Army Guys

If you're me, or someone similar, then you played with army guys as a kid.  Everyone loved army guys.  They were the little plastic people your father wouldn't scold you for playing with.  They came in two colors; Green and Different Green.  The Greens were always fighting each other, which I think is because the toy company was prepping the youth for a race war.

Army guys came in a lot of cool poses.  There was "Gun-Shooter", "Double Gun-Shooter", "Flamethrower Guy", and my personal favorite "Right-In-The-Middle-Of-Throwing-A-Grenade Guy".  He was always squad leader!  There was one pose that was just plain horrible.  Army crawl guy.  This soldier was perpetually crawling, which made playing with him pretty difficult.  I'd always have to invent wild stories as to why he was on the ground when everyone else was standing.  Like in the base before the enemy attack.

Captain Gernadey:  Why are you on the floor Johnson?
Johnson:  I lost a bullet, I think it rolled under this gigantic pencil.
Captain Gernadey:  Oh no, the different greens have attacked, quick to the perimeter!
Johnson: I'm on my way!
Captain Gernadey: Why are you crawling?
Johnson: Well its not a race.

Of course every set came with about a million of these.  I always ended up killing them first.  Captain Gernadey would often manage to take out the entire enemy army crawl squad in one shot.  Why do you think he was captain?  Of course half the other guys would end up lying on the ground too.  The ability to stand on their own was not a highlighted feature of army guys.  These guys would do battle leaning against tanks a lot of the time. Sort of a half-loitering style of combat.

My typical fights were pretty exciting.  One side would always win with a brilliant strategy.  The only one I remember well is that one green side would often launch up a guy using a tank cannon to land on a low strafing fighter jet.  The guy would hijack the fighter jet, after somehow entering the cockpit, and turn the tide of the battle.  To combat the strategy, sometimes the different green would launch their own guys up on the plane using their tanks.  An exciting battle on the wings would ensue.

I was an impressionable youngster and one day someone told me that playing war was wrong.  That I shouldn't play around by making plastic men die.   What about their plastic loved ones?  Naturally I was ashamed.  So from then on, in the battle set up stage, I would make up a story how it wasn't really war, it was just some guys playing virtual reality war.  I was pretending people were pretending to fight.  Basically the same plot you'll see in Inception 2.