On this day five years ago I came downstairs and found this on my desk:
My second collection of essays, This We’ll Defend, about my time in the military and after, came out five years ago. I had just gotten my author copies a few days before.
I had no idea where the Army guy figurine came from. I knew it had to be from Jennifer, but I didn’t know:
1. where she got it
2. when she got it
Here’s what she did:
On the cover of the book, as you can see in the picture, are little green Army men. In a couple of different essays in the book I mention playing with them as a child. I lined them up on the floor of my room. I held mock battles with them. Sometimes they fought against my Star Wars figures. Sometimes my brother stomped into the room and kicked them all down.
My press had sent Advanced Reader Copies months before the book came out. I loved the cover. It captured everything I wanted: how war gets in us as children and how often we approach war in childlike terms like win and lose, or good and evil.
Not long after I saw the cover, Jenn and I went to Emporia. It’s a pretty average Kansas town, which means there are a lot of bars and a lot of churches, I guess to go to after all the sinnin’ at the bar.
I digress.
Emporia has a cool little chocolate shop and an old cafe with greasy floors but good food. There’s a park by a river or something—I don’t know, it was like 148 degrees that day, so we didn’t get out of the car, just kinda looked at the river.
There’s also an old antique store we like. We stumbled across it when we went to Greensburg, Kansas, a town that was wiped out by a tornado in 2007, but I’m digressing again.
We were in the old antique store when Jenn found the Army guy. She saw it before I did and snatched it up, which means I never actually saw it. I still don’t know how she did it, and I’m still kinda mad about her ninja skills, but only because she refuses to teach me. She’s says it’s an ancient art of women. She says men can’t have everything, and I guess I can’t argue.
Anyway. Ninja Jenn snatched it and stuck it in her purse and carried it around the store for an hour—it’s a big store. If we had been in Wal-Mart the security dudes would have arrested us (or her—I would have denied knowing her, then busted her out of prison later).
But now we’re at the register and she’s panicking because she’s got an Army guy in her purse. She’s also buying a box, and at the point of paying, like the box is on the counter and the woman is ringing it up and Jenn has her credit card out.
Luckily for her, my bladder has been burdened by years of alcohol abuse, and I wander off to find a restroom—it’s a long drive back, and I’m of the male species, so I don’t stop once I get on the road.
As soon as I’m gone, Jenn begins a conspiracy with the woman behind the counter. She whisper-explains that the figurine she’s hiding in her purse is a gift for me and could the kind lady please wrap it quickly and put it in the box and then wrap the box and then put it all in a bag?
When I came out sightly lighter, Jenn was headed to the car. She kept the box wrapped until we got home and she hid the figurine for months, until five years ago today, when I walked downstairs and found it sitting on my computer desk, the same one where I’m writing this here Substack.
Jenn got the desk for me, too. And the bookshelves she set up to either side, so it’s like a little alcove. I come down here every morning while she drinks coffee above me. She says she can hear me type. She says she loves it, because she knows I am doing something I love.
So this Substack is for Jenn and her ninja skills. For my little green Army guy, and the girl who gave it to me.
And also, I guess, for my second book. Happy Birthday, buddy.
Here’s an essay from it. Thanks for being here.
The Size of Their Toys
If I could warp drive or time travel or beam myself to anywhere or anywhen, I would go to the floor of my bedroom, circa 1978, where I sometimes spent the whole day lining up my little green army men opposite one another and forcing them to fight. I bought a bag of 144 soldiers every few weeks because things kept happening to them—they got run over by the lawn mower or sucked up in the vacuum cleaner or “accidentally” tossed down the old well outside our house—and when I got a new bag I’d open it carefully, inhaling of plastic and green paint, then take out the soldiers one by one, sorting them into squads, all the kneeling bazookas together, all the prone riflemen side-by-side. There were mine-detectors and radio operators and a few officers with pistols. There were flame throwers and mortar-launchers and machine gunners and I set them all up every Saturday morning before the good cartoons came on—Bugs Bunny always engaged in some form of fighting with Elmer Fudd or Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam, over gold or swords or whether it was duck or wabbit season—and aimed their weapons at one another.
Some days, to make the war more realistic, I would steal a bottle of my mother’s red fingernail polish and paint blood on the soldiers. I’d take my pocket knife and carve away pieces of their shoulders, or faces, then wrap their wounds with gauze. I had a die-cast Chinook helicopter and an F4 Phantom with a mouth and jaws painted near the front, and the F4 ran cover missions over the prone soldiers while the Chinook began airlifting them away. When my brother came in the room and stomped around yelling “Nuke” until all my careful lines were scattered and all my soldiers had bent rifles or broken bazookas, I wished I had airlifted them away sooner and hid them from his ultimate destruction.
