Playing Army

 

I’ll tell you one thing I don’t see much of anymore - kids playing army. Wait - maybe I should change that statement to, “I don’t see kids playing army outside anymore.” If you want to see kids playing army now ,you’ll have to look in their bedroom where they are probably playing “Call Of Duty”, a very popular military video game. To be honest, I’ve seen the game, and it is quite realistic. From the explosions, the weapons, to the dead folks, to the bombed-out houses, it does make quite an impression. 

But the sad thing is that the children’s interaction is limited to exercising their fingers and looking at a video screen - indoors. There are no toy plastic rifles, plastic helmets, canteens, or fake hand grenades like we used, because we played army outside. 

Of course, the fact of the matter is that most of us began playing army indoors.  When I was about 5 years old, it involved hundreds of those little molded green army men. You could get a whole bag of them in Woolworth’s for 99 cents - which also included a couple of tanks. I remember thinking how ironic it was  they were all made in Japan. We kept them strewn on the living room floor until my barefooted father stepped on them for about the tenth time. Then he ordered us to take them outside. That was fun for a while because I would place the little grunts behind rocks and trees to ambush the unsuspecting German army. Soon this got boring, so I added Black Cat firecrackers to the skirmishes. It was fun to light the fuse and see how far the tiny soldiers would fly. And if one of my buddies had a cherry bomb, we could blow up a whole brigade. 

When I got older, play-soldiering became more realistic. A whole group of neighborhood kids formed a battalion who came together regularly to fight against an imaginary enemy. 

Fortunately, in the early and mid sixties we had a number of TV programs about World War 2 to draw ideas from. Classics like Combat, The Rat Patrol, and Garrison’s Gorillas.  

Combat was the best. It starred Vic Morrow as Sergeant Saunders - my hero. I can recall looking in the Sears catalog for Christmas toys and choosing the Thompson machine gun, because Saunders had one. 

Playing Sergeant Saunders in our neighborhood army had its drawbacks because one of my buddies, Mark, played Lieutenant Hanley, another character in the show. This led to a number of disagreements about who would lead our unit. I thought I had the most influence because I was Sergeant Saunders, and he was the star of the show.

So,I would say something like, “Here’s the plan. We’re gonna throw grenades at those Krauts then attack them from the front.”

My friend Mark would always disagree with me, saying, “No. I say we sneak up behind them, and ambush them from the rear. Mark always argued that a Lieutenant out ranks a Sergeant even if it was on a TV show.    

Furthermore, if I went against his orders, he said he could have me court marshaled. I knew that if I played by the imaginary army rules, he was right. 

There was a very good lesson to be learned from playing army back then that followed me into corporate America as an adult.  That is, you can disagree with someone all you want, but if they outrank you will lose the argument, even if they are wrong. I don’t think Gen Z’ers will ever learn that kind of life lesson by playing Call Of Duty.   

Of course, during my childhood these imaginary army arguments between the Sergeant and Lieutenant kept on until one of the privates said, “Hey, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s just go ride bikes.” And off we would go, leaving the Germans to wait until another day. 

Unfortunately, I also learned you can’t do that in the real world.  The Germans never wait.