Playing War
A Story of Childhood
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Eddie’s father was a captain in the Navy. Looking back on the years when Eddie was my neighbor, that fact figured larger in my childhood than I realized at the time.
When I first met Eddie, we were just about to enter the 4th grade. It was the day before school and his parents were moving boxes from a U-Haul into the house next to mine. I walked outside to enjoy my last day of freedom and found a red-haired boy – who was a frustrating two inches taller than me – digging a hole in my yard with a stick.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if I should simply know and muttered something about a foxhole. “I’m Eddie,” he said, raising up from where he’d been squatting on his haunches. He stuck a grimy hand out. I shook it. He spat on his hand and I followed suit – I’d seen that in a movie and it looked cool.
“That means we’re friends now,” he said.
“I’m Sam,” I said.
We established the fact that we would be in the same class, with the same teacher, who I’d heard was mean. This information seemed to elevate me a little in Eddie’s eyes, which gave me some satisfaction, so I added that my older sister had been through the 4th grade three years earlier. He nodded sagely, as if this made me a source of wisdom and therefore a valuable friend – or ally.
“Have you been to the river yet?” I asked him. He shook his head. Two minutes later, we were running down to the river for one last illegal swim before the summer ended. I think our parents met each other when they went looking for us.
Over the next four years, our parents often went looking for us in the woods around our neighborhood or down at the river. Eventually, they grew used to it and began to ignore our absence, figuring we’d arrive home when we got hungry. Perhaps they were just happy that we spent so much time outside, instead of playing video games. When Eddie’s father got a new assignment and my best friend left us, he and I were the fastest kids in the grade.
Within two weeks of his arrival, Eddie had organized the playground. Not in a bureaucratic way, more like a criminal syndicate. We had a gang and he was the ringleader. In another week, we were at war.
I’d never been at war before, but I knew it was a serious business and there could be no more kidding around. Battle lines were drawn based on municipal geography. Our neighborhood was at war with a neighborhood across town. Eddie said they were encroaching upon our “territory.” Looking back, I’m not quite sure how that would have worked, but he said it and we all believed it.
I think it all started when Reddy got into a fistfight with Eddie after school one day. We were out on the playground and even though I’d known Eddie for only a few weeks and I’d known Reddy and the guys from Old Lake (Reddy’s neighborhood) for years, I quickly found myself squaring off against Fredo, who was bigger than me but was a bit of a coward (which was why we called him Fredo). A few others tried to grab me and Eddie from behind. Jonny and Jackie and Henry and Quentin saw what was going on and jumped in. Within a minute or two, it was the boys from Old Lake against the boys from Deer Hill Farm (our neighborhood).
I still have no idea who started the fight. It wasn’t much of a brawl. None of us was big enough to really hurt any of the others, but we wrestled in the dirt and got ourselves good and muddy. I remember throwing dust clods at Newton until both of us looked like zombies just out of the grave. It was – I won’t lie – a lot of fun.
Before Eddie came, we’d play soccer or football or throw osage oranges at each other or “played war” with air guns (holding our hands as though they cradled pistols and rifles, conveniently empty if a teacher ever saw us and came to inquire – gun shapes were banned at our school). Sometimes we fenced with sticks. This could actually be quite elaborate. We’d choose a war (the Revolution, the First or Second World War, Vietnam, even the French and Indian war). We’d choose sides (I always used to end up being the British), and then everyone would obey the rules (you couldn’t use a weapon that didn’t exist in the time period in question).
Once Eddie arrived, it got real. We didn’t choose sides anymore; we had sides. Suddenly, war lost the veneer of pretend. We weren’t gangs, though. As an adult, you look back on this stuff and realize it was all pretty tame compared to what it could have been. Nobody ever got hurt and we didn’t use real weapons. But for nine-year-olds, it was war.
Eddie made all the plans. I think the fun came more from the elaborate schemes we made and the lengths we went to build new traps or weapons. At first, we just threw tennis balls at each other during recess. But the war went to a new level when Eddie invented the first breakthrough capability. It wasn’t really much more than a slingshot that shot chewed-up bits of gum. But we called it the “Gum Projectile System,” which made it sound fancy.
I got caught shooting Warren in the back of the head in class one day. Mrs. Seligman gave me detention. Then, Randy and Yuvie both got themselves caught, too, and she realized something was going on. After that, she was on high alert for gum and slingshots. She was like a hawk. She spotted Jonny wadding up some gum from across the room and took away his slingshot. When she asked Jonny what it was, he said it was, “GPS,” and stayed mum about what “GPS” meant even when she threatened to keep him out of recess for a week (he was a real trooper). After that, we referred to Mrs. Seligman’s classroom as a “GPS Denied Environment.”
