Guns

 

   I still remember the cool grass on my back as I lay dying. Birds overhead, indifferent to my death. Swirling. When I was a kid, the sky seemed to be a deeper blue. It now seems polluted, pale, faded, tired, something less than what it was then. The sun used to be perfect. It seemed to foster us. To parent us in a way that our parents never could, never did, or maybe never wanted to do. Go play, they would say. The sun’s out. It’s going to rain tomorrow. They didn’t have to tell us. We were going to anyway. We were at home in dirt and grass. So much time was spent under the sun’s watch. Its warmth. The omnipotent babysitter. It knew us all so well, kissed our skin, strengthened and seemed to favor us. We had tans and burns from its attention. Its doting. It witnessed everything we ever did, but never told a soul. I killed all of my friends and my brothers more times than I could count. I killed everyone in the neighborhood. I used my Uzi or my M16 machine gun, or my bazooka, all of which had unlimited rounds. I used my 9mm, my AK-47, my Dirty Harry .44. I used land mines and trip-wire. I used a flamethrower I crafted out of a backpack bug-sprayer. I could hear their skin fry.

    I was killing other neighbor kids playing war, but I was hit and I was dying. We didn’t call it war, though. Not in my neighborhood. We called it “guns.” I thought of being killed as a kid during those games and how cool the grass felt as I lied there with my eyes closed counting to thirty. That is how long you were dead in my neighborhood before you could get back up and kill the other kids who just killed you. I was probably wearing the Army Ranger t-shirt I bought at the Army-Navy store. It had a skeleton wearing a red beret on it, under the inscription, “KILL’EM ALL, LET GOD SORT’EM OUT!” I had camouflage pants and boots on. I had a canteen on my hip and a few plastic grenades on my belt. A knife, the inside of the handle stuffed with matches, fishing wire, and hooks, and capped with a compass that I pretended I could read. Thirty seconds. A lot goes through your mind in thirty seconds. Those details were all hashed out before the game started when you were choosing sides. Establishing boundaries. Time of death. What war it was. How long after you came back from death until you could shoot someone. What tree you had to touch to reset. It was every kids’ Geneva Convention. I don’t think anyone really counted all the way to thirty before they got up and started shooting again. Some kids always cheated. They yelled, “You missed me!” and kept running when you shot them three times in the face from ten feet away with an M-60 grenade launcher. Little sonsofbitches!

    Other kids liked dying. They got shot when no one shot them. They died all the time and did so as dramatically as they could. Like Custer at Little Bighorn, shot to hell and back with invisible arrows, sliced up with pretend tomahawks. Or they flailed their arms in the air like Sergeant Elias in Platoon. Betrayed. The helicopter tailing away. Gooks all over him in the rice paddy. The game was as corrupt as a political election, but it went on, day after day, year after year. A definite winner was never really determined. We ambushed and massacred each other repeatedly, but there was a cease-fire at supper time each evening and we all went home with our cheap plastic M-16 and Uzi machine guns and stowed them away, anxious to do it all over again tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow would be Vietnam. Or World War II. Maybe the Civil War. Or The Revolution if we had enough wooden muskets. Or Cobras versus Joes. Or World War III. The big one we all were sure was to come someday. Sure that we would be in and sure that we would win. America against Russia. Mano a mano, at last. Or two giant mushroom clouds.

    We took turns being good and bad, which was very distinct and never convoluted. When you were bad, you played the role and went with it. For those few hours you were a kraut or a gook or Jap and you fought like one. You were a rusky sonofabitch or an Indian (though most of us preferred to be Indians). Any hill was Bunker Hill or Hamburger Hill. Any fort was Ft. McHenry. Any wall was the Alamo. And any creak was Bull Run, which would be crimson, polluted with imaginary blood and dead horses by the end of it. If I could steal a red bandana, a topaz necklace, and maybe a wig off my mom, I’d go shirtless and be Rambo. I would free POWs in Cambodia or kick some commie ass in Afghanistan. There were a bunch of rocks past Shasta Avenue. That was our Afghanistan. I’d shoot down that helicopter which was just another kid with his arm twirling over his head, spitting bullets with his mouth, and shooting missiles from his eyes. “Pretend you are...” began much of our storylines. Whatever came after didn’t much matter. Unless it was gay, we did it. We flew airplanes and helicopters and drove tanks through muddy fields. Got out to fix the track when they broke. We were sniped. We were taken prisoner. We were frogmen in the creek. Navy Seals. Marine Recon snipers in trees. Army Rangers parachuting in the farmer’s field with stolen bedsheets. Delta Force on missions to destroy bridges or communication towers. Or tunnel rats in the sewer tunnel at the end of Mulberry Street, living our own Red Dawn. “Eat shit, you commie bastards!” We repeated what we heard on Tour of Duty or Commando and it was safe to when you played guns in the creak. Your mom would never hear anything you said and God wasn’t listening. Not to a bunch of devil dogs. There was just the sun who kept better secrets than a Vegas mattress. 

