One moment school photographer, war correspondent the next. We were in a resort on the hills of Java, Indonesia not 30 kilometers from Mt. Merapi, the volcano which only weeks ago had started to erupt. The team building games were winding down when I noticed a small militia of boys and girls breaking off toward the lower resort grounds. They were ominously armed, albeit, with bright yellow-and-orange-colored weapons. The boys favored the long arms and machine guns. Some were even in camos, flack vests, and had bandoliers slung over their shoulders. Their deadly intent was clear and they were scary. The girls were armed with pistols, which they swung about with grace, like handbags, while they walked. They were, uh, well, pretty.
In the flurry of preparations for this field trip I’d heard there would be a Nerf War and this must have been it. A Nerf gun is very expensive. The battery-powered weapon fires a projectile made of a cylindrical tube of styrofoam tipped with a thin cap of slightly heavier plastic. The result is bullet that will fly about 15 or so feet but will not have enough mass to hurt. The downside is, should it hit an eye or a face, it can still cause injury. No other faculty member was present, so I jumped in to set the rules of war. No head shots. Ever. No going on precipices or roofs. All combatants were also to take time to write their initials on their bullets or lose them. The battlefield was to be in an area were the projectiles could be easily found. Three hits equaled an out. Flack vest counted for 2 extra hits. It was hard to lay down the rules though, the boys were spoiling for a fight. Rules declared, I stepped back to watch.
The first skirmishes broke out early. The boys’ imaginations were very fertile and had set up headquarters over a hundred meters away from the girls’. This presented some difficulty because the bullets had a maximum range of 4 meters but were reasonably accurate only in the first meter. Premature fire was going off with nary a girl in sight.
When the two camps finally engaged, the boys gamely took shelter behind hedges and nursed their shots until the big charge. The girls’ battle strategy was to stay out in the open and dodge the silly bullets that the boys were shooting from afar. They figured early that since the boys couldn’t hit anything, it was safe to come up on the other side of the hedge, wait for the boys to stick their heads out and shoot them. Now didn’t I say no head shots? But fortunately, the girls’ aims were none too accurate either so there was just a lot of shooting from both sides of the hedge.
“Bang! You’re dead! No I’m not, I got 2 lives left!” “Teacher, am I dead yet?” And so it went. War is hell. But not for me though. As I watched this war I was simultaneously viewing a long forgotten war I had fought in the 60s. My cowboy revolver with the antler horn grip used to fire with a “bin-yang” sound (I made the sound, of course) while my kid sister’s Winchester rifle went “ee-bang!” No Nerf guns in those days. And here I was again, in the midst of murder and mayhem. Will men never learn to eschew the horrors of war?
The boys were impressively grim. Scrunched down for cover, they must have seeing hordes of enemy approaching to overrun their camp. The girls were not cooperating though. They traipsed in the open. They took time to pick up bullets and reload. They aimed, they danced close, they fired, and they hit. When finally the boys couldn’t take it anymore they charged with guns blazing in full auto. The fleet-footed darlings, on the other hand, scampered away giggling and unscathed.
Hostilities ceased when there were no more bullets to fire. Then it became a mass search for expensive bullets in the grass, under the hedges. Some of the girls complained about the nasty mud which soiled their sneakers. One exasperated girl observed that this war was too much trouble. Meanwhile, the boys stolidly reloaded magazines and ammo belts. But all good things must come to an end. It was 11:30 and we had to be packing for the ride home. So I declared the war was over, and peace was restored in Indonesia.
