COMBAT!

In the early nineties most of our friends watched Saved by the Bell, Full House, and Boy Meets World. Our lack of cable television left us out of the pop-culture loop, but we were blissfully ignorant. My brothers and I, always slightly different or as we thought, slightly cooler than our friends, had a unique favorite television show: Combat! The syndicated 1960s show about a squad of American soldiers in France during World War II scripted our backyard adventures. As often as my brothers Spencer and Rob could manage, our neighbors Chris and Ryan were enlisted to join our ranks. One sticky hot summer afternoon in 1994 while our mother made dinner, our backyard was a bloody battleground. I begged to be Sarge or Lieutenant, or Caje or Kirby. I wanted in on the action. There were krauts that needed to be killed! My chauvinistic oldest brother disagreed. “You’re a girl,” Spencer, age thirteen and therefore in charge, said. His sapphire blue eyes squinted in the sun as he said, “you’re a nurse.” I pouted. There weren’t even any nurses in the show, but Spencer was the sergeant.
After Spencer crawled out of our trench and before he motioned for us to follow, Rob told me, “you can be Doc.” I perked up with a smile at the thought of being one of the show’s regular characters. “He’s important! If we get shot you have to fix us or else we die.” Satisfied, I trailed along after my brothers and Chris and Ryan, intent on doctoring as many wounds as possible. I made sure I had everything I needed in my medical bag. I saw an ace bandage that Daddy brought home for me from his physical therapy appointment, a blue and yellow stethoscope with clear plastic tubing attaching the earpieces to the chest piece, one band-aid, and a bracelet-looking thing that I realized years later was supposed to be a blood-pressure cuff. I wouldn’t be letting my squad-mates die anytime soon.
We crawled through the woods—Sarge, followed by Kirby, Caje, Littlejohn, and Doc. Chris and Ryan’s mom didn’t believe in toy guns, so they made their own. They toted hockey sticks covered in black electrical tape with pieces of two-by-four taped on to fill out the shape of the gun. Our parents were more old-fashioned, so Spencer and Rob had real fake rifles, but Spencer had duct-taped a piece of two-by-four to his to create the magazine of his Thompson submachine gun, also known as Sarge’s Tommy gun. The soldiers clutched their oddly taped makeshift scrap wood rifles closely. I tugged on my doctor bag, and we all tried our best to not lose our camouflage hardhats in the underbrush. We followed Sarge’s lead, crawling on our bellies in order to remain unseen by the enemy.
Sarge suddenly yelled, “duck and cover!” and at that moment we all heard the horrifying, yet strangely exciting sound of an enormous plane flying overhead. Kirby followed Sarge’s order by tackling the straying Littlejohn under the cover of an enormous low-hanging evergreen tree and pulling me and my doctor bag along with him. My heart pounded inside my chest as I reminded myself that I needed to stay safe—I needed to be well enough to help anyone who got wounded. We heard the bomb fall hard and fast only about a football field’s length away—too close for comfort. We found some solace in the hope that it may have hit some nasty krauts.
Our hopes proved to be true—Sarge’s eyes shot from the sky where the plane had been to the grass a short distance away from us. There was a thump and we realized that the arm we saw fly through the sky had been German. The boys grinned and I felt nauseated. All was silent, and Sarge, with a wave and a grunt, gave us the OK to follow his lead and continue on our trek. He waved a hand behind himself—he heard krauts. We all stopped mid-crawl. He quickly held a finger to his lips and we listened intently. They were coming from around the abandoned shack we had been camping out in. Sarge and Kirby raised their rifles, Caje and Littlejohn waited for orders, and I crouched behind a rock to avoid getting struck by a stray bullet.
An incalculable number of German soldiers came into view as their helmets rose above the vast rock that two days later would mark the homerun line of our backyard baseball field. “BANG! BANG! BANG!” Kirby’s rifle fired but was quickly drowned out by the much louder “EH-EH-EH-EH-EH!” of Sarge’s Tommy gun filling the air. Eleven krauts down. Sarge and Kirby, my brothers, were brave and bold, shooting wildly but accurately. Kirby and Littlejohn hung back and stayed low to pick off the sneakier krauts. I could tell the Germans were losing great numbers because my squad mates emerged from their hiding places. Four prepubescent battle cries later, the boys were all up and running, determined to get every last enemy. “I got seven!” yelled Caje. “I got nine!” screeched Sarge. The sound of flying bullets and whooping, warring boys filled my ears. I remained hidden behind my tree while I waited to be needed.