    Flags flew and were taken. Whatever happened to them, I don’t know. We made our own, sometimes on bedsheets or pillowcases. Spent a whole night drawing and coloring an eagle for an 101st Airborne flag that turned out to look like a deformed chicken, still it was badass and we flew it and saw it as it was intended to be seen. We had the Gadsden flag. The Rebel flag. Hell, we even had a Nazi flag at one time or another. They sold them in the Army-Navy store before it was forbidden by the PC police. This was back before people were pussies, mind you, when just the sight of something offended them. This was the 1980’s when you rubbed dirt on it. But no flag we ever got was ever any better than the American flag and we treated it much better than we did any other. It was never stuffed in a pocket or drug along the ground. It was never left in the creak or snagged on a branch up in a tree. It was never pissed on when someone captured it, or burned, and no one’s nuts every touched it in playful disrespect. Even as dopey kids, 7, 8, 9 or 10 years-old, we knew it was what afforded us what we had. Those days. The shows and men we emulated. The creak. Our freedom. It was emblematic for the country that gave us our guns, our games, our friends, our homes, our parents, our dogs, our school, our town. I suppose these days they would call us young “tribalists,” or little fascist bastards, but it was always America first and there was not a kid who didn’t understand the importance of that most fundamental and simple concept. There wasn’t an unpatriotic kid among us or he would have had his ass kicked, as he should. It would be equivalent to a Satanist going to a Christian church. His intent only to delegitimize or defraud it. If I live in America and do not love America, I think I would move rather than to live like a parasite making ill the body that affords me the liberty to destroy it. What a caustic and vile way to live, to hate the body in which you abide.

    I sometimes wonder whatever happened to those guns. Like those kids. Like those flags. I don’t know. I simply forget when they disappeared or what happened to them. If mom sold them in a yard sale, or donated them, or if they got tossed out and ended up in some landfill somewhere buried like relics maybe to be excavated by archeologists one day. I do remember that for a while when playing guns ended, I’d lie in my bed and shoot the ceiling with my M-60, perhaps, longingly. I can recall the loose and worn trigger and the worn-down handgrip. There was no gay orange tip. I can recall the gun feeling small and it didn’t rat-a-tat like it used to. It kind of just puled. That ceiling was a blank ceiling. There were no Nazis or gooks or rebels or ruskies opposing me. There was no one there. Nothing but textured stucco. I remember the batteries for the grenade launcher dying and not bothering to replace them. What an indignant death they suffered.

    I killed every kid in the neighborhood at least 1,000 times. I am sure they all killed me about as much, too. The guns went away and were replaced by footballs and baseballs and swimming pools and girls and dirty magazines which in turn were replaced by something else until there was nothing else. Nothing but this laptop and these words. Bills in a drawer and pills and whisky in a glass beside me on the desk. A cellphone I shut off. A blaring TV from another room with grown idiots playing make-believe for a living. News talking about riots and a rigged election. Vitriol. I feel badly for them for some reason – those toy guns. I have felt badly for inanimate objects since I was a kid. It was the reason I hid my stuffed animals in my closet like Jews from Nazi SS friends who would have accosted me for being 12 and harboring teddy bears and stuffed dogs in my room. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of them. It took me years, and even then, I felt a twitch of sorrow.

    There are days when I see a creak or a park and I want to play guns again, steal a few of my dad’s cigars and smoke, paint my face up with boot black, go to the Army-Navy store and buy something camouflage. But I can’t. The creak is half gone. A housing development has encroached onto our battlefields cutting off our passes with privacy fences. The farmer’s field became condos. My dad passed away. And the Army-Navy store closed years ago and they don’t sell guns in department stores anymore because some hippy journalists wrote enough whiny “intellectual” and sanctimonious op-eds and universities released extensive studies about how kids shouldn’t play with “violent” toys. How they should be taught to nurture and love the grass and the trees and multiculturalism and become pacifist globalists, and how they should never think America first because it is xenophobic or racist or bullying in its nature and it makes people uncomfortable. They have you surrender your balls by third grade. The only flag they say you ought to fly is the “Pride” flag to support gays and trans-people who are far more courageous than Chuck Norris or Rambo or the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima, they will tell you. It doesn’t represent God’s covenant anymore. His promise to never destroy the Earth. It has been hijacked like Pan-Am Flight 73. And they say America was never great, and the American flag is a painful reminder to those disenfranchised people who have long-been oppressed. To me, it is quite the opposite. It is the flag that represents us all perfectly, our strengths equally, and any and all oppressed persons have a stake in it, a share, and it is the flag, the only flag, of their true liberty, newfound or otherwise. It represents what we were and what we have become and what wars we have fought to get there. 

