It’s Not Real, It’s like Something from a Video Game
There we sat together, killing them and smiling. Sometimes I’d sprawl out, shirtless, hairless, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms to keep me comfy. Our dad would yell at us to turn it down. I remember the carpet marks that would imprint on my arms and stomach. My older brother’s pale hands were fast and he’d wear the ‘Y’ button out over time. There would be times when it was a perfectly nice day outside and I’d abandon him in combat to go play. When I’d come home he would still be there, eyes centered on the TV set, and I’d rejoin him.
I rarely played shooter games on my own, only when I got older, and even then I never got the hang of them; but Tucker was a fan since the first time he saw an Xbox. That first time must’ve been at a neighbor's house, most likely it was the Bowmans’, where we would congregate in their basement and fill up the couches. Other times it was the Sibilas’ place or the Monteros’, but the Bowmans’ basement was the main hub. All the kids on the street would meet there and it would be a fun gamble for who you’d see that day. We played multiplayer games. Rock Band, Castle Crashers, Halo, Super Smash Bros. I have vivid memories of being nine and singing “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet while the other guys (and it's funny as these days a few of them are actual musicians) tapped along with the plastic drum set and guitars. Other times, only one of us would play a game, and then the rest of the kids would joke and watch. Just Cause 2, Portal, Skyrim. We were kids of all ages and grades who hung out together, but I was always the youngest. I was the cutoff in terms of who was allowed over. Sometimes I’d peel off from the older guys to play GameCube in the back room. They used to call me the ‘midget’ and they’d give me ‘midget hugs’. It was playful and I was treated like everyone’s little brother.
The neighborhood kids exposed me to lots of modern entertainment and introduced me to most of the geeky things of my early adolescence, ultimately shaping my interests; but with shooters, in particular Call of Duty, my older brother was hooked. In 2009 when we got our Xbox 360, it became routine for him to sit in the same spot for hours. During summer break, he’d return to the TV and lean back in the same position for days, racking up kills and rising in rank. He wore a headset that let him yell insults at the other players, but he wore it with one ear uncovered, so he could talk to me and hear me commentate. Tucker was the master at Call of Duty, a God, and I bragged about it to my older-brotherless school pals.
How many older brothers do you think served in a war and left their little brothers back home?
My brother was in a sniper clan, ranked 80-something in the world. Wrapping my nine-year-old head around that was nearly impossible. Such an accomplishment right? One that he’d uphold forever and ever. Being alive only a little over a decade, it was a kind of lifetime achievement for him. These were random people he played with. It was teenagers, kids, and grown adults banding together to be the best trickshotting, elite group of snipers in the whole game. But in the next year, a new game would come out. New gameplay, new mechanics. For a while, he stuck with the old games and never gravitated toward the new ones. So it was likely he grew out of Call of Duty because I could never imagine someone as good as him simply losing the skills he possessed. He just stopped playing and moved on to different titles and genres. It's been almost a decade since my brother has approached Call of Duty or any of its games with the same grit and tenacity. He completely stopped fighting.
A soldier bonded to his rifle doesn’t just forget how to shoot. It's got to be impossible to shake the training. I’m told in some branches they break you down and build you back up. They mold you. If a soldier loses the ability to shoot and shoot well, well maybe he just got sick of shooting. Maybe it's as simple as he got tired of aiming. You only aim a gun at something you are willing to destroy. When you shoot something you either hit it or miss. There is no third option. We used to aim spray-painted airsoft guns at each other in the woods. My friend shot me point blank above the eye once.
Yet, back then, for countless hours, I sat and watched carefully next to him, like a buddy in a sidecar, going where the bike goes. It was amazing how fast and reactive he was when it came to ‘team deathmatch’ or ‘search and destroy’. The game mode ‘search and destroy’ was interesting because you got one life per round and it was your duty to either guard the bombsite or plant the explosives. Both teams got the chance to plant or defend. It was always easier to plant the bomb. Tucker was good at it. I never liked that mode.
One life. The United States of America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were victorious in WWII. There were some other winners too. The good guys won by means of dropping a nuclear bomb and flattening a nation. Call it a ‘game over’. The Japanese are proud people and it was argued that they weren’t going to surrender. But they did after Nagasaki. Anyone would’ve surrendered after that, even proud people.
