#78 - Little Green Men

Little Green Men

12/30/05 (#78)

I'm aching to spend three dollars, but I just can't.

It's not that the cost is prohibitive---it costs that much to rent a movie (even a terrible one), to buy a fast food sandwich (even a terrible one), or to get the smallest of lattes from our neighborhood coffee shop, all things I do with very little consultation of the weekly budget. Heck, unless it's in penny form and you have to carry them in one hand, that's simply not a lot of money.

The problem is, it's a bag of Army men. A squadron of killers. In fact, two squadrons in contrasting shades of green, with a pair of stout plastic tanks, a couple of sand-bag armaments and flags for the opposing forces to capture. (Mind you, the $10.00 set at Target is even more enticing, with boats and rafts and helicopters and enough little soldiers to do an accurate re-enactment of D-Day. But I look at that box and imagine six or seven years of finding bazooka men under the couch and bayoneted soldiers underfoot.)

I say "squadron of killers" in no derogatory way---it's simply a fact. The package includes no plastic K.P. sergeants equipped with potato peelers; no monochrome strategy experts staring at molded computer monitors with press-on software stickers; no chartreuse civil engineers sketching blue prints for how to rebuild a storm-ravaged bridge. These injection-molded armies are not on a peace-keeping mission: they are stamped in a very small variety of actions that all fall under the categories shooting, stabbing, or blowing up.

I cannot calculate the sum of hours I spent as a child playing with my army men. That was the early 1970s: the Cold War was alive and well, and the war in Vietnam was an action verb, not a historical reference. In 1973, the term "politically correct" meant voting the party line in November, and I'm certain no one questioned my Mom's parenting skills when a platoon of riflemen filed out of their Happy Days lunch box barracks---boys will be boys, and boys love playing with army men. I had no family in the military, so everything I knew about warfare was learned either from TV (for instance, when a soldier gets shot, he will not collapse but instead fall dramatically with a graceful trajectory; or when enemies get shot, they die single-bullet deaths, whereas my infantry could take enough shrapnel to set off a metal detector at 30 feet and still manage to capture the opponent's generic flag) or from my big brothers (for instance, no matter how stealthy my battle plan and how much I might outnumber my foe, I would not win the battle, understand?) But that limited amount of virtual military boot camp was enough information to allow endless hours of fun with my battalion of 2" infantrymen.

It's no longer the early 70s. The social sciences have made great strides in the area of child development, and the gun has long been out of favor as an acceptable toy. Considering the frequency of gun incidents at public schools (including those with tragic fatalities), it's a positive change that fewer children come of age thinking that guns are good toys. (This is not "political correctness", this is common sense that has simply become more common.) I recall a powerful orange dart-gun pistol that was confiscated from our three-adolescent-boys household, removed from service when Mom noticed that my brothers had removed the suction cup ends from the darts and were shooting high-velocity hard-plastic projectiles, quite often at their little brother Bill. (Which might explain why I never cared for guns---my familiarity was gained mostly from the business end.) Of course, the adolescents in this story then took to the old-school method of throwing their projectiles, so the net gain was minimal---but arms control was a wise move on my mother's part, as it was for a nation of mothers in the years that followed. (Mothers might dream that their kids will grow up to be T.V. stars, but not if the show is Cops.)

Yet I am surprised the plastic army man fell victim to that same logic of toy censorship. I understand that we don't want kids packing fake heat, but being a soldier is an essential occupation, and a heroic aspiration. (One might find fault with the missions, but we can't throw out the babies with even the murkiest of bath water.) Especially now, in this era of enforced patriotism, when love of country is a rated scale against which we are all measured (and protecting the resale value of the car by not marring the paint with Old Glory decals is seen as code for wanting to be French), the three dollar bag of army men should have been the holiday season's big hit. Instead, the classic plastic Army Man is quite hard to find in stores.

Perhaps with so many years without an official "war", our culture grew complacent about the military. Peacetime offered little press for the soldiers, and so in many eyes, the armed services were just a uniformed apprenticeship that helped a young person pay for college. The Army became just another government job---and how many government jobs have their own action figures? There are no multicolored I.R.S. Agent packs, collections featuring accountants with hands melted into complex plastic adding machines with extras like a massive paper shredder and two ominous-looking black cars designed for on-site audits at the Hot Wheels corporate offices; there are no legions of blue-plastic postal workers to fan out and distribute tiny toy catalogs to the people of Legoland.

Or maybe Army men require too much imagination. They make no noise (you have to make the rifle and grenade sounds yourself), they have no action-figure-esque points of articulation (the laying-down guy is never going to walk, that's that), they're incredibly drab (even if you get a plastic sack of opponents, they'll be a different uniform drab) ---frankly, they're not much more than simple physical manifestations of a game that takes place in your mind. They are the antithesis of Playstations and the X-Box. (Ironic that both of those systems allow you to play Army Men video games that feature graphics of old-school army men*, running around obstacles like AA batteries, bottle caps and leaves---everything that once required imagination is now provided, making it simultaneously pretty cool and terribly sad.)

Whatever the cause of their failing popularity, I don't think my daughter would be interested in playing with Army men anyway. Intrinsic to war games is appreciation for strategy and position: the full-frontal assault; the well-placed sniper; the plastic-tank-as-troop-shield advance. Sage would more likely use the tank for giving tours of the war torn area, stacking it high with soldiers, dogs, sharks and dinosaurs. (And I have a hilarious vision of my wife's influence on Sage's war games: "Look daddy," Sage would inform enthusiastically, "this piece of dog food is the fabricated evidence that was presented to justify the assault on the train station." Then turning back to the fun, "I'm going to feed it to the horses.")

No, the only person in my house that wants that bag of Army men is me, and I don't really want it, either---despite my printer stand offering a wonderful multi-tiered arena for a battle, I suspect I would be bored with playing before I could even get them all standing on their oblong pedestals. My enthusiasm might be reignited if they were more than merely a retail hypothetical, but I have no time for such pointless distractions these days.

Paradoxically, I think my attraction to the package stems from the very argument I use to dismiss them: I have no time for such pointless distractions. These little green men represent an era that included vast expanses of solitude, a time when fun did not require modifiers such as "pointless". I see in them a momentary escape from adulthood: no floors to sweep or dogs to walk, no mail requiring reply or websites to update; just a careful advance up the bookcase in order to mount a surprise attack on Fort Hewlett-Packard---real estate that is easily worth three dollars.

* Sample screen shot from the game Army Men RTS

©2005 wpreagan