Codename: B.R.A.T.S.

Several years ago, my friend Dan from elementary school delivered to me a very special book.  It wasn’t fancy or a hardcover you could find in a store.  It had no cataloging ISBN number to identify it.  Instead, it had been photocopied together and bound together inside one of the nicer faux-leather (plastic), three-ring style portfolio covers, with a little window for what was usually reserved as the title and author page.  Instead of any words to identify it, there was only a rough drawing of what appeared to be a rifle of unknown manufacturer’s origin.

It was a collection of short stories—very short stories—that were written by, and about several fifth and sixth grade boys.  These stories explored the rich textures of what it was to be transitioning from innocence into life’s experience.  The writing often broached global politics and turmoil, intertwining with the real-life trials and tribulations of adolescent hormones, crushes and took restless youth angst to a whole new level.  These stories were seething with conflict, ego, super ego, super-duper ego and a warped distortion of values that could only be gleaned from the action movie heroes and comic books of the mid 1980’s.

I know what you’re thinking.  “This book sounds Amazing!  How can I get my hands on these fabulous stories?”

You cannot.  They are not available for reading, and here’s why:  As wonderful as they are to me and possibly the five other authors of the stories, they are truly terrible pieces of literature.  In fact, I don’t believe that it can be called literature legally.  I don’t think the stories can really be considered anything more than lengthy discourses linked by ridiculous, superficial ideas.  But at that moment in our combined histories lived a jointly held vision expressed in the only way we knew how; one-or two page stories that would barely pass as a pitch for a movie (though they were still better than several of the Fast and the Furious films).

I don’t know what the catalyst was that ignited the hotbed of action-prose that awakened in Mr. Fields’ split fifth/six classroom, but I can tell you that once the subject took hold of us, it refused to let go.  We grabbed a concept, and we fed off of it together as a team of writers, making our own way and adding to a timeline that had no definite past, present or future.  Stories were simply written into the universe we created and if the characters overlapped awkwardly into other stories that were supposedly taking place, well, that was alright.  Nobody was griping about continuity issues or our exploitation of fundamental rules.

The subject, or subjects, was/were us as extensions of ourselves.  The six of us, Dave, Justin, Barret, Arthur, Dan and myself became heroes in our own collective minds, using our stories to become the people we wanted to be: brave, attractive, smart, deadly ninja-fighting (above all), country defending super soldiers.

The characters we wrote about were kids recruited into an ultra-special forces unit and trained in combat, espionage, martial arts, and intelligence.  The back story was that we had all been trained at summer camps while growing up and we operated as a deadly-first strike team for the United States Government.  Through these characters, we became everything we were not in real life.  This meant we could write ourselves into and out of any ordeal we could think of, mostly saving hostages and killing bad guys.

We chose a clever—not-so-clever— acronym for a name.  We were the Battle Ranking Adolescent Trained Soldiers, or B.R.A.T.S..  Not to be confused with the ugly little female stereo-type reinforcing dolls known as Bratz, or the delicious European sausages, brats, short for bratwurst.  We were neither dolls nor wieners.  Instead we were branding ourselves and our little writer’s collective with a tough name that at once showed the universe we were writing into that we were hardened little kids that always got our way.

These stories were full of death, weapons and gore.  They contained plot points where we had all been shot or stabbed only to turn around and shoot or stab someone else for revenge.   Twisted morality and a warped sense of right and wrong drove what little character development there was inside the stories.  Our imaginations were only limited to what action movies and/or war comics we could mash together to make an “original” story.

Sometimes the story would be a quick rescue operation with one or two B.R.A.T.S. flying into a hot situation, picking up a prisoner, shooting a few bad guys in the face, explaining we were kid soldiers to the disbelieving rescued civilians and then maybe a passionate speech at the end about how “sometimes you have to break the rules to do the right thing.”  We could round that out in about one college-ruled page.

Other stories might take plot points from Top Gun, and combine them with the superior, yet incredibly different Lone Wolf McQuade.  A story like this is created when the author wants to see themselves shooting down a MiG aircraft in an F-14, but also wanting to tie it in to karate-fighting South American drug lords.  That story may take between two-and-a-half to three pages to connect THOSE dots.

Every B.R.A.T.S. story would contain several key parts: heroism, clever and often unoriginal dialogue, specifically named weapons or equipment, known girls from our little school, a favorite rock and roll song playing in the background and bloodletting.  It was a winning formula.

If the over-the-top action hero thing and dialogue wasn’t enough, the use of very specific military equipment added a whole new level of tedious.  We wouldn’t write something like:

“Justin rolled to the ground, picked up a pistol and shot a guard.”