The next innovation of Eddie’s was to take a Red Flyer wagon and tie its handle to a bicycle seat. It took several days of skinned-knee crash-testing to wring out the kinks, but eventually we figured out how to ride it, mostly. The “platform,” as Eddie referred to anything remotely connected to transportation, allowed one of us on a bike to pull two others behind in the wagon – provided we stayed on roughly level ground – at least for a short spell. We had to alternate turns on the bike because the biker inevitably grew tired. We still crashed a lot.
Eddie called this platform our “dreadnought.” I had to look that word up. Our first engagement with it came one Saturday afternoon in October when we biked over to Old Lake (Eddie pulled the empty wagon behind him and the rest of us rode our own bikes – it would have taken too long if two of us had ridden in the back). Except for Eddie, we stashed our bikes in a bush down by the creek. Then we positioned ourselves around the corner from Reddy’s house. We’d piled rocks in the wagon and Jonny and Henry had brought five slingshots. A tall hedge ran along Westchester Street, almost to the stop sign, allowing us to hide while we planned our charge.
When Eddie gave the word, he pulled out onto Elm Street – the street Reddy lived on – and gave the order for Jonny and Henry and Quentin to “cover” us. The three of them jumped out from behind the hedge, slingshots at the ready and aimed at Reddy’s yard, poised to fire.
Nobody was in sight. As Eddie pedaled slowly (Jackie was chubby and I was a little tall for my age) up the street, Jonny and Henry and Quentin waited. Nothing happened. Quentin – the most trigger-happy member of our party – began firing pebbles into Reddy’s yard anyway. Several of them thudded into the dirt and a few bounced off the tall oak tree in the center. By the time Eddie pedaled us level with the house, I could tell that Reddy’s family must have been out for the afternoon. Through a window in the garage door, I could see that both of their cars were gone.
Still, Eddie told us to fire off “a barrage of missiles.” We dutifully obeyed, firing a few pebbles in the direction of his front door. To this day, I’m amazed we never broke a window.
After Reddy’s house, Elm Street took a slight dip. It wasn’t much, but it was enough of a downhill to give our wagon momentum. The rope holding us to Eddie’s bike went slack and we gained on him. The only trick we’d learned for when this happened was for Eddie to start pedaling faster. The rope went taut again, but we were moving much more rapidly now and our momentum only increased. Which made it harder for Eddie to steer. Jackie and I left off firing and watched to see what would happen.
Eddie ended up on one side of the road’s crown and we ended up on the other. Our momentum swung him around some and he lost control. We crashed into the curb and I somersaulted over top of Jackie while Eddie dove from his bike into someone’s yard. Luckily for us, we missed the parked cars. I skinned my knee pretty badly and Eddie got a scar on his forehead and bruised up his arm. Jackie came out mostly alright, with only a banged-up shin and cut on his wrist.
Eddie was proud of his scar. He said we’d earned our first “war wounds” and that we would all be decorated. Deeming our action a success, despite a no-show by the enemy, he led us back home, where we received bottle-cap medals for heroism.
After this, Eddie decided we needed a fortress. Over the course of the fall and winter, we spent dozens of hours out in the woods behind his house setting up fencing, laying a foundation, gathering logs and branches, building a hut with a roof, and digging a trench. Eventually, we had quite the fort – certainly more substantial than anything I’ve seen before or since. It survived the snow (although we did have to clear out and rebuild a caved roof), the rain (it wasn’t watertight, but I’ll be darned if it wasn’t pretty good at keeping out the weather), and even a barrage of stones during the one time when the boys from Old Lake actually managed to make an expedition over to our “territory.” All in all, that fortress was probably our biggest success.
Once the fortress was more or less built, Eddie began telling us we needed to “expand our fleet to embrace distributed operations.” I had a feeling the boys in Old Lake weren’t putting this kind of effort into “building new platforms,” but I didn’t say anything. Looking back, I wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t an excuse for Eddie to fool around with us on wagons pulled by bicycles, or build elaborate catapults. These latter we built into our fortress. Eddie couldn’t make up his mind as to whether to call the catapults “launching devices” or “anti-aircraft guns.” Despite the fact that the boys from Old Lake didn’t have any aircraft.