There were roughly 5,330,000 Nazi Germany casualties, something like 2,120,000 Japanese casualties, possibly 8,800,000 to 10,700,000 Soviet Union casualties, and 416,800 U.S. military casualties during WWII, a total of 418,500 dead Americans accounting for total deaths between military and civilians (estimating an additional 2000 non-military lives were lost, added up from Pearl Harbor, captured mariners and civilian POWs in Asian prison camps). An estimated 384,000 Great Britain soldiers were killed in combat and 40,000 of their civilians were bombed to death in their hometowns. It is estimated that 550,000 to 800,000 Japanese civilians died, over 6,000,000 European Jews were murdered by the Nazis, and over 19,000,000 Soviet Union civilians were killed.
Tucker was really good. He was an 11-year-old killing machine—a gung-ho, American-made creation, entranced in battle, the poster boy for killing the enemy.
If you were a teenager and had access to the internet, the game itself was everywhere. Call of Duty: Black Ops was a game surrounding the Vietnam and Cold War that came out in November 2010. It was rated ‘M for mature’ so our Dad bought it for us. There were other titles before this one, but I remember this was the first of the series my brother truly latched onto with the intention of slaughtering others in online matches. We had a PlayStation 2 that I frequented mainly because I liked the games it had better. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed platformers and drivers. The first of the shooter series, Call of Duty: The Finest Hour came out in October 2003, and it was released on PlayStation 2. We had it. We also had the second one and third one, playing both of those dry. He used to play those religiously and as time passed these newly released games became more advanced, forcing us to upgrade to a superior console. I stayed with the PlayStation, it felt more ‘video-gamey’ to me. The upgraded consoles provide better graphics, power, blood physics, realism, and the ability to interact with players far better than the PlayStation provided. The Xbox was an immersive experience.
Young men have always had a bad mouth. We can’t help but swear. Soldiers in war attributed slurs and names for their enemy, likely to make them seem less human. Likely to make them easier to kill. A reasonable thing to do. In WWII, the Allies demoralized Germany’s National Socialist Party, calling them ‘Nazis’. The Nazis called themselves the ‘Wehrmacht’. The American soldiers called them ‘krauts’ or ‘jerrys’, they also called the Japanese the ‘japs’. The Nazis called the American soldiers the ‘ami’. Both parties called each other the enemy. The Americans bestowed themselves the title of, ‘GI Joe’s’, and what luck for young American boys as in the 1960s, toy dolls under that same name were created.
During a match, my brother called some kid who lived across the world a ‘camper’ because the player was posted in a blind corner. The kid returned and called him a ‘faggot’. This only infuriated my brother more, exchanging even worse things to be said. Observing a quarrel between my brother and a stranger, I laughed.
Growing up and to this day, my brother has always been a history nut. He knows things the average person doesn’t and I’m not sure where he stores all this information. He’s a real, educated, bonafide American. Growing up we took trips to this fairground called Conner Prairie, where we’d spend the day walking around colonial-era America, experiencing a taste of what life was like then. We got to watch Civil War reenactments and watch the adults who were playing as the people of the time.
War was a part of things we passively consumed. While I read comic books like “Beetle Bailey”, he was reading “Time” encyclopedias that were gifted from our grandfather. They were either gifted or one day during a trip to Anderson, he stole the lot on his way out. These books had detailed descriptions of battles and graphic photos. Pictures of wealthy Germans posing for family portraits, none of them smiling. Artistic sections with images of naked European women washing themselves in rivers or lying across beds. The bulk of these books were filled with hundreds of pictures of artifacts and weapons that were used in each war, captured with a modern-day camera. We could see high-definition images of the actual things people used and wore in battle. It was like a museum confined between pages. It was all very interesting. We were looking at actual snapshots of burned-out bunkers and real dead guys, dirty and battered, with their mouths hanging open, and their eyes rolled back. I remember seeing piles of bodies of people that had names and individual lives. Stacked like trash. He read these books respectfully. Never did we laugh at or mistreat the history that was shared with us. It was utterly fascinating. Even in grade school, we were observant and aware of war even without understanding it. In third grade, we were learning about multiplication and how to type on the computer; at home, we were identifying differences in human motivation. In the classroom, I asked “What is an adverb,” and on the same day I might’ve also asked myself, “Why is this Hitler-guy massacring these people?”. These books were dedicated to showing information, war crimes, and famine in the truest form possible. Back then I didn’t understand exactly why, but today I do. I wondered if Tucker was processing the weight of what he was reading. Being my older brother, I always figured he was.
These books inspired the video game, as the game and its contents were fictitious. Of course, it was. It was merely inspired by true events that were real. So Tucker killed without question. These were pixels on a screen. Highly rendered, extremely detailed pixels.
