Toy Soldiers

    Today I found a large bin of old toys I used to play with when I was a little kid.  It was piled high with various action figures, toy cars and trucks, and scattered or broken pieces from other toys.  There were probably over a thousand individual pieces in there.  It was quite impressive.  Most of this bin was filled with hundreds of toy soldiers; those minuscule green plastic men fiercely wielding their tiny weapons against an unseen plastic enemy.  
     Some of them were clearly American Civil War soldiers, half of them blue and half of them gray, with muskets and sabers.  Others were meant to be World War II era, probably my dad's childhood toys passed down to me.  Still more looked like they were American soldiers in Vietnam, with more modern uniforms and weapons than the older toys.  They came with horses, cannons, tanks, jeeps, and tents and buildings for bases.  They were fully prepared to do battle.
     I remembered back to when I was younger and I would play with these toy soldiers all the time.  I loved history even back then and I would sometimes try to recreate civil war battles complete with generals and cavalry charges.  Other times my imagination got the better of my love for historical accuracy and plastic dinosaurs and knights would fight alongside World War II soldiers.
    I guess it was a great outlet for a young imagination, but this pastime seems quite silly to me now. It made war seem like great fun, a giant playing field with formations and charges and guns and tanks and other exciting features.  I imagined myself as a general and a tactician, setting up my armies against the enemy.  I didn't care what or who I was fighting for, it was just seemed fun to fight.  As the battles progressed I swept aside the opposing soldiers as they died like I was the hand of God, ending countless plastic lives with my juvenile fingers.  I gave no thought whatsoever as to whether these little soldiers wanted to die, whether they had families, whether they volunteered or were drafted.
      On one level it didn't matter.  They were made of plastic.  They couldn't feel or think or live or die.  I don't think I could do it now though.  Now I see war on the news every day and read about it in books and magazines.  Back then all I knew about war was green plastic men shooting at each other with green plastic guns and whatever I could learn from children's history books.  My younger self sat in my basement and staged wars with glee, while around the world real soldiers who were not made of green plastic killed real people with real guns that were not made of green plastic.  These soldiers were so inanimate and innocent back then. Now I look at them and I see men who are prepared to kill and afraid to be killed, and I don't think a child should determine their fate so happily.