We did, however. Or at least, we tried. Eddie wanted badly for us to achieve some sort of flight. It started with intricate paper airplanes and moved on to experiments with parachutes and trampolines. Eventually, Eddie got his hands on a hang glider, but luckily his mother took it away before one of us jumped off a cliff with it.
As with the wagon-pulling experiment, we spent more time crashing than anything else. We never got any sort of “aircraft” working to Eddie’s liking, and we were lucky none of us ever broke a leg. The worst that happened was that I got a black eye, which I told my mother was from playing dodgeball at school.
But for the “distributed operations,” which Eddie explained involved “littoral combat” (I looked up ‘littoral’ and it left me more confused than I had been before I looked it up, so I didn’t ask), we needed a more serious “platform.” The bike-pulling-the-wagon wouldn’t cut it. Besides, I told Eddie I didn’t want to lose any teeth on a curb.
This was when Eddie introduced his plans for “the Ford-Class Carrier.” We had no idea what this was, other than that it would represent a major technological leap over both our adversaries and our current level of technology. Eddie explained that the Ford-Class Carrier would use electricity to do what we’d previously achieved with steam. When Jackie asked Eddie what we’d ever used steam power for in the past, Eddie sighed, as if it was hard work for one person to do the imagining for all of us.
“I mean muscle power, you tenderfoot. My legs. You’ve got to think creative and not be such a nincompoop, Jackie.”
He informed us that this new platform would also be larger than anything we’d used in the past. It would carry all of us, not just three of us (one pedaling and two in the back). It would represent a massive advance in capability, allowing us to deploy far more firepower than ever before. For close to two months, he talked about this thing and we still didn’t understand it. Finally, Jackie said that we had to quit talking about it and actually do it, whatever it was.
We were sitting around Eddie’s kitchen table when Jackie said this. Eddie began to explain that acquisition might prove a little difficult, but all in all the Ford-Class Carrier would be a worthwhile investment.
“Yes, but what will it do? How will we get it?” I asked.
Eddie’s father walked into the kitchen, nodded at us, and walked over to the fridge to grab a beer.
“What will it do? What will it do?” asked Eddie to himself, “Why, everything. It will give us a massive strategic advantage over Old Lake. The Ford-Class will be impervious to their missiles. It will be faster and bigger than anything they have – or anything we currently have. And it will…”
He trailed off because his father had walked back to the table to listen to our conversation. He stood over us, looking at Eddie. “Edward,” he said, “I’ll say this once. You are not taking out my Ford F-150 to go fool around in Old Lake playing war with the boys over there.” Then he turned and walked out of the room.
And that was the last we heard about the Ford-Class Carrier.
Our “war” with Old Lake continued off and on for the rest of the time Eddie’s father was stationed at the base outside our town. At times, it grew colder. At times, it flared up hot. The boys at Old Lake rarely tried to gain any “technological” advances on us, but they did put in a series of tripwires in the woods where we used to stage attacks against them. Eddie said this was their “A2AD zone,” but when we asked him what that meant, he said he didn’t know.
He was always drawing up plans for some new projectile or means of transportation. Whenever it snowed, he tried to do something with sleds that never quite worked. We managed to sled downhill while standing upright and throwing snowballs, but we never managed to lure the Old Lake boys anywhere where we could ambush them in this way. That didn’t stop Eddie from christening this innovation the Light Combat Sled, which he insisted on claiming was a “program.” Thus, it was a true statement that our erstwhile LCS program never quite managed to bear fruit.
It was a sad day when Eddie moved away. We bid him farewell and he urged us to stay resolute and continue the fight without him. But nobody had the heart for it once he was gone, not even the boys at Old Lake. I remember sitting around a table with the other guys feeling glum.
“What’re we gonna do now,” asked Jackie.
“I don’t know, I guess,” I said. I was the ringleader now, and I didn’t want that responsibility. I didn’t know any acronyms.
Then someone suggested we just go ask the guys from Old Lake if they wanted to play basketball, since a new court had opened near the school – which was neutral territory. Everyone agreed this was okay since it was on neutral ground. It would be like the Olympics. A temporary truce.
It was sort of strange how quickly our former enemies agreed to the truce. We played basketball almost every day after that, except when it rained or snowed. We never got around to restarting the war.
I reconnected with Eddie some years later. He went into the Navy like his father. Flies F-35s now. We lost touch again shortly after the birth of his son, but I don’t think he’s changed much. Not in the ways that matter at least.