It would read more like:

“Justin rolled to the ground, picked up a .45 ACP, M1911A1 automatic and shot a guard in the face!”

Note the almost redundant detail of stating the caliber of a pistol that any person on the street could tell you is the ONLY caliber the M1911 comes in.  Also, why simply shoot a guard, when you can shoot one in the face?  Also, why shoot a guard in the face, when you can shoot a guard in the face using an exclamation point?

That exclamation point served two purposes, it meant that what happened was a big darn deal and secondly, the exclamation point helped a reader psychologically fill in the details that it would normally take two or three sentences to state.  As a reader of a B.R.A.T.S. story, you could see that exclamation point and understand that the shot was extremely difficult to make.

The exclamation point conjured up a vision that the guard, surprised that he is being attacked, was possibly leveling his weapon at Justin.  Finger groping for his trigger only to be relieved of the desire by a .45 caliber round passing through his upper cheek bone and severing the conscious center and medulla oblongata of the sentry’s brain.  The exclamation point said ALL of that without the words… or not.  That was the beauty of a B.R.A.T.S. story, we empowered the reader to fill in much more than a traditional author would.

Probably the most scrutinized facts being checked in B.R.A.T.S. stories was the use of weaponry.  Why? Why would anyone choose to take into battle with them a simple M-16 when an M-203 with an optional 40mm grenade launcher is available?  It’s the same rifle with the added feature of a grenade launcher underneath.  True, you may never USE the grenade launcher feature.  Lord knows, nobody wants you to have to use it, but what if you are pinned down by the enemy with your M-16 and you find yourself NEEDING that grenade launcher?  The M-203 got lots of play in B.R.A.T.S. stories.

I believe there was one story where it was requested that a change be made due to incompatible rounds being used in two different weapons.  “A 9mm Baretta cannot use the bullets from an AK-47, you’ll simply have to change the AK-47 to something that uses 9mm ammo, like an Uzi machine-pistol or better yet, a Heckler and Koch MP5,” I’m sure one of us eleven-year-olds said, never mind how the entire story is one paragraph and most of the punctuation marks are exclamation points.

Oh, and the girls…  These poor helpless girls we put in our stories.  If only they saw us in real life as the heroes we were to them in our stories.  The truth was, we were far more terrified of talking to these girls in real life than we were in our stories.  In reality, if the girls had witnessed us mowing down thirty bad guys in a hail of gunfire, they would have been far too traumatized to think of us as anything but monsters capable of taking another human life.  But in our minds, killing equaled hero and hero equaled the girl liking you without you having to explain your feelings.  We never took the stories to the next logical step:  you marry each other in the eighth grade and then have thirty babies.  A fairy-tale fit for the hills of Arkansas.

That was the beauty of what we were figuring out as writers, through our pens and pencils we could create anything we wanted to.   If we wanted to shoot a dynamite arrow at a speeding car to impress some curly-haired cutie we saw on the playground in one of our stories, we did it, and we didn’t judge each other for it.  Writing for us was like a very weak form of magic; not terribly impressive, but still, how’d we do that?

Although many times the author’s character took the lead in the story we were writing, each of us was really good about throwing the other member’s on the team a figurative bone.  If Dave had referenced writing about a girl named Andrea, why not show him a little love and put the two together in my story.  Young love was always done tastefully in the B.R.A.T.S. universe if unfortunately full of machismo mistaken for chivalry.  We never leveraged that intimate knowledge against someone or as a way of teasing.  We loved seeing ourselves as the hero, sure, but some of my character’s best moments came out of Dave or Justin’s stories and not so much my own.

Perhaps it was through reading each other’s stories that we learned more not only about the feelings inside each other but also re-affirmed the new emotions, hopes, dreams and doubts we found in ourselves.  “It’s okay for me to feel afraid of being threatened into a deadly game of Russian Roulette because clearly, Dave is uncomfortable with that idea too,” I would determine after finishing one of Dave’s better stories.

Barret’s character was the computer and communications expert.  He was a quieter kid, with a better developed brain than most of us and a penchant for science.  Although he didn’t write many stories, he really enjoyed reading them.  We used one of his family vacations to London as the backdrop to a solo adventure I wrote to really highlight what a great guy we thought he was.  We knew he was moving away soon.  Families from Kittitas don’t vacation in London.  So the writing was on the wall.

Just before he left, he wrote a letter of resignation and handed it to me.  I could see how much it meant for him at that moment.  The rest of us didn’t know what a letter of resignation was, yet here we were, presented with one requesting honorable discharge from a fictitious job that none of us realized required formalized paperwork.  Part of me was curious if Barret carbon-copied the Department of Defense.

