



Date: May 8th, 2006 3:59 PM

Author: cowardly hall



I lived in a somewhat rural area until I was 11--a line of houses on our side of the street backed up to a wooded area that had trails, creeks, etc. Fortunately for me, almost every neighbor had a kid or two that was within a few years of my age, so there were always about 12-15 of us who would get together every afternoon to wreck havoc and cause mayhem, coming back with scrapes, scars, grass and mud stains on our clothes. It was mostly innocuous stuff, waterfights, forts, treehouses. Then I saw "Gettysburg" and it really stuck with me. We drew up a plan to build a complex system of earthworks and trenches in a semi-wooded area so we could have our own Little Round Top battle with water guns, water balloons, etc. We spent about a month and a half over that summer building the ultimate battleground--we gathered fallen logs and branches to build our trenches (usually 3-4 feet deep, only). Each side had a "base," which was a treehouse surrounded by a fort on the ground. On the rear side of each fort was a prisoner-hold. The plan was that if some kid got pwned by water balloons or guns, he would be captured and put in the prisoner hold until he was released. The hold was really just a wide ditch covered with a propped up ceiling of thornbush-clippings, so the leaves would completely cover the top. Finally, a few weeks before school started again, we started having our battles, which I must say were pretty fucking cool. Other kids in our class would get dropped off during the day to play with us, so there were always about 15-20 kids who would come equipped with their own weaponry and water bottle. The battles went well, aside from the occasional quarrel over whether the watergun stream actually hit one of us (we learned quickly which shirts had little color contrast between wet and dry). One day, though, we were in the midst of a particularly bitter struggle to free three captured prisoners from the enemy's camp. Their remaining kids were bottled up in the fort, defending it with their lives, and they had two propped up in the treehouse raining down their dwindling supply of water balloons on our side, while we tried to hit them with our own supply and allow ourselves to enter the fort. With the opponents fighting vigorously from their treehouse, they forgot to notice that the branches supporting them were getting slippery from the water being spilled and shot everywhere. One of us threw a balloon at a kid in the tree who ducked to avoid it, but lost his balance and fell out of the tree and onto the prisoner hold that had the three kids, collapsing the flimsy thornbush roof on top of them. Needless to say, the injuries from that day were quite extensive, the kid who fell broke his arm or something, and his parents called ours to tell them to take down the battleground. They complied, ruining the coolest summer of our lives.



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=413091&forum_id=2#5743024)