It as swimming day for kids at the base.  I was treading water in the deep end, poised to strike should any military-brat suddenly go down or decide that poking one another in the eye was fun.  

We had the typical games going.  Some went diving for the penny.  Some were playing water basketball.  And of course the biggest-splash contests where they’d take turns jumping in feet first to see who could cause the most commotion.  Only on a military base filled with kids whose Fathers and Mothers go to work covered in camo and packing gas masks in their “briefcases” the game took a different spin.

“Let’s play dead soldiers” one of my girls said gleefully.  

“Okay!  You shoot me.  And I’ll die first!”  

Those were the only rules.  Each girl took turns shooting one another and dying, rather realistically, into the pool.  While my other students got bored with the penny and the ball game within five or ten minutes, the dead soldiers game lasted a good thirty minutes – and attracted more kids as it went.

Over and over I watched children die of various bullet wounds.  Some took a guerilla approach to their attack.  Some simply aimed and shot.  They all died well.  None of them cried out for help dramatically or pretended to draw out the final death moments.  They all took the bullet happily and died with silent splashes.  Over and over.  

I can remember as a child having my own morbid games.  We had cops and robbers.  My father had indians and cowboys.  There are always variations to the games.  But I recall, in my own childhood, thinking that death was an automatic “out”.  Something to avoid.  Even when we were clearly shot we’d dispute it.  I recall arguing my way into hopping around with a missing leg and two missing arms (all shot off) all because I refused to accept death in the game.

Is it because so many of these children know their parents are facing their own game of dead soldiers?  Is it the hours and hours of real-life footage kids see, followed by patriotic music and narrated by proud voices?  Is it the lack of funerals?  The lack of a sense of sadness surrounding dead soldiers that let them all accept play death as stoically and enthusiastically as real death?  

Or is this just the new mutation of childhood morbidity?  Are we at the point now where death is an automatic rather than an automatic out?