It was a passion.  We wrote stories at home by ourselves, or together during free times at school.  We spent hours at each other’s houses thinking up new ideas for stories and sometimes finding a nice corner away from each other during a sleepover to write a few stories.  One of us might start one and another would finish it.  Sometimes a story would have three or more writers, continuity be damned!

My wife, who is in education, tells me how hard it is to get most adolescent boys to practice writing and penmanship.  Our son Zach will do anything to avoid putting pencil to paper if it means communicating a thought to someone else.  But there we were, every fifth grade boy in albeit a small classroom, independently taking it upon them to write out in longhand these twisted testosterone tales of blood and glory.

Despite being rehashed bits of our favorite influencing media, the stories came from inside of us but built on the information we were fed.  Sometimes it was a bit telling of our understanding of global politics and inability to distinguish shades of grey from the black-and-white.  We didn’t need to understand a bad guy’s motivation to understand that they were from a country or culture that was against the United States.  Whatever perceived evil that popped up in the nightly news, if we heard about it enough, would end up as a bad guy in a B.R.A.T.S. story.

This led to too many unfortunate culturally insensitive references in the work.   I can honestly say that after reading some of the passages I wrote about certain enemies in the stories, I would have changed how I addressed them.  I still probably would have killed them in the story, sure, but I would not have disrespected them in such a crude and general way (with an exception of the Neo-Nazis and KKK, I meant what I said about them).

All the misinformed political policy and cultural insensitivity aside, the pieces were still very creative and we were proud of them.  We carefully shared the stories with whoever we thought wouldn’t laugh at us and our tremendous mountain of collective hubris.

Our teacher, the firm but fair Mr. Fields, was impressed with our handiwork.  He addressed one of our pieces, where our tiny, farm-country elementary school was over-run with terrorists with interested amusement.  “You know, sometimes those 500 round bricks of .22 caliber ammunition go on sale at Bi-Mart and I imagine myself holed up in my house, defending it from the advancing Soviet army,” he told Dave and I while handing our story back to us, “but then I get to laughing, thinking, what kind of damage can I do with my little .22?”

“Quite a bit,” I thought to myself, acknowledging that he enjoyed the story, but not appreciating being ripped from our collective fantasy of being able to handle an invasion with such nay-saying.  “A decent marksman with a .22 could probably drop enough men to make someone think twice about taking a man’s house,” I specifically remember thinking.

“If Mr. Fields believed in himself a little more, his family probably wouldn’t have to suffer,” I told Dave a few minutes later.

“What are you talking about?” Dave answered, now at least one story and drawing down the road from our conversation with our teacher.  How could he not be troubled by this?

I let the conversation go, feeling the once strong male role-model we respected, needed more confidence… and probably some target practice.  My respect for the man returned later that winter when some garbage he was burning in his garden ignited a pressurized can near his face, burning off a thin layer of his skin and consuming all of his eyebrow hair.  When he returned to school, I remember admiring his courage to fight through the pain of what would equal a terrible sun burn; but more importantly, to return to the cruel slings and arrows of elementary school children with a permanent look of surprise present on his face.  A look attributed to the lack of the upper-quadrant facial hair that is crucial to reading the emotional expressions on the human head.  And immediately the question was posed:  How could we work that kind of explosion and wound into a story without hurting Mr. Fields’ feelings?

Did I mention the drawings?  They weren’t my forte, but Justin and Dave whipped them out like they were getting paid for them.  Justin worked at such a pace on these stories that I wondered if he was writing stories with his left hand while drawing pictures of the stories he was writing with his right hand simultaneously.  He could pump out two or three stories in an afternoon along with six or seven accompanying illustrations.  Justin’s specialty was inclusion of the entire group in most of his pictures.  He had far-away views of all of us in action against any of our enemies.  Everyone got to kill a bad-guy in Justin’s drawings.

Dave was all about telling the visual story.  He really had a grip of what a Chinese throwing star must look like as it whizzed mid-air toward its target.  It was like he had gone to an illustrator’s workshop on the proper drawing and composure of action martial arts weaponry in pencil.

Barret’s duties in the stories were taken over by another boy from our sixth grade class, Dan, who ended up putting the above mentioned collection together years later.  Dan upped the level of writing and drawing.  He gently spurred us past our writing hang ups and plot holes and helped us bridge suspensions of disbelief with details and realism.  Dan regularly read books that didn’t have pictures in them, thus giving him insight into the mechanics of putting together a coherent story.

It was the drawing that really improved with the arrival of Dan to the collective.  Even at twelve-years-old Dan brought texture to his drawings that any of us would trade all our comic books for, so our pictures got better just from his examples.

