The Mudball Wars

We spent the World War II years in Southern California where Dad built B-17s for the Douglas Aircraft Company. We lived in a small one-bedroom cracker-box house, virtually identical to hundreds of others, in one of the war-time developments that sprang up to house defense workers flocking into the state. Most of the families were young, and, as a consequence, the neighborhoods crawled with kids.

As kids, we had to devise ways to channel the aggression instilled by the constant war coverage and the patriotic military movies that were popular at the time. We played lots of improvised war games where we fought invisible enemies--nobody wanted to be the enemy--for control of imaginary beaches and fortresses, but these imaginary battles were never entirely satisfactory in a cathartic sense because of their heavy reliance on imagination. It was difficult to appreciate the heroic exploits of your playmates when you could see only your own imaginings.

So, to inject realism into our play, and since it never snowed there, mudball wars broke out periodically. They were never conclusive in any meaningful way, but they relieved boredom and sharpened wits while teaching lessons in honor, heroism, deceit, and duplicity--all valuable qualities for later life.

The wars almost always began spontaneously, and generally followed the same script: A group of bored kids, looking for ways to pass a summer day, would squabble over some minor thing. Names would be called and denied, taunts would be hurled and returned, and challenges would be issued and accepted until factions formed and resolved themselves into two major and vociferous positions. That marked the end of the diplomatic phase, and the conflict quickly escalated to open warfare from there.

The line of battle was always the street, with the two sides facing each other across the two lanes of no-man's blacktop. Battle tactics consisted of dashing down to the ditch beside the street on your side, scooping up a handful of mud from the trickle of water that always coursed there, and retreating out of range before those on the opposite side of the street could paste you with a mudball. At a safe distance, you formed your mudball and waited for one of the enemy to make a similar dash for ammunition. While he was thus occupied and vulnerable, your side unleashed a hail of mud missiles at him. Hits were few, but when one occurred, it was a cause for great celebration on one side and great anger and renewed determination on the other.

The composition of the two sides changed from time to time, sometimes even within the same war. Alliances formed and dissolved, negotiations were undertaken, and espionage was engaged in.

Dirty tricks were not only allowed, they were admired greatly. The deception usually consisted of pretending to be friends with one of the enemy, while concealing a mudball behind your back. The trick was to entice the enemy to meet you down at the street under a flag of truce. When you got close enough, if he fell for it, you let him have it with the concealed weapon. You then had to beat a hasty retreat to avoid being pelted by his henchmen. Sometimes, if you were truly daring, you would even cross over to the other side, professing to have had a change of heart. You would even hurl mudballs at your former friends, being careful not to hit them of course, until you saw your chance to deal a devastating blow from within your new "friends" lines, and beat it back across the street to a heroes welcome in your own lines. These schemes were always worked out in great detail with your mates, so that they knew what you were doing. Of course, double agents added complexity to the equation. A double agent would cross over to the other side, supposedly to strike the enemy from within, but then he would truly convert and would return to his former allies, only to strike against them and rejoin the enemy.

It all got very confusing, and that confusion was what usually brought the war to an end. Nobody could remember who was on which side, so the war just petered out, and we were all on speaking and playing terms again, the recent battle forgotten in the pursuit of some new adventure.