The American soldiers chased the retreating cowards while I during a moment of entirely unwarranted wartime peace ran to tend to the wounded. In an area that my squad mates had already vanquished, I knelt, opened my bag, and urgently drew out my plastic stethoscope. I listened to his fading heartbeat and suddenly his eyes fluttered open. I knew they were the bad guys, but I always thought the German soldiers were so handsome. I could tell it was painful, but he managed a faint smile in my direction. I heard the dying German soldier whisper “danke” as I poured some invisible medicine into his invisible mouth. He sputtered and coughed briefly and then closed his eyes again as the pain eased. I told him “everything’s gonna be okay,” and he breathed his last.
I came out of my trance when I heard “DOC! DOC!” I looked up and I saw the boys running toward me. Kirby was wounded. He had his right arm slung over Caje’s shoulder and his left arm around Littlejohn’s. “He’s been hit!” Sarge called frantically. For the number of enemy soldiers we’d just done away with, a grazed shin wasn’t too bad. “Did you just save a bad guy?” Sarge asked with a mix of shock and big-brother pride in his voice. I nodded my head, relieved that he wasn’t mad. I hopped up to follow the boys along to our safe spot—the house-sized rock that we all thought had once been an Indian grinding stone. I began wrapping an ace bandage around Kirby’s wounded shin. His freckled nose wrinkled with his smile. “You’re a great Doc.” I grinned in response to the type of affirmation that mattered most—the affirmation of a big brother. I continued to wipe away the dirt and the blood from his shin, and for good measure I pulled a band-aid out of my bag and placed it over the wound.
Sarge leaned against the giant rock where Kirby and I were sitting, cleaning his gun. Caje sat on the ground with his back against an old oak tree, and Littlejohn stood a short distance away with a bag of sunflower seeds in his hands. His cheek looked like a chipmunk’s. Littlejohn spit. I looked and saw a growing mound of sunflower seed shells on the oak leaf-covered floor of the woods. “Stop!” Caje glared at Littlejohn after he received one too many sunflower seed shells to the body. He was going to pound his bold younger brother if it continued. “Pooowit!” A sunflower seed hit Caje’s face. He leapt to his feet and as he approached his brother, Littlejohn suddenly screamed.
“Aaaaauuugh!” He clutched his arm and fell to the ground. “We missed one!” Littlejohn pointed with his good arm, and Sarge, Caje, and the freshly healed Kirby immediately bolted in that direction. I rushed toward Littlejohn who was laughing at having so narrowly escaped the wrath of his brother. I listened to his heartbeat, and since I was out of band-aids I placed the blood-pressure bracelet around his arm. Moments later the other boys were back, victorious. “Gimme some of those!” Sarge stuck his hand into Littlejohn’s bag of sunflower seeds. “I’m starving!” I wandered off to pick some flowers. Littlejohn and Kirby began arm-wrestling, and Sarge and Caje watched and argued over who got to take the winner.
Attached to the side of our house next to the backdoor hung a giant copper-colored dinner bell, and the sound of our mother suddenly ringing the bell that evening was one of the most exciting sounds we’d heard all day. Sarge, Kirby, and I yelled “MESS!” in unison. We all ran out of the woods and toward the back porch where our mom stood. “Do you guys want to stay for dinner?” she asked Littlejohn and Caje, who excitedly responded “yes please,” and Caje went inside to call their mom to see if it was okay. I scrambled up the back porch stairs and yelled “Hi Daddy!” when I saw him open the door for me. I ran into the house and leapt into my daddy’s arms and dumped my doctor bag on the floor. “Everybody go wash your hands!” said Mommy. Daddy let me down and I skipped past the washing machine into the bathroom. I squeezed among the crowd of boys around the sink. “I need to refill on band-aids,” I thought to myself as I scrubbed the green and brown from my hands. My stomach growled. I smelled tacos.