Where have all the army men gone
It’s been written that no real research has been done which proved that playing with war toys stimulated children towards aggressive behavior. With that said, I suppose that proving the opposite is – at this time – impossible.
It’s also been acknowledged that games involving competition and war are common in the play behavior of most children, at least in the western world. If it were possible to obliterate such games, would we then also be removing an important vehicle through which young children experience courage and overcoming danger?
While Michael Moore will try to convince you that they turn children into soldiers or train them to kill, only the most idiotic of people can really believe that.
I write these words for a number of reasons.
When I was a mere slip of a youth, these so-called war toys were a fact of life. Whether it was my G.I. Joe Adventure Team toys, my Sgt. Rock action figures, my beloved G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (sold here, of course, as Action Force), or the most simple toys of all, army men, they were everywhere.
I discovered only recently that plastic army men were practically non-existent here any more. Of course, Action Force hasn’t been on the shelves for years and Remco, makers of Sgt. Rock, has been nothing but a memory for a very long time. But army men?
Army men used to be the staple of a boy’s life when I was a kid. Every single boy I knew had them in the 1970s. And, like generations before me in the 50′s and 60′s, they were just as popular. We didn’t just have a couple – we had hundreds. Inside, outside, snow, rain, mud, you name it.
I remember fondly my Marx Navarone playset, which we sat atop a giant hill of dirt and assaulted just like in The Guns of Navarone. I remember my friends and I re-creating the Normandy invasion – just like in The Longest Day at the stream near my house, complete with bunkers, tank traps and machine-gun nests.
We didn’t care that some of our plastic WWII army men sets had Korean War-era jets with German markings on them. It was perfectly OK that our Shogun Warriors or Godzilla turned up to help the Allies stomp a mudhole in the Nazis. It was called having fun.
For all of us, it was our first experience with wargaming. We were able to agree on set rules, play out tactics – and aside from getting dirty the worst thing that happened was the occasional outbreak of poison ivy or sumac.
How, exactly, was this bad? Teamwork, playing outside in the fresh air, using problem-solving skills… sharing are bad? I think not.
How can anyone say that we were being programmed to become soldiers? Well, maybe here I’ve not a decent argument, as 98% of my playgroup actually did join the military, myself included. But as much as I can remember, all but one of us also became honor-roll and honor-society students.
Granted, in recent years, military toys have taken a hit here in Denmark. But maybe for the wrong reasons. Our crazy northern neighbors, Sweden, have this stance:
War toys are playthings, which are used to solve conflict, gain power, or win through the use of violence. Their aim is to wound or kill.
Pretending to be aggressive is not the same as being aggressive. Aggressive behavior is the intention to harm another person. Aggressive play includes make-believe fighting and rough-and-tumble, which has no intention to injure anyone.
For nearly all children who engage in it, aggressive play is exciting, active, and fun, full of fantasy and imagination. That’s it and that’s all.
War is not a game. War is not fun. War sucks.
But toys are fun. Army men are fun. For all the reasons I’ve already named, they are probably one of the best toys out there – inexpensive, unbreakable, replaceable, no-batteries-required, and down-right good stuff.
Instead of bitching about war toys, people need to instead bitch about the governments who act as though their military forces are toys.