Or perhaps in my time travel I would go to the toy aisle at Wal-mart after the new Stars Wars action figures have come out and are hanging in their plastic cases with scenes from the movie on the cardboard backs, their lightsabers or blaster pistols at their sides. Next to Han and Luke and Leia are bags and bags of army men, and next to those are disc guns and potato guns and cap guns, and next to the guns are plastic hand grenades and self-propelled rocket launchers and cap bombs shaped like real bombs. Farther down the aisle are the Viewmasters and Simons, the Magic Markers and Crayons, the Etch-A-Sketches and Lite Brites and See’N’Says, but I’m drawn to action figures and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots, to water pistols and Red Ryder BB guns. I’m drawn to the dark side of the force.
Or I would go to my living room in the early 80s when my parents bought me an Atari 2600 for Christmas and my family gathered to play Asteroids and Missile Command and Space Invaders and Combat, the cartridge that came with the system, a simple game in which you and your opponent fired ricocheting bullets at one another from tanks or airplanes or helicopters. Asteroids placed you in a tiny ship in the middle of giant hunks of rock caroming around. There was no plot, no storyline, only more and more rocks hurtling at you from the depths of space, which was also where the aliens came from in Space Invaders, their antennae waving as they marched down the sky toward Earth. Missile Command asked you to save the world from falling missiles, and when the missiles struck, as they always did, eventually, a mushroom cloud rose over the cities of the world and the screen turned a sickly shade of yellow before fading to black and blue.
I used to own a starfighter from Buck Rogers and a little Twiggy figurine that made noises and lit up. I had a Snoopy alarm clock with a loud, obnoxious bell-ring that I hated, but I loved Snoopy because he fought the Red Baron from atop his doghouse. When I got bored in school I drew pictures of the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, the Colonial Vipers and Raiders. On rainy days we played Monopoly, where we tried to take over the bank, and Risk where we tried to take over the world. I had a Stretch Armstrong and a plastic Godzilla who often fought one another, and I had a Superman and a Batman and Robin who sat on a shelf for a long time after I grew too old to play with them and are lost now or most likely destroyed. In an act of maliciousness which I sometimes still despise him for, my brother once burned all my little green army men with a can of hairspray and a lighter, melting their plastic faces into pools of plastic goo, and sometimes, if we had fought recently or he was feeling especially mean, the way only brothers can feel toward one another, he would burn my Star Wars figures, and I certainly still despise him for that, not only because some of them would be worth a lot of money, but there’s a feeling inside me, foolish though it may be, that if I could find some of the toys I used to own as a child I might remember what it was like to be one.
I kept all my toys in a giant football chest that eventually cracked and split open. But for a long time it sat in my closet beneath a blue blazer I wore only to church, where I would sneak one of my Star Wars figures—usually Vader or a stormtrooper—and walk him up and down the back of the pew in front of me until my mother or grandmother made me quit, and then I would enact quiet battles on my thigh or on top of the Bible in my lap.
Besides Vader and a handful of Stormtroopers in various dress—Tie-fighter stormtroopers in black flight-suits and Endor Moon bike-riding stormtroopers and machine gunner stormtroopers that came with machine gun and tripod—I had Luke and Leia and Obi-Wan, Han and Chewy and C3PO and R2-D2 and Boba Fett and IG-88 and the lizard bounty hunter whose name escapes me now. I had rebel soldiers with their German Wehrmacht-like helmets and X-Wing fighters and B-Wing fighters and a cast iron Millenium Falcon about the size my palm is now. It had a plastic grey satellite dish on top that swiveled 360 degrees, and through the plexi-glass windows you could see tiny little men sitting at the controls as they veered around the universe of my bedroom. I had a foot tall stormtrooper and a Chewbacca, complete with a crossbow laser that was the absolute coolest thing in the world at age 6, with perhaps the exception of lightsabers, which Darth Vader and Luke and Obi-Wan carried. Boba Fett wore a big missile on his back and carried a laser rifle. Luke Skywalker came in X-wing Luke and Bespin Luke and Jedi Luke. Han Solo had his space jockey outfit and his Hoth outfit, where the temperatures were unbelievably cold, and Return of the Jedi Leia wore a chain bra and a real chain around her neck (another model from the same movie wore her Endor Moon outfit, but of course boys were drawn to the chain bra version.)
I wanted them all. I wanted the action figures, and I wanted a lightsaber and crossbow laser and a machine gun laser and Boba Fett armor. I wanted to pilot the Millenium Falcon, or a Tie Fighter, or a Colonial Viper. I wanted to sit near Spock on the bridge of the USS Enterprise as Captain Kirk called for warp four, as Scotty and McCoy beamed down with one of the red-shirted guys you knew wasn’t going to make it back. My brother and I made that little wooshing sound the automatic doors on the Enterprise made whenever we entered the house or went into the kitchen, where our Star Wars commemorative glasses were stacked in the cabinets beside our Empire Strikes Back lunchboxes.
