wars

I was a child in the sixties. Since my grandfather had been in WWI, My father was in WWII, and my brother (who was eleven years older than me) was going to be in the Vietnam war; I just assumed that when I came of age, there would be a war for me too - that society was somehow structured this way. By the time I was a teenager, I knew better of course, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that some war was destined for me. Fortunately, as it turned out, there was no US war in the late seventies, breaking the generational cycle. I hope the same goes for my son.

Jonathan

I used to believe that war was never fought by real human beings, but only by robots. I thought that people would never subject themselves to carnage of war, and would have inanimate robots fight the wars on their behalf as a proxy.

Chris

From a very young age, I knew my Dad's best friend had been injured in 'the war'. I studied the man at length, and very innocently deduced that he must have swallowed a grenade to keep all his fellow soldiers safe. It wasn't until I was about 12 years old that I realized he just had an enormous beer gut.

Aimee

i used to believe that the purpose of bombs dropped from planes was so they would land on people pinning them to the ground preventing them from getting up.i suppose in a way it is.

felix

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.

Anon

Until I was about 13, I believed that the Gulf War took place near the Gulf Of Mexico....

D

I used to belive the cold war was a war in the snow. Instead of bombs it was snowballs. I was shocked when i laurnt aboit it at school.

Anon

I was always confused when my mom said we could donate our old clothes to the Salvation Army, because I thought it was part of the army and I wondered what soldiers would want with old clothes.

Anon

When I was younger I thought that the Gulf War was being fought in the US near the Gulf of Mexico. I thought this for a really really long time.

Jarrod

I used to believe that I could stop the war in Vietnam by running out between the fighting sides. I didn't think that they would shoot a child. I then thought that I could get them to sit down and talk about it reasonably and work thinks out in a peaceable fashion.

Raven Simons

I used to believe that a war was when men in colonial outfits would tell their enemies to meet them at an area with green grass and a metal fence surrounding the area like in many playgrounds. They would then all meet there. There, the good guys and their enemies would sword fight and the winners of the war were the ones that won the sword fight.

Aerith

As I grew up, my father would tell me stories of his time in Viet Nam and would preface these stories with "Charlie...". I grew up thinking that one man named "Charlie" gave our US military hell!!!

Anon

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.

Autumn

When I was little I wasn't able to figure out how an army could win a war or battle without killing all the soldiers on the other side.

Miss Taken

When I was little, no one wanted to tell me about the concept of war and what is actually is, which is, let's face it, a bunch of people killing each other over things that were way too complicated for a kid to know anyway. So I thought that war was more like a fight and no one actually had to die. I visualized it like a martial arts tournament and the two sides would fight and then when someone cried "uncle!" it was over in a match, so no one really got hurt and after they counted up the score of winds and loses, it was over. As an advocate for standing up for yourself, I didn't understand why people weren't having these perfectly civilized competitions more often to solve their problems. Even when someone told me that war is about killing everyone on the other side and showed me a picture of a US soldier with a gun in his arm, at first I was confused. "But if everybody kills each other, there won't be any winners or losers, just dead people." Oh man I wish I had been right all along.

Anon

I used to believe that a dictatorship was a time when people had to do Dictation exercises in class (the ones in which the teacher says some sentences out loud and you have to write them down without any mistake) all the time. I understood why people said dictatorships were so bad: after a while, it would become really boring to do nothing but dictation at school!

Anon

my logic told me that, being a bad thing, any war was forbidden and therefore practically impossible. when i learned that there are many wars going on in this world all the time, i didn't understand why noone came to arrest those responsible.

Anna Asisa

i was about 10, before the Gulf War started and i remeber hearing about it all the time. i also remeber watching endless hours of it ontelevision. However, i thought i was all about GOLF. i couldnt figure out why people would fight so much about Golf.

Zo

I used to believe that a war was just one single battle that lasted a few hours at the most. I also thought that all wars were pre-arranged and that all of the countries made their own army and fought in a battlefield about the size of a few football fields.

Anon

I used to think that World War II took place on a field in Los Angeles (where I lived). I thought that you could just go to where the war was going on and watch it through a chain-link fence.

Lili