Lock and Reload
‘Dad, what’s an SLR?’ asked my ten-year-old son.
‘Single-lens reflex camera. It means you see the image that comes through the lens of the camera.’
‘No, it’s a self-loading rifle.’
So, he’s at the age when he’s asking questions he already knows the answer to, but I saw parenthood giving me another chance to relive one of my childhood obsessions. (The playground-equipment-obsession period, when the kids were toddlers, freaked out delicate parents when they were confronted with a large 40 year old coming at them down a slide.)
Little Lloyd Jesus is now war mad. He’s gone the whole hog, with $2 jumbo bags of plastic soldier figurines like the ones from Toy Story; there’s lying-down sniper; kneeling sniper; captain with a pistol calling ‘Charge’; and, every boy’s favourite: the soldier with a machine gun.
The Not-So Virgin Mary, Little Lloyd Jesus’ mother, has been so concerned that she even asked his two (male) Grade Four teachers if his war obsession is wrong.
‘No,’ said one. ‘I was like that when I was a kid.’
‘So was I,’ said the other.
‘Me too,’ said I, and we all chipped in with details of our childhood model aircraft (Spitfire) building, much to the consternation of the Not-So Virgin Mary.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll pass,’ said one teacher.
‘Especially when he finds out it’s hard work,’ said the other.
‘And he could get hurt,’ I chimed in, and we waxed lyrically about whether we’d prefer to die from a bullet wound or from bayoneting (from a bullet wound, of course).
The Not-So Virgin Mary caved in to the relentless pressure of all things male and let the boy indulge in war. We’re modern parents, so, naturally, we hoped, by giving him literature, to use the boy’s obsession to further his education. Mum let him have two kid-friendly historical books, but was appalled when his conclusion was that World War II is way cooler than World War I. I went straight for the Commando Comics.
Commando Comics (or Battle Comics, depending on which side of the war street you were from) were palm-sized comics that detailed the exploits of fictional war heroes. I’d consumed hundreds of these while spending school holidays at a friend’s farm that didn’t have television. They were an outrageously entertaining read, and the memory of the soldier with damaged legs on the shoulders of a blind soldier (‘Together they would make one complete soldier’) stays with me to this day. I was shocked that the second-hand comic store charged $7 for a Commando Comic in a plastic cover; luckily, the boy chose from the plastic-free $2 pile and so I could, happily, start a sentence with ‘Back in my day those comics were 20 cents...’
Next, the boy moved on to model building, but he wasn’t interested in planes, just tanks and model soldiers, and was quickly bored with them. It wasn’t a complete loss, as I finally got to make a Stuka Dive Bomber and annoy my family by recreating the screaming engine. The only place left to go was the movies.
Choosing a war film for a ten-year-old boy is tough. I wasn’t going near the hyper-clichéd Platoon; the adult, and way too slow, The Thin Red Line; or the Mel Gibson bloodfest of We Were Soldiers (where the Mel Gibson mantra of ‘It’s gory, so it’s true’ started). A friend had already shown the boy The Matrix, so any attempt at gee-whiz action was going to come a cropper after he’d seen Keanu shoot blokes behind him with two machine guns over his shoulder and without even looking. In the end, I went for a biopic called To Hell and Back.
To Hell and Back is the true story of Audie Murphy, the most decorated US soldier of World War II, starring Audie Murphy. It’s got everything: orphaned children; a farm boy who’s a dead shot because he’s got to feed his family; and a man who was rejected by all the armed forces because he was perceived as too young and too slight but who becomes the most decorated hero of World War II. His clichéd war buddies include a feisty Polish guy; a loud-talking womaniser, who really misses his girl back home; and an American Indian, played by a real Indian, which must have caused a bit of a stir back then.
I can see now why it was one of my favourites. Audie uses a Thompson machine gun often, and the film culminates with him sending his squad back to safety while he radioes the positions of five tanks and dozens of German soldiers, and holds them off by using the machine gun on a burning tank that could explode at any moment. (Audie was responsible for killing and wounding 50 German soldiers in this battle).
To Hell and Back, made in 1955, was the biggest-grossing Universal film, until Jaws, in 1975 (which in, real terms, means that way more people saw To Hell and Back, as ticket prices were cheaper). Watching the film recently, I kept thinking of Murphy playing himself in a cleaned-up Hollywood version of his life (Murphy actually wanted Tony Curtis to play him) as pretend soldiers spun themselves dramatically in a pirouette of death, or fell comfortably so as not to hurt themselves, while all the while being absurdly reminded of the grisly deaths of his fallen soldier buddies.
My son’s favourite moment was when a buddy stands up to cheer after Audie has thrown a grenade into a machine gun nest and is killed as Audie shouts ‘Get down!’ As with Chekhov’s gun, you know that somebody will die in a war movie as soon as someone shouts ‘Get down!’ (No one would die if those guys would stop shouting ‘Get down!’)
Audie then goes on a vengeful rampage, that man with the innocent, passive baby face pumping bullets into dozens of Nazis as he wipes out machine-gun nests. Even this incident was a Hollywood fabrication, because Audie’s mate was killed when the Germans in a machine-gun nest pretended to surrender and then shot him. The result was the same, though: baby-faced Audie goes on a vengeful rampage!
Audie Murphy died in a plane crash in 1971 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery. The headstones of Arlington’s Medal of Honour recipients are normally decorated in gold leaf, but Murphy requested that his stone remain plain and inconspicuous like that of any ordinary soldier. It’s the second-most-visited grave in the cemetery after John F. Kennedy’s.
I bided my time, as my boy had a giggle at Audie’s limited acting ability and at the clumsy, cleaned-up war of To Hell and Back, and then I casually crunched him with: ‘Lloyd, in real life that baby-faced, ordinary actor was responsible for destroying six tanks, killing over 240 German soldiers, and wounding and capturing many others. Remember, son, you can’t judge a Commando Comic book by its cover.’
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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