    They’ve given kids violent video games where they are degenerate street thugs, slapping hookers, and stealing cars, and shooting cops, and TV, and hastags, and ADHD pills, and there has never been more school shootings. No school was ever shot up by a kid high on Rambo who spent his childhood toting a plastic M-60, blowing imaginary guts out all over the neighbor’s lawn. Never happened. The central theme in all of our movies and shows and books and our neighborhood war games was that they were battles for good. To save someone or something. To defend or in honor. To do what was right. Sure, Rambo had to blow a lot of people up and kick their teeth in, but he did so on principle and for a good purpose. I asked the kid at the toy store where the guns were and he looked at me like I was a psychopath. But then after some thought, he pointed me in the direction of the end of the store where on a small rack there were “dart blasters” and “laser tag” sets and “super soakers” and “water launchers.” Nothing that said “gun” because the word gun has been forbidden for kids because the dirty hippies all grew up and had babies and have written them out of a boy’s life, unless you’re in the not-so-secret reality of a video game with a pixel gun and a hoe to bitch slap, I suppose. In the sunless basement or a room you never leave but to go to school.

    It is not the same world. It’s been hijacked by cowards and dopes. By eggheads and condescending virtue signalers who think they are smarter and better than their parents and everyone else. People who do not know the value or grace of humility. I realize I no longer have any friends like I had friends when I was a kid and the possibility of such has long passed. I realize we don’t do such things anymore like spend all day at a creak fighting wars and shooting each other for what’s right, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good, and rubbing mud all over ourselves to hide from the predator, not because we have matured into responsible adults or better people, but because we no longer have that kind of imagination and we are ashamed of such morality. What we were killing with our guns was evil, everything that was wrong in the world was in our sites and we cut it in half without blinking. There was good and bad, right and wrong, but now there is excuses for being bad and guilt for being good. And right and wrong has been rewritten and it is no longer based in the fundamentals of the Christian faith, or in any faith, or in God because secularism and immorality has run amuck.

    They will tell you that the planet is getting warmer and the sun is getting colder and the seas are getting higher and the viruses are getting deadlier. They will tell you to wear a mask. To stay indoors. To get shots. To change your beliefs because your beliefs are not their beliefs. They will tell you what to do because that is how they feel powerful – when you obey and do not question their authority. Only an idiot questions science, they will say. Their science. This is how it is and you are going to abide. Cops are racists. The good guys are bad and the bad guys are good. But tyranny is exerted upon us not by a strong authoritative leader who puts our liberty and freedom first and celebrates our national collective identity, but rather by a collective of self-serving rulers, profiteers, race-baiters and self-determined “elites” through an erosion of basic principles, liberties, shared values, and our identity as a common people. It is an invasion from within. Never in a creak bed with mud on my face looking through binoculars or a toy gun site would I have figured the enemy this way.  

    I have owned a few handguns over the years and they sat in a drawer and were shot only on occasion for sport. Apparently, I have lost my affinity for inanimate objects because they were never that important to me. I sold them or gave them away at some point or other. But I recently went to the gun store in town, while it still exists, wearing my mask, and I bought an AR-15 rifle, a shotgun, and two 9mm handguns. I would have bought half the store if I could have afforded it, including the sandbags and ration packs and a kevlar vest. I would have bought an M-60 grenade launcher, a flamethrower, an Uzi, a bazooka and a howitzer if they sold them and if my credit card had that kind of limit. I would have bought a cannon and ten crates of grenades and ammunition to last me until Jesus comes back. I would stockpile like I stockpiled on Hasbro toys before they began making rainbow-colored dildos, or whatever they make now.

    If your government tells you that you don’t need a gun, you need a gun. Ask the Indians. Ask the Chinese after Mao and the Poles and Jews who survived Nazi Germany. I read an article about The Deacons for Defense and Justice. In 1965, Western Louisiana and Eastern Mississippi was known as “Klan Nation” because the Ku Klux Klan was so powerful in the region, deeply engrained in local law enforcement and the government. Black folks were tyrannized and lynched by the Klan until about 20 black army veterans banded together and boldly armed themselves. Things changed soon thereafter. Black housekeepers and workers no longer took the racial insults and taunts as they did before. They refused to be degraded. They stood their ground. A New York Times article called “Armed Negroes Make Jonesboro Unusual Town” dated February 21, 1965 was referenced in the detail of this account. The Deacons model spread to other Klan regions in the South and they were able to overturn Klan power with scarcely a shot fired.  

    I wouldn’t have known this had I not joined the NRA and read their literature. I guess I didn’t trust them, I had been brainwashed to believe they were something they were not. So I looked up the article myself and it was true. I built my own gun case and store my guns proudly in my house. I show them to friends and family. I get them out and pass them around and point them at the ceiling. A blank textured stucco. I talk about them like they are family because they are family. If ever tyranny or crime comes to hurt me or my family, God forbid, they are my defense and will be used for no other purpose. Inanimate objects are once again special to me. Maybe I will never use them, but in extremis, I will not hesitate. I will die on my lawn before I live in a cage. It appears that the long train of usurpations and abuses has begun. I hear talk of mandatory gun buybacks and reeducation camps and higher taxes and unsecured borders. Hollywood elites and social justice warriors boldly ridicule America and authentic patriotic Americans. They call us racists and zealots to divide us. And so, maybe there will be a time, under a tiring sun, when my friends and I are called to duty by tyranny, not by youth, to play guns again. And maybe someday boys will get muddy and play guns in creaks and grow up to be men rather than gender-confused, basement-dwelling, socialist, commie tit-sucking sycophants. Or so a man can still dream, by God.