Summer's Lost Sound

On summer afternoons in 1989, we marched through the woods with toy guns spray painted black and mimicked the sounds of warfare. There were four of us, 12 and 13 years of age, and we each made our own unique noises. Mike, the youngest, rapid fired the word “pow.” Tavis, the next lowest in seniority, shouted “nananana” for his machine gun’s killing power. I was a sergeant, second in command of our little squad, and I would flick my tongue against the roof of my mouth, creating a more violent version of the purring sounds I sometimes make these days to impersonate my cat. Jason, our lieutenant, carried only a fake pistol – it’s simplicity a symbol of his authority – and he made a complex noise for it by sucking in and then exhaling, creating a hybrid of the word “pow” and an exasperated sigh. If you stood close to any of us in combat, you’d likely be sprayed from the mist exiting our lips.
Those war-like sounds of ours erupted in the woods behind Jason’s house. We lived in Clarksville, Tenn., next-door neighbors to the Fort Campbell, Ky. Army Post, and occasionally a Blackhawk helicopter would fly over us, adding a touch of verisimilitude to our fantasies. The woods, thick with leaves and vines, morphed on those summer afternoons into the jungles of Vietnam. We walked into its shade with the swagger of hardened soldiers, moving branches aside with the barrels of our toy guns and cussing about the heat. It didn’t take long for someone to lift his fist in the air, motioning for us to be quiet.
“A machine gun nest,” the lieutenant would whisper. A machine gun nest hid behind almost every cluster of trees in those woods.
I didn’t live in the same neighborhood that this jungle surrounded. I grew up about a mile away, on a quiet suburban street without any kids my own age. I’d leave the house around 10 a.m. every morning that summer and hike across the golf course that separated me from my war buddies. Along the way, I snatched up golf balls for use as hand grenades against the enemy.
Our little squad met in the gray carpeted safety of Mike’s living room, where we spent the rest of the morning watching movies like “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” or “Hamburger Hill.” We were too young to understand the horrors of what we saw. Rather, all the blood and gore in those films looked like great fun.
When the movies ended, and our adrenaline was properly spiked, we armed ourselves with the toy guns stored on a shelf in Mike’s garage and then headed out into the sweaty heat of a Tennessee summer.
“Pow pow! Pow pow!”
“Nananananan!”
“BAM! BAM!”
Our artificial gunfire echoed through the woods. When the battle was over, we gathered in a circle and debated over who killed the most bad guys. The Lieutenant normally won these arguments. We respected his authority in all things. Mike, because he was the smallest, was often teased until his face turned red that he’d actually shot his own soldiers. But once the matter was settled, we hiked deeper into the woods and opened fire on yet another machine gun nest.
We only played war in the summer. The woods shriveled into a gray, bony mess in the winter. We could no longer pretend it was our patch of Vietnam. Nazi-occupied France, maybe, but that war was too distant and held little appeal to us. So we waited for June and another season of the joys of warfare.
We were the bored children of a peacetime era. The first Gulf War, two years later, lifted our spirits, but it was all over too quickly. Then came Somalia and Kosovo, but those didn’t seem like real wars to us. By the time I graduated college in 1999, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was living at the end of history. There were no more wars to be fought.
These days, I don’t hear the sounds of boys imitating machine guns and bombs. The children living in our neighborhood in Nashville don’t come outside that often. I assume they’re too busy playing on their PlayStations or Wiis, or updating their statuses on Facebook. But I like to think the reason why I don’t hear them is because the children of today aren’t as naive as we were. They’ve grown up in a time of wars, have seen the graphic images on television and, possibly, know personally some of the soldiers who’ve died.
Perhaps when these children become adults, they’ll give us a few years of peace. And then those summer sounds of warfare I once made will again return, as their own bored children set out in search of a little innocent mischief and bloodshed.