Every male American child plays army at some time in his life. I am not sure how my version of playing army got so real. From about the age of 11 or so until I was about 17, I hung out with my cousin Scott just about every weekend. At first, we would just hang out at each other’s houses while our moms were out doing whatever moms do. Scott and I had much in common, we both were into sci-fi and military-stuff, we also each came from single parent families. We would play Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs (role playing games – yeah we were geeks!) and watch movies and eat junk food. As we got older and more adventurous, we started to go out and play “war” with our toy guns and some camouflage fatigues (fatigues were popular then [this was during the cold war, after all], but these were the green and brown woodland camos, not those weird, useless urban camo patterns they have today).
We would stay around my house and maybe venture as far as the neighbor’s yard in our “battles”. Soon, we were picking up any army surplus items that we could find at yard sales and surplus shops. I had a helmet, web belt, knife, a full set of fatigues, cantines, etc. We were still using toy Star Wars guns at the time, but we got really adept at tactics and strategy. We would “shoot” at each other and we always “died” if we though that we were hit. We got good at using cover and camouflage and in moving stealthily through the woods. I think we learned the value of patience while we were waiting for the “enemy” to come walking by so we could ambush him. Our adventures often began to take us far away from my house. There was one time when we walked through the woods all the way to the next town! It must have been 5 or 6 miles through the woods, across streams, through mud bogs and eventually to the KMart in Webster, Massachusetts!
Sometimes my other friends would get into it, too. One “game” sticks out in my mind. It was Scott, Pete, Chris, Eddie and his brother Albert and myself on one gloomy October afternoon. We had been planning on playing army all week, so we weren’t about to let a few sprinkles stop us. We suited up and headed out into the weather and walked to the “battlefield” that was really a huge stretch of untouched woods about a 1/2 mile behind my house. We started playing, three per team. The name of the game was stealth and cover that day. I remember sticking grass and sticks into my helmet cover to help conceal my presence as I knelt at the foot of a tree and covered Chris as he moved slow and low down the trail to look for our enemies. I looked away for a second and then heard someone off to my left make a loud explosion noise. I glanced over at Chris as he looked around in a confused manner. Scott popped up from behind some bushes and started “firing” at Chris and I. Scott had set up a booby-trap made of a disarmed hand grenade (available from any surplus store) tied to a stake with a trip wire laid across the path. What ingenuity!
Anyway, right after that it began to pour. We didn’t let the deluge stop us though. We played right through for another hour. We headed back to my house, soaking wet and emerged from the woods, we saw that Pete’s mother had already arrived to pick him up. I remember the look on her face as she saw us come out of the treeline dripping wet. It was a while before Pete was allowed to come back over my house…
Anyway, those were the good ol’ days. Eventually, Chris and I got into playing paintball on the weekends and Scott made good on his life long ambition to join the army. I think paintball was more fun!