’d dare me to smite him if we were playing David and Goliath. Of course I’d oblige. I’d try to smite his arm with the side of my ‘sword’ but he would move and end up getting his bugle smote. He’d panic and go screaming home to mama. I don’t think he ever squealed on me but of course, mama always knew who smote her kid and she’d be out there, shaking her fist at the corner of our house. Next thing I knew, I’d be trimming the front lawn with hand clippers, which took about three or four days, if I worked at it.
We learned our war tactics from old Wallace Beery; toughest, ugliest U.S. Marine that ever walked the face of the earth (at least in our local movie theatre). But heck, he could save the whole world before breakfast single-handed and never even break a sweat. He had stuff hanging out all over him; his big butt hung out his pants at the back, his big gut hung out his pants at the front. There was always a smoke hung out of the corner of his mouth. (At least it was a tailor made, not like them cowboy roll-your-owns). Jeez, he was even ugly in his dress uniform when he was being awarded whatever medal was popular in the movie. Is it any wonder we grew up wearing baggy clothes and having tailor mades hanging out the corner of our mouths?
Oh, we knew the difference between make believe and reality though. On the way to a Wallace Beery movie, we had to pass one of the city’s water reservoirs. There was always an armed guard patrolling the top of the ridge there, twenty-four hours a day. At night they even had searchlights. Now those guys had real guns. Somebody told somebody, who told somebody that if you got too close, or ever, ever touched the chain link fence perimeter, they wouldn’t think twice about blowing your brains out. They had orders to shoot to kill and by God, that impressed us some. Of course, we never had the good sense to walk the next block over because that way we’d have been unable to see these trained killers, but we were smart enough to cross the street before we got there. By the time we got to the movie, we always felt like we’d survived the first encounter by the enemy.
The newspapers and the radio, - now that was something else. They were confusing to us kids, to say the least. Either they talked in code, or were just plain stupid according to us. We could never figure out such statements as ‘missing in action’, or ‘lost in the campaign’. What? Didn’t those guys know where they were going that they’d get lost? The weirdest one was taking time to ‘remember our fallen’. Cripes! We fell down all the time! We never bitched about it. The worst thing that ever happened to us was a good smack in the head for having gotten our clothes all dirty. The only good thing ever to come out of the radio was a program called ‘Lancaster (something or other)’. Harold Markowitz couldn’t wait to tell in class one morning that those guys could see right through the radio. It seems that when his dad came home from work one day when the program was on he was about to change the dial to the news when this program was getting ready to do a commercial. Just as Mr. Markowitz’ hand touched the radio, the announcer said ‘Don’t touch that dial’ with such conviction, it scared the old man into leaving the program on, figuring somebody might be spying on him. Well, one of my uncles summed it up this way after returning from overseas. He said don’t believe anything you hear, no more’n ten percent of what you read, and only half of what you see. I guess that’s pretty accurate.
Well as the war closed and the men started coming home, we also were growing up. There were different things to interest us. Souvenirs taken from the enemy, Army and Navy surplus clothing like flight jackets, cargo pants and the like. One of the guys brought in his big brother’s steel cigarette case with a bullet hole right in the middle of it. The story was that he had had it in his tunic pocket when he was hit. The bullet pierced the cigarette case just enough to go about half an inch into his chest. He bragged that smoking had saved his brother’s life, which was all the more reason for us to do it. That piece of memorabilia even topped the odd Lüger or enemy bayonet we saw.
But I’ll tell you what. Old Mr. Cook who was our English Teacher in High School summed it up about as accurately as you could want it. For a mousy little bespectacled man, he was sure full of surprises. We were studying a book called ‘The White Company’ that was from about the same era as Skinny Butler and my adventures. We were supposed to do our own reading but he couldn’t help himself but get right in there like a dirty shirt. According to him, the era in which the book was set was when war was war by gum! The armies at least had the good sense to get out there in the selected battlefield at an early hour, fight like banshees all day long with their kings and generals at the head of the column. By late in the afternoon, they had the decency to call it a day, take care of their dead and wounded, and have their supper and all that. Now see, us kids could understand that. We’d had the same idea just a few years before.
Anyway, the more he dwelled on it, the grumpier he got. Heck, the way wars were being fought these days, he said, what with people shooting at one another from half a mile distant and the generals and presidents and kings all hunkered down in some safe cozy place miles away, you might just as well not even bother. Mr. Cook was a WWI war veteran so he did know something about a real shooting war. I guess that was why he got so grouchy. Whatever happened to hand to hand combat, he would say, his voice rising as he got more and more worked up. Whatever happened to picking out a good battlefield and proving yourself, man to man without blowing up half a world full of innocent people? The way it was now, the enemy was so far away, you couldn’t tell who you were shooting at. You might just as easily kill somebody’s cow, or kid for that matter, the way things were. And the Prime ministers and kings and generals always got the worst of his tirade. According to Mr. Cook they were all a bunch of lily-livered cowards who had never seen a battlefield except in the movies. He said if the armies followed them like they did Genghis Khan or Hannibal or Charlemagne, they’d all end up on different golf courses.
Well, if you think about it, he had a point. He was sure a feisty little guy for a five foot two, hundred and twenty pound English teacher - probably had a bit of a Napoleon complex. He’d even go to all the football games just to see the combat. Of course the kids would fill him full of cokes and hot dogs and he’d spend the next three days with indigestion. But he took it like the man he was.
Well, sooner or later you got to grow up, if that’s the right word for it, and put all your war games aside, because the next batch of kids is coming into the world. There’s no more time for heroes or for saving the world because you’re too busy feeding the little buggers to worry about that sort of nonsense. It isn’t until you can sit back and take a breather that you realize the brood you’re raising is just about as butt ugly as Wallace Beery. They got body parts hanging out the back and the front, with joints hanging out the corner of their mouths, but they haven’t got the muscles to drag themselves any further than the video game screen. Then some idiot with a Ph.D. in ‘Stupid’ comes up with the idea that these games develop good hand eye co-ordination. Sometimes I get the notion to pick up a picket fence sword and smite them a couple of times. Let’s see how good their hand eye co-ordination would be then. Why, I’ll bet the WWII vets, even the dead ones could still beat the pants off these geeks. Jeez! Even the world leaders, hiding at their country clubs gotta drive around in golf carts. They probably even got power steering on them contraptions too.
The more I think about it, the more I’m beginning to agree with old Mr. Cook, rest his soul. Only thing is though, he seemed kind of bitter. He was probably looking at us and thinking the same thing I’m thinking about the young folks around here. It’s just too bad that ‘hand/eye co-ordination’ Ph.D. guy couldn’t figure out how we could co-ordinate our eyes to see the hurt we’ve managed to inflict on people and use our hands to heal the wounds instead of playing video games. Well, I guess we already know how to do that, but it just isn’t a popular pastime. Maybe it’s as simple as going back to picket fence slats and cardboard boxes where our leaders pick a field of combat and lead the column. Maybe that way our soldiers could become heroes again instead of the shattered shells of humanity they’re made into, we could still have our wars and be home in time for chores and supper.
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