I had Spock and Kirk figures too, Kirk in the yellow captain’s shirt and Spock in blue, and a model Enterprise I put together one rainy afternoon while my parents yelled at each other in the living room. For a long time I wanted to be one of the hawk men from the Flash Gordon movie, which came out in 1980, about the time my parents’ marriage was disintegrating. After school I came home to an empty house, but Star Trek came on at 4, Kirk and Spock and McCoy sailing through the universe and righting wrongs, always hoping the next leap will be the leap home, but no, that’s the theme from Quantum Leap, which didn’t appear until 1989, about the time I was trying to decide between college and the military, or perhaps suicide if neither of those things worked out.
There is a temptation, even now, to scroll through the vintage toys on Ebay, the Stretch Armstrong with an asking price of 300 American dollars, the Godzillas, the foot tall stormtroopers. The Obi-Wans and differently-clothed Leias, the Greedos and Hammerheads, the Lego Star Destroyer that sells for close to $2000 on Amazon.
The temptation, of course, is to return. This is why vintage Star Wars figures sell for so much—men my age trying to recapture their youth. This is why, as we grow older, we tend to accumulate more and more, as if by surrounding ourselves with symbols we might surround ourselves with substance, make some sense of where the years have flown, if time has somehow warped or we have beamed ourselves into adult bodies.
Sometime in my childhood Reagan came up with a plan to put missiles and lasers in space in case the Soviet Union ever launched their ICBMs, and sometime in the late 80s I traded my toys for guns, first hunting rifles, and then an M-16. In 1991 the first Gulf War appeared on our TV screens like magic, or special effects, something out of a movie or our childhood imaginations. Not long ago I received a catalog in the mail from which I could order Glocks and Desert Eagles and Remington Model 870 Express HD 12 Gauge Pump Action Shotguns, complete with riot grip and Tactical Rail and 50 round bandoleer. I could order box upon box of cartridges and shells, from surplus Russian and Hungarian calibers to 5.56 NATO rounds, and I could order laser sights and conversion kits and carbon fiber handguards, all of which sound a little like science fiction.
I wonder if our fear of Soviet missiles drew our attentions toward the stars and made us think of alien invaders, or if we’ve always feared what might fall on us out of the sky or arrive from the dark of space. It occurs to me now that we never had a chance to win those old Atari games because there was no way to win. They always, always, ended in death and destruction. The waves of asteroids or invading enemies came faster and faster until you lost, but at Christmas, cold outside, snow and ice on the roads, we simply took turns trying to save the world, laughing when we failed, secure in our knowledge we could always restart and try again.
Had I been born in 1997, or 2000, as my daughters were, I would wish for wands from Harry Potter, Katniss’ bow, the immortality of Team Edward or Jacob, themes programmed into them by movies and TV shows and advertisements as they are taught from a young age to buy and buy and buy, targeted as if by heat-seeking missiles or photon torpedoes. On all our favorite shows and games, missiles fell from the sky and spaceships destroyed entire planets in a never-ending thirst for conquest, but I didn’t care about that because of the way the Millenium Falcon fit into the curve of my palm, its die-cast weight so heavy, so substantial. As if I, too, could fly, could warp drive myself wherever and whenever I wanted, see all the corners of the far universe.
I always go back to the toy aisle at Wal-mart or the living room one lost Christmas with wrapping paper strewn across the floor and shiny toys just opened lying all around. Or my bedroom floor early in the morning, before my parents divorced. Before acne, and awkwardness. Before college and a family and the subtle yet sudden realization I have grown older. Before any awareness of wars in the world, only those on the screen or those you created, wars you knew would turn out all right. Back before the sky filled with missiles and drones like something straight out of science fiction, before the realization the world could actually end. Back to when the top of the toy chest comes off, it’s raining outside, and the only difficult choice you have to make is which toy to play with, which world to explore, which war to bring to a victorious end.
Sitting here in tears which seems to be a common occurrence when I read your stuff. Thinking about my kids, and how they used to come barreling around the corner dressed as Jedis for no reason at all, light sabers flashing. And I just remembered we had this Darth Vader helmet and you could press a button and there would be James Earl Jones saying, “Luke, the force is strong with you” or “Luke, I am your father” - I think there were maybe five different phrases. Somewhere I have a video of my daughter at three or four wearing it in her pajamas, pushing the button over and over again while my son and I laughed our asses off. My son is heading to college Thursday.
I suppose it’s something about the passage of time and lost innocence and not being able to hold onto much of anything. And it’s also the way you write about your wife and daughters which hits me right in the heart. Anyway, that was a lot of words to say “thank you” 🤍 And Jenn sounds like my kind of gal.