My brother also liked being competitive. In fact, he would get absolutely obsessed. It was a shared goal to be the highest rank among players. To be one with a positive kill-to-death ratio. The best war veterans were the ones with the highest kill-to-death ratios, right? Is it easy to join that club? I mean, all it takes is having zero deaths and tons of kills. Who had the highest ‘KD’ in ‘nam? I wonder if they were good at battle like my brother. How admirable is that to a kid? How admirable is that to a kid in 1950? Who was the worst player that day on June 6th, 1944? Who died more than once and got no kills? A loser? The best players, the ones racking up loads of experience points through killing, got awarded medals and emblems and gun skins and achievements. The best servicemen in WWII were awarded medals and pride and honor and ‘thankyous’. Surely tons of Vietnam vets were given ‘thankyous’. Maybe some even had fun playing the game. War, is a competitive game.
These boys are generations apart, but it's the same thing ain’t it? A twenty-year-old mowing down the enemy team with his max-level MP40 is the same as a twenty-year-old pushing a knife slowly into the chest of a Vietnamese farmer, watching the light leave his eyes and his hands reach out for help. It’s the same thing, ain’t it?
There were 58,220 U.S. military casualties during the Vietnam War, and records show 382 American deaths were self-inflicted. Our enemy, the rotten enemy, had endured 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighter casualties during the Vietnam War. In 1975, the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam due to a lack of support back home and after some time letting the country fight its own battle. The North Vietnamese “won” the war, allowing for communism to take hold.
After all that, we were bored and it was time to play a different game. This new Call of Duty has a zombie mode, let’s do that one!
On my Mom’s side, our grandfather was in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. He flew planes but was never involved in combat. From my Dad’s side, Pop-Pop was also Army trained during the same war, but he didn’t have to fight either. ‘Rank One’ on Call of Duty is known as ‘Buck Private’. It is the lowest form of Marine. I like to believe that was Pop-Pop’s rank. Both of them are dead now. The military route was never important in my family. Nobody ever encouraged me or my brother to enlist. In the videogame, my brother’s profile was maxed prestige, and he unlocked every attachment, weapon camo, and emblem available. He was the highest rank you could attain.
There were exactly 2,219 U.S. military casualties (in Afghanistan only), during Operation Enduring Freedom from October 2001 to December 2014. There were exactly 4,418 U.S. military casualties during Operation Iraqi Freedom from March 2003 to August 2010. These numbers are accurately recorded. In 2021, the Taliban seized total control of Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out its remaining troops 20 years after the war began. President Joe Biden called an end to “major military operations to remake other countries”.
We are done. The fun in Afghanistan is over.
There are plenty of ways to play in war. Mankind has played with machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, flamethrowers, drones, turrets, battleships, bowie knives, IEDs, cluster bombs, jet fighters, tanks, missiles, grenades, machetes, bayonets, mustard gas, landmines, submarines, young men, napalm, booby traps, torture, and a nuke. Also with muskets, swords, fists, cannons, galleons, arrows, fire, spears, and horses.
My brother came home from war sometime when he turned fifteen. He hated the new games that were being played. Not only that but I stopped watching him. I quit rooting him on because I had better things to do. So he retired. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t live in day-to-day fear of the things he saw or did. Vets with PTSD struggle to cope with the real world, for what they witnessed in war could not be justified as real to them. And to justify it was an entirely different mountain to climb. Watching civilians be helplessly slaughtered. Watching your friends get blown up by a grenade. Surviving a prisoner camp where your whole platoon was brutally tortured and killed. None of that belongs in the real world. It can’t be real. It's like something from a video game.
So don’t worry when you see it because by then you will already have, digitally, hundreds of times over. They say there's another great war soon.
Throughout his many battles, Tucker killed something like 80,000 men. He died over 20,000 times. His team on average lost more battles than won. It got to the point where “win or lose” didn’t matter, as long as he was earning kills. He served as a part of the Black Ops. He was there for Modern Warfare I through III. My brother was there when President Kennedy was shooting Secret Service zombies in the skull. He was there for all of that, and today, he’s sane, unmarked, and trauma-free. He was far better in firefights than me, he was an excellent soldier.
Sometimes I wonder if the young men who fought overseas would have fought harder with their little brothers cheering them on. It goes for either side. Maybe they would’ve tried for more kills or fought harder for victory. Maybe they needed that moral support. Who is to say little brothers weren’t doing that back home; hoping, imagining their brothers as war heroes?
Surely my support aided his trigger finger. I know because I was sitting right next to him and the TV. Watching, smiling. Why else do they call the 200 men of a soldier's division his ‘company’?
I was my brother’s company. I was all 200-something men rooting him on, fighting next to him. In those days I was his company and he was mine. How lucky the both of us really are.
