Me and Sgt. Wilson

As a kid, my toys were limited by both the economy and the times. There was the piece of plastic that covered the TV screen so I could draw on it for the Winky Dink show, the Lincoln logs, the Plastic City building blocks, a few toy vehicles, my brother’s erector set, and our Daisy cork firing air rifle. My most beloved and most used toy, though, was a bag of small green plastic army soldiers.

They were W.W. ll soldiers. Some of them had bazookas or mortars, some were laying down soldiers with rifles and tripods, some had hand grenades, some were stand-up men with rifles that had bayonets affixed to them, and one, one had a Colt 45 handgun. That one was me. He was the leader of the platoon, and I named him Sgt. Jim Wilson. As Sgt. Wilson, I was smart, brave, tough, capable, and as close to being a superhero as anyone could be.

My job was to be the strategist: to demonstrate my astute ability to outsmart the enemy, and my deep knowledge of warfare that included where to setup, what to use as defenses to protect my men, and how to literally kick the enemy’s little green plastic butts.

I must admit that things got confusing for me sometimes because I only had one set of green soldiers and everyone except Jim Wilson looked the same because they all were the same. So, when I was about 8, I found a way to separate the good guys from the bad guys. It involved fire. (Don’t try this at home.)

My brother and I had a playhouse that didn’t have electricity and, you’re not gonna believe this, but we illuminated the place with candles. Yep, little boys with matches and candles.

There were wax candles all over the place. So, one day while playing with my soldiers in my candlelit playhouse, I decided that I wanted Jim Wilson to look tough so I held his handgun up to the candle flame and ever so gently melted the very tip of his gun just a very little bit. His Colt 45 became a snub nose revolver. From that point forward there was no way to mistake the enemy from the U.S. soldiers because I melted all the good guys’ guns just a little.

By this time, Jim had completely become my alter ego. He and I were inseparable. In fact, it was not unusual for me to play army with these guys at least three or four days a week, 12 months a year. Christmas was my favorite time because I could use the toy steam locomotive train that ran under the tree and battle around the manger. We’d play and hide in the fake mountains that my brother had built for the shepherds and their flocks. Yes, of course, it was a little confusing fighting a 1940s war right there in Bethlehem, but that’s where the train tracks ran, which was pretty incongruent as well.

In the summer of 1955, my dad and mom decided to take us to Washington, D.C. to see the monuments, but dad was a very tense big city driver. On our way home, in the middle of rush hour traffic, I was playing with Jim and one bad guy on the ledge of the open back window.

It was a fight for my life, and the bad guy hit me with an undercut and knocked me (Jim) right out of the car window. I begged my dad to stop in four lanes of rush hour traffic to pick him up. He wouldn’t. Then I pleaded until he yelled at me. So, I cried for the next three hours.

Jim Wilson was a heavily decorated and respected war hero, gone forever on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., and to this day, I’m still in counseling.