At first glance, i can seem morally/ethically exceptional...i've never struck another person in anger (except my big sister once as a child). The teeny handful of things i've stolen in my life are the stuff of amusing anecdote. I've never raped, harassed, or been a predator in any but the most relatively profoundly benign ways.
And by the time i was a late teen, i had fallen in love with the visions of lennon, vonnegut, thoreau, and "My Dinner with Andre".
Pretty hip?
Sure...
Yet there's a level on which i've always felt a...well, "faker" is too strong, but slightly embarrassed at pieces of my youth. "Deep dark secrets"? Again too strong, but there are parts of my past i never trot out in genteel, cultured company.
Let's trot.
I was a pacifist by the time i was draftable, ready to be a conscientious objector should my country call on me for military service. I like to think that there was no point in my youth when i would have obeyed, had i been asked to kill.
Perhaps some might have found that surprising however, given my youthful love of things military. I never felt a disconnect, but if you'd looked at me objectively...
Playing "war" with neighborhood kids was a devoted passion, starting around the age of twelve. Dividing into teams, armed with our favorite toy gun, strategizing and "killing" each other until only one side was left. I was good. The best, even. Stealthy, fast, patient, and sharp. I can't say that no one ever got the drop on me or that my side never lost, but those were rare. Nor was there anything brutal in our play. It was never consciously personal...just the joyful abandonment of pure play, then reboot and go again. It eventually graduated to super-soakers, which was beyond brilliant.
Yet...was there a deeper level on which we were all training ourselves in predatory ways and attitudes? A level on which we were subconsciously approving of the real-world parallels to our play?
How can there NOT have been??
But if there was, how can i have become so entirely pacifist when the time came to decide such things for myself? There was never any internal discussion or debate - nor any need.
My militaristic-seeming seeds bloomed early. Around the age of four, my favorite toy became G.I. Joes. I had a collection of figures and outfits and accessories, plus three or four sizable vehicles and a two-story headquarters. These weren't those pathetic four-inchers, these were the original eleven-inchers. I had a group of G.I. Joe friends on my block, and we always gathered to play at lizzie's house. She had the coolest collection, and was so conscientious about not getting our pieces mixed up that she had us all bring only our naked Joes. Isn't it fascinating that a girl was the star of our otherwise all-male company? A girl loving military toys?? Somewhere in the back of my mind, i've always wondered what kind of a person she became. A moral degenerate?? The hilarious side of that, is that the point of this article is how i grew into a pacifist icon, despite my seeming militarism as a child...so why wouldn't she as well? But prejudice is always faintly illogical...and more to the point, of course she grew up to be a degenerate! We all did, we all are. But just now, that's neither here nor there...
After my Joes, there were war comic books. Mostly Sgt. Rock and Men at War. Some of them introduced a level of sophistication and ambiguity to my young mind...i remember a story about two wounded survivors of a battle, one who can't see or talk, and another who can't walk. They work together to get to safety, and only in the last panel is it revealed that they're actually enemies.
And then came the models. Plastic glue-and-paint kits, of warships and airplanes. I probably did a dozen or more, between the ages of five and ten. Amateurish at first, but eventually my decal and fine brush work were exemplary.
When i was very young, i had those two-inch green plastic soldiers, and around the age of eight or nine, that morphed into a grand sprawl of one-inch plastic soldiers in various colors, with assembly-required tanks and vehicles to scale (HO?). By then, it was apparent my primary interest was World War II. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because that war seemed (to my child's mind) morally unambiguous, with clear "evil" on display? That explanation doesn't quite fit though, as i took more delight in the Axis toys (this was later paralleled in my Star Wars figures...the Empire was always cooler to me). Was WWII...cool? My plastic armies eventually took over our 8'x4' holiday train platform in the basement.
When i outgrew comic books, i collected military books. Sprawling tomes, sometimes focusing on just the ships or planes.
But the culmination of my militaristic pursuits was the board game i created to play with my neighbor and best friend, dave bent. It started from two existing board games about WWII sea warfare, War at Sea and Victory in the Pacific. There were cardboard markers to represent each ship of every navy. They each had numbers representing firepower, defense, and speed (aircraft carriers had a fourth number). I combined, i expanded, i rewrote the rules. I created ships the creators had missed (like the pathetic russian navy!). So many of those three-number sequences are forever burned into my synaptic pathways. A single game could last weeks, at several hours a day. I was always the Axis. Such joy, passing away those hours...
Many might try to bring my father into the picture, and say that coming to grips with his legacy must have been at the heart of all this. He'd been a soldier, and spoke of his service with pure patriotism and pride. He never went to war, but one cannot imagine him having any reservations about doing so (had he, i think perhaps our relationship mightn't have survived). Surely my own youthful zeal for things military must have been related to him in some way, even if only as a means of appeasement?
Well...no. I really don't think so. I remember no time in my life when winning his approval was important. My first awareness of him as a fellow humyn was one of disconnect. He was he and i was i, and the twain simply did not meet. This was neither sad nor happy, it just...was. That may be an oversimplification, but essentially it feels true.
So then, why?
I want to say it's just a reflection of my big youthful brain, looking for outlets to express my creativity and need for escapism (which i couldn't have been aware of then...but we live in a dysfunctional society defined largely by an out-of-balance need for escapism). Perhaps subconsciously i knew that dad (and by extension, the rest of the macho culture that surrounded me) would never hassle me over what seemed an extension of his own life? Maybe...
Once i realized how pacifistic i was, i never felt the need to "burn" my miltaristic past. I just moved on - i was very self-accepting. A trait that was tested by the third focus of this essay, but first...
Edgar rice burroughs! The writer who turned me into a reader...
(Part 2 - https://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2018/06/bond-burroughs-and-milataraphilia-pt-2.html)
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