Toy Soldiers

When I was a kid, I loved toy soldiers. Well, I suppose I still love toy soldiers, but I loved them a lot more when I was a kid. I’m not talking about the super-deluxe G.I. Joes with a hundred interchangeable weapons, 24 points of body articulation, and a host of vehicles like jet-powered dune buggies, amphibious submarines, and mobile command centers. I’m talking about the green plastic toy soldiers that would come in packs of fifty, and if you were lucky they’d throw in a little plastic tank or some plastic sandbag bunkers.

Sure, the little green toy soldiers couldn’t change weapons; the guy loading the mortar could never pack up his mortar and pull out the M-1 that he slung across his shoulder. The sergeant who had his hand cupped to his mouth could never stop yelling at his troops and sit down to a cup of coffee, and the sniper laying prone in the dirt could never stand up and dust off his clothes. These toy soldiers didn’t have one point of articulation, much less 24, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that there were a lot of green plastic soldiers, and you needed a lot of soldiers to storm a beach or to set up a command center in the fichus in the living room. In fact, one bag of green plastic soldiers just wouldn’t do. That was what, a couple squads? And where was the enemy? Toy soldiers couldn’t fight other toy soldiers of the same color, and they could only fight toy dinosaurs and scary-looking stuffed animals for so long before they got bored with it. So what was the answer?

More soldiers.

If you paid attention you could get the 50/50 bags of toy soldiers, with half green soldiers and half tans. The tans were always the bad guys; every kid knew this through some sort of shared child Geneva Convention. Sometimes you could find the gray toy soldiers, though they were occasionally mixed in with civil-war plastic soldiers. The gray soldiers were great, and the civil-war collections of troops weren’t bad, though they were doomed to be overwhelmed by the standard greenies. The gray soldiers were Special Forces, and though they sometimes got the drop on the good guys by setting ambushes in potted plants or by hiding in kitchen cabinets, they too were usually overpowered.

I still have a few toy soldiers tucked away somewhere in my childhood bedroom, and I’m happy they’re still around. We could all use a little extra protection.