the past: wars

After the Gulf War, I thought that wars were regularly occuring events, like the Olympics or something. I remember asking my mom, "When is the next war?" like it was already planned out.

As a very young child I used to believe that the Army, Air force and Navy all fought each other for a living. One day while visiting an Air Force base, I was shocked to see a lady wearing fatigues, I assumed she was in the Army, and I expected some of the Airmen wearing blue to attack her.

When I was 7 I was obsessed with all things military. So when my dad told me we were going to Germany for a holiday I became hysterical. I just couldn't grasp that WW2 had ended. I had nightmares for weeks. We ended up going to Cornwall that year.

As a four-year-old with a very large vocabulary, I decided the "Civil War" was the one war where everybody pretended they were nice to everyone else. For example, a soldier would offer the enemy a cigarette, shoot him when he least expected it, and then pretend to be sad about it.

When the BBC news reported the murder of yet another Roman Catholic man in Northern Ireland, I used to catch on to the ROMAN bit more than the Catholic bit and had an image of a Roman Centurion sprawled out dead on a street in Belfast

My younger brother asked me once who won the first world war. I obviously had a sense of fairness because I concluded that because we had won the second world war that Germany must have won the first one.

Confused after learning of the Civil War, I asked my mom what "civil" means. She said it was where people were nice to each other. So I pictured the Civil War as a period where people were always smiling, shaking hands, complimenting each other, etc. I justified the "war" part of the phrase by the idea that it was a niceness competition, and they thought "war" sounded cooler than "competition". Needless to say, I failed the test... and got really mad at my mom for telling me false information. It took me a while to staighten it out.

When i was young, Operation desert Storm was going on. I never watched the news, but i always heard this one guy's weird name: "Saddam Who's Saying."
I asked my mom one day when he would shutup and stop the war, and she laughed till she cried...but it wasnt really that funny...

When I heard about the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland,I amagined a war between Irish secrataries, hurling ballistic pencils and engaging in hand-to-hand ruler fighting...

When I was in second grade, and the Gulf War was going on. I wrote a letter to Sadaam Hussein asking him to please stop the war, and to not worry if people made fun of him and called him a baby. I gave it to my second grade teacher and she gave me this funny look. A couple months later, the war ended, and I was seriously convinced for a while that, single-handedly, at 7, I'd ended the Gulf War.
Ah, to be a kid again:)

When I was little I couldn't really concieve of how a war could be "won," so I figured that there must be a giant scoreboard on the battlefield somewhere, and when one side got enough points, then the war was over and everyone went home.

I grew up in the 80's, and there were a lot of post-apocalyptic movies around, like Mad Max, Threads, and The Day After. I firmly believed that the "end of the world as we knew it" was just around the corner. My school uniform was green, and I thought the school had picked the colour so that after the fall of civilisation us kids would blend into trees better, have a better chance of evading Mad Max-style slavers, and maybe survive. On the special days we were allowed to wear street clothes to school I never would, as I just KNEW that'd be the day nuclear war broke out (somehow I never thought about it happening on a weekend or holiday). Aged 13 I changed to a school with a blue uniform, and I was really worried about my future survival. I was a lonely, strange kid, but learned alot about being self-sufficient just in case.

When I was four, I had an auntie who liked to scare me by telling me all about world war 1 and 2. She always ended her stories with a "world war 3's just around the corner".
So I used to keep a small suitcase full of my favourite clothes and a bottle of water underneath my bed that in case the war came, i'd be ready.

Who knew that many years later, I'd find my favourite clothes and remember what I did with them. I'd thought I lost them.

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.

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.

Since he had fought in WWII, I naturally assumed my grandfather had killed Hitler himself.