Published: May 04, 2008 11:39 pm            

THE OFF SEASON: It’s time to go to war … in the backyard

TERRE HAUTE — My wife, God bless her, is always finding ways to make my family happy.

She cooks our meals, does stacks of laundry, and keeps the house as neat as a pin. She tells me when my tie and shirt don’t match, is willing to repeat entire lines I miss on the television, and tells me the yard looks good after I’ve mowed it; she often reminds me to take my prescription medicine, too.

On most nights of the week, I’m in bed a good while before she’s finished with the chores she wants to get done. I’m a lucky man.

But last week, I believe she took her love for me to a whole new level: She bought a set of plastic army men for me.

We had gone to an auction — a big one — and sitting on a shelf with glossy metal lunchboxes and classic comic books and other toys and memorabilia from my now distant childhood (the G.I. Joe footlocker really brought back memories), was a 32-piece “Action Army Set.”

Along the bottom of the original and dusty box, in particularly enticing red and black lettering, came the true siren song of advertising: “Have hours of fun with this exciting set;” and “Authentic detail!”

I must have been slobbering when I pulled the top off the box because she said, twice, I think, “We should get this; we may have a grandson who would like to play with it someday.”

“Grandkid … I would play with it right now,” I said, only half-kidding as I ogled the Patton tank and Army helicopter, the sounds of my own chopper-like special effects already reverberating in my head.

We had been keeping an eye on a few items at the other end of the building, too, so I took off to monitor the situation there, and when I returned, sure enough, she had bought the set. It went for $2; that was half its original cost.

When I was a boy, plastic soldiers were my toy of choice. While other kids went for train sets or bows and arrows or metal backhoes and tractors, I wanted, above everything else, army men. I can’t say exactly why. I wasn’t raised in a particularly militant or bellicose family. Virtually all my great uncles had been in World War II, but they hadn’t come home with so many tales of battlefield glory that I was hooked on the idea of being in the military myself.

I think my love for the little green guys came from the movies. I had, after all, spent a good many Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching war pictures on Channel 4, films like “The Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Wake Island” and “Merrill’s Marauders.” My idea of real heroes came in the flickering black- and-white images of John Wayne and Brian Donlevy and Jeff Chandler, maybe even William Bendix, who almost always got himself killed.

My mom understood. I can still remember wandering the aisles of Woolworth’s or Kresge’s on Wabash Avenue whenever she took me downtown to shop, probably for pants since she could only patch my well-worn knees so many times. They were fascinating places, intimate little five-and-dimes, crammed floor to ceiling with everything from artificial flowers to thread to garden hoses and, plastic soldiers — bags of them. Why, you could buy a hundred for 89 cents, and more than once I recall meandering through the store searching for Mom, practicing my most pathetic, pleading expressions before I found her.

I had my own little army uniform, too — a deep green outfit (actually, the trousers were old green jeans) that eventually grew too tight and too short in the arms. That and an authentic war surplus helmet — minus a badly needed liner — made me a ridiculously scrawny soldier whose head disappeared in his too-big bean pot of a hat.

I stood at attention in more than one of my grandmother’s photos in that uniform, and most often I was properly attired when I dragged my big box of soldiers out from under my bed for a rainy afternoon filled with the screams of grenade attacks, ambushes and frontal assaults. More than once, Mom forced me to abandon my battlefield on the living room floor while she talked on the telephone, allowing me to continue with the whistle of mortar shells and the howls of banzai charges only after she’d hung up.

We lived in a wonderful place in those days. About 50 yards behind our house, under a massive red oak, was a big open sand pit. I spent hours there with those army men, planning massive battles, organizing tented encampments, building fortified pillboxes and machine gun nests with twigs and acorns and dirt clods. I imagine that if I were to go to that sacred place yet today, even after walking through it for the last time some 25 years ago, I might still uncover some lost and forlorn soldier, his arm forever primed and ready to hurl a grenade at enemy troops.

By the time my attention turned to basketball and girls and playing my brother’s 45s on our portable record player, I had planned to annihilate my army men in one last Armageddon, but luckily, I never did. They collected dust under my bed for years until I left home and packed them away to await the arrival of my own kids.

When I was young, war was just a game. No one ever really died. My screams and moaning agonies were, thankfully, as phony as the movies I watched and the plastic men with which I played. I know better now; the casualty lists that accompanied Walter Cronkite’s voice on the evening news in the late 1960s sobered me some, and unfortunately have been replaced by no less tragic numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But, in those days, I knew none of that, and the hours I spent with those soldiers, and on off days with my Fort Apache set or Civil War troops, was time using my imagination.

It’s too bad that all wars can’t be fought that way.

Mike Lunsford can be contacted by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

        

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