A Yankee Doodle Dandy

The Old Man has probably seen every John Wayne war movie ever made. My friends and I have fought along side the Duke at Iwo Jima, Bataan, and all the other places around the Pacific. We've been Flying Leathernecks and Flying Tigers.
We would see one of the Saturday movies, and then come home and Park Street became the battlefield du jour.

Of course, like the Duke, we were a well equipped army. In the years after World War II, "Army/Navy" stores proliferated. They sold (and in most cases still do) surplus equipment. One of the greatest treats I could have was to be allowed to visit the store. All of us in the Park Street Battalion had helmet liners, web belts, canteens, and combat boots. Never mind that the helmet liners made us all look like infantile bobble-heads, and the web belts had to be overlapped and tied, or that the combat boots were usually 3 sizes too big, we were ready to stand with the man and destroy the evil devotees of the Rising Sun.

Weapons consisted of (most important) the Daisy Air Rifle. These bad-boys made a very convincing noise when a BB ricocheted off a helmet liner. We did observe our own version of the Geneva Convention however; you could never aim at a face. Of course, it never occurred to us that the helmet liner was perilously close to the face. This was followed by our rubber bayonets, and our grenades. Grenades were the hardest to come by. We used the "cones" that are left after a magnolia tree blooms. They even looked the part. Sometimes, we'd discover a new foundation had been dug for a house. The red Virginia clay clods made perfect grenades, and would explode realistically when they hit a helmet liner. When this happened, the battle was usually pretty much over and would end with one ticked-off bobble-head chasing another.

Now as any true John Wayne fan will tell you, all the soldiers smoked. For added realism, we would save up our candy cigarettes from our trip to the movies and lay around out in the back yards and on the back lots, "smoking" when there was a lull in the action.

One day, we achieved Nirvana. One of our army, (and for the life of me, I can't remember which one) came into possession of an actual training hand grenade. It had no possibility of exploding, but it did have all the mechanical parts. You could cock it and re-set the safety lever or "spoon", and put the pin in. When you pulled the pin and threw the grenade, the spoon would fly off and give you such realistic action it almost made you cry.
Now we had seen the Duke grab that grenade, pull the pin with his teeth while firing his sub-machine gun. Movies lie. Francis the Talking Mule couldn't pull a grenade pin with his teeth.

I don't still have that helmet liner or those combat boots. But that web belt is still in service. I carry a tool pouch on it now. It still functions after all these years with one exception; it no longer overlaps.