the past: wars

When I was small, I believed that a war was when two teams (that for some reason looked like the swarves from Snow White) got together and played tug-o-war. They did this in the dirt with a chalked ring around the playing field. When I heard about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and pictured him standing on the side lines cheering his team on.

I had a friend in secondary school who used to believe that Hitlers first name was "Heil"! I can still remember the look on my history teachers face when she asked him who "Adolf" Hitler was.

I used to think that when two countries were at war, a rope divided two sides of a field and both sides would line up on their side and they'd just start shooting at each other until one side was completley eliminated.

I thought that with the cold war, there was an ice age, meaning everything was frozen over and snow and ice was everywhere and ice sculptures were everywhere and the war was covered in ice and people would fight each other in the icy area.

I used to believe that all wars were a result of a previous war and that all it would take to stop any future wars was for the sufferers/country of the last war was to decide not to seek revenge and not to be angry.

When I was younger and somehow the subject of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima came up, my father explained that the bombs "vaporized" the residents of the cities they were dropped on. It took some years for it to sink in that "vaporized" meant "killed." Somehow I had made these folks out to be living clouds of vapor somewhere in Japan...

i used to belive that my dad was in the veitnam war as a helicopter pilot.well thats what he told me,it wasnt until modern studies that i uncovered his filthy lie.

As a kid growing up in a small village in the UK I was convinced that war could break out at any time. I also thought that when there was a war my house could be bombed at any minute, so I planned my exit thoroughly. I realised that I would be able to hear the bombs falling by the sound, like the sound you hear on cartoons when something is falling from a high distance. Therefore I thought I would have time to grab my things, and my parents, and run out of the house and up a small hill so I was far enough away from the house. I didnt think about the fact that this would take at least 5 minutes!

I used to believe that a molotov cocktail was like a shrimp cocktail...I thought they would hold a match to the shrimp's tail and that would somehow kill people.

When I was about 6 there was a war in my country and I asked my mom how long it was going on. She said 4 years. I don't know why but untill I was about 12 I believed that every war lasted 4 yrs.So when we were learning about wars in our History class and the teacher said that a war lasted for 100 yrs i thought that she was completely off the track

When I was a kid, another kid told me that the U.S. Civil War was fought over the question of whether "hell" and "damn" should be considered "dirty words". I believed that for what must have been several years.

After i played Wolfenstein 3d, the world's first 1st-Person shooter, i began to think that back during World War Two, Adolf Hitler would command his armies in a big robot suit, and when he commited suicide, he self-destructed in the suit, killing his girlfriend in the process.

I always saw the Army recruiting booths at the mall and other places, and they confused me to no end. After all, why join the Army if there's no war? Then I thought, "Wait, why join the Army at all? You're probably just gonna be killed!" And so I came up with my own reasons for this...
The Army is a small room, with about 100 people total, all sitting around a tiny table. On the table was a light, and the soldiers would sit there for years, waiting for the "War light" to come on. And when it did, that meant there was a war. At that point, you'd pull a lever on the wall, and the floor would colapse, dropping you into a series of tunnels that somehow lead you right to the war.
I was quite happy with this explanation, until I remembered my original question, "Why do people bother joining the Army?" Well, I assumed that while waiting for years for the War light, you didn't need to sleep, eat, drink, pee, OR poop!

As a very young child in the early eighties, I had yet to recognized the United States was a relatively safe place to live. Gaining a healthy fear of bombs being dropped from planes from television footage about past wars, I would hide under trees, slides, or whatever else I could find that would shield me from being seen be anyone in a plane that would want to drop a bomb directly on ME. Of course it was completely irrational that anyone would have wanted to drop a bomb on me in particular, nor would I have been protected by a puny tree or playground slide if they had.

After reading books The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place, I started to horde books and clothes in case there was another world war and we had to go into hiding. My first year of college (1982) I finally figured out this wasn't going to happen. I live in the United States.

There was a storm drain behind my elementary school that looked an awful lot like a cannon when we were in third grade. After seeing it, I believed that Revolutionary War was refought every night behind my school, and that the soldiers kept accidentally forgetting to take the cannon back with them during the day.

My parents didn't want me playing with toy soldiers from WWII, so they bought me sets of knights. These were the Britains Limited figures - a wide variety of armor types, so not all of them had Crusader tabards. My logic in playing Knights In Armor was that the ones with the crosses on their tabards were physically stronger.

Years later, I got into medieval history, and found out that was one of the folk beliefs in the actual Crusader armies.

At the end of the street where i lived in Antwerp, there is a monument of worldwar 1. It shows 4 statue's of naked and serious looking men, only wearing an army helmet (and a sword in front of them to cover up their ...).
I asked my mother what this monument was about and she said it was made for all the people who died in the first worldwar. Of course i was surprised.... That they took the effort of making a large monument for a war where only 4 guys were killed.