On a childhood building models, and what they can help us understand.
I’m not sure exactly when it started, but by the time I was in middle
school I was seriously into model-building. I know that I constructed some
trucks, a few planes, maybe the occasional car, but the vast majority of the models I built
were of naval ships. I distinctly remember a box in our upstairs bathroom
full of those completed steel-gray models—battleships, cruisers, destroyers,
aircraft carriers, PT boats, troop carriers and amphibious landers, you name it
and I had at least a few in my assembled fleet. The hobby hasn’t continued into
my adult years (although I look forward to making some models with my boys, and
especially my very careful and mechanically minded older son), but I’m sure
that the skills it helped me hone—reading and following directions, precision,
patience—have come with me into lots of other aspects of my life and identity.
Yet as I think back on those model ships, I have to admit that I don’t know
that they communicated much at all about the complex realities of their uses,
their histories, the battles and conflicts in which they participated. Obviously
they weren’t necessarily designed to do so—or at least I’ve never encountered a
plastic model that comes with any way to represent the effects of explosions,
of aeriel bombardment or ship-to-ship combat, or the like—and there’s no reason
why they would have to; there are plenty of other ways for interested young
people to learn about war, after all. But you could make the case, and I think
I might be inclined to agree, that in the absence of any such contexts and complications,
military models can help convey ideals of war as a purely exciting and noble
pursuit, something that every young person can imagine participating in
heroically. For one of the most clear and compelling accounts of such youthful
ideals and what they can produce, I can’t recommend strongly enough Ron
Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July
(1976).
I remember one model that was very different, though. That was a
model of the beachhead at Tarawa (that’s not the one I had, but it’s not
dissimilar), the Pacific Island which became the site of one of World War
II’s most horrific and destructive battles. The model of course couldn’t
convey every detail of the battle, but it did a couple of things that were
distinct from the ships: it forced me to consider the experiences and lives
(and deaths) of the individual soldiers I was putting down on the beachhead;
and it inspired me to investigate the battle I was assembling, and so to learn
about the U.S. casualties, the Japanese defenders who literally fought to the last
man to hold the island, and so on. Doing so didn’t stop me from working on
those other kinds of models, but it did make it much harder for me to entirely
ignore or elide the contexts—or, more exactly, the defining realities—of the
Pacific Theater, of World War II, and of war in general. That’s a perspective
worth modeling, I’d say.
Next
Pacific-inspired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Thoughts on these issues, on modeling or other connectinos to war,
or on any related themes for the weekend post?
12/6 Memory Day nominee: Ira Gershwin, who with his brother and partner George contributed some of America’s most memorable and enduring songs and musicals.
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