It was Dan that posed the question to me:  “Have you ever thought about writing a longer story with more details?”  I hadn’t, but Dan thought I had it in me and so I gave it a go.  I ended up writing a twenty-something page magnum opus that I was very proud of despite knowing how many spelling and grammatical errors were in it.

Our writing got better and better.  I can see subtle tacks back and forth in the stories, moving forward through the foggy haze of character development and perspective.  We took chances, made mistakes and learned from them.  We didn’t know it then, but what we were doing in our free time for fun were the essential exercises we needed to be doing to organize our thinking and communicate our ideas with more clarity.  I have a sinking suspicion that if we were praised too much for the writing we were doing, we would have suspected we were doing extra homework and abandoned the project.

I remember reading a half completed story to my mother one evening while outside on our back patio,  just wondering if the story would pass muster from the adult point of view.  As I read, I would catch mistakes and correct them with the eraser on the end of my preferred writing tool, a trusty Number 2 lead pencil.  Squeezing punctuation in, compressing an extra indefinite article or demonstrative was common and accepted editorializing when rewriting entire passages was out of the question due to space and the impatience of the author.

My mother listened with interest as her son read passages describing himself fantasizing about taking the lives of other human beings with guns, knives, swords and explosives as casually as some kids talk about playing baseball or skiing.  She nodded at each justified killing of a “bad guy” as if her son had to use some excessive force to make an example of a terrorist as a warning to all other enemies of liberty it seemed perfectly fine to her.

“So this is what you’ve been doing in your room the last three hours?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, lowering her shoulders.  “Keep it up.  It sounds like you are about halfway done.”

Looking back, it is hard to tell if my mother was subtly trying to encourage me to push myself as a writer or if she had been enjoying the three hour break from a son with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  Perhaps she thought by implying that I was in the middle of the story, she might get three more hours of un-interrupted Mom time.  Sharon Damm is clever; upon further reflection I believe my mother knew she could accomplish both goals at the same time.

It doesn’t seem like it was so long ago that we put these stories together, but just as the 1960’s were viewed as different in the 1980’s, the 1980’s seem much more different here in the 2010’s.  This may be just an older man looking back at harmless dreams of fancy through binoculars of information driven perspective, but there are many hard changes to the world around us; some good, some bad.

If the B.R.A.T.S. had been created now instead of in the good-old-days of 1985, it would have been front page local news.

Local Elementary School Students Take Initiative and Start Creative Writing Club – would not have been the headline.

Instead:

Bloodbath Averted as Local Educators Identify Five Psychopathic Elementary School Boys in the Same Classroom

Actually, neither one of those would be a headline because there are too many words, but I’m sure my point is made.  The pictures we were drawing alone would have warranted a trip to a psychologist.  The stories would have had us expelled, no note sent home, no temporary suspension, just an invitation to leave the school and don’t come back.  I’m not saying they would necessarily be wrong to do it either.  I’m saying that some of the stuff we were drawing and writing had all the red flags of a crossing guard supply store.

I would like to point out that none of the B.R.A.T.S. ever landed themselves in jail or prison (outside of the times it happened in the stories, which was often even though the confines were usually in foreign countries and the charges unwarranted).  We all grew up to be semi-decent citizens with kindness in our hearts.

I’ve seen variations on this fantasy story many times as depicted in the movies.  There was The Rescue, Iron Eagle, Toy Soldiers and the most reminiscent of them all Agent Cody Banks, but they weren’t quite B.R.A.T.S. stories.  None of them captured the true spirit of empowered kids with training and weaponry, blowing holes through villains and enemies with such wanton panache.

Please let it be noted that all of those movies appeared AFTER we were pencils down, writing our little grammatically challenged butts off.  We never went after the royalties in court.  I think we are all satisfied with the knowledge that our ideas may have touched others enough to imitate our work.  Besides, how would some hotshot Hollywood producer have heard about these stories anyway?  I mean, even though Kittitas is on one of the main Interstates that crosses America and only two hours from Interstate 5 (that if followed South, leads straight to Los Angeles), it’s hard to believe that some bigwig found one of the dozens of stories at the Kittitas mini-mart (a favorite rest stop of the popular Rock and Roll band KISS) and took it back with him to La-La land.  Also, there’s absolutely no way a kid could have looked up the address of a Hollywood studio and mailed a poorly scribed story to someone that could get a movie made.

I’ve let that bitterness go.

My favorite thing about the collection of stories was that the group created something bigger than any one of us could have done as well on our own.  We built a solid friendship and respect for each other around those stories.  While the stories inside that folder are more about the childish insecurities we wished to hide with a wish to become something MORE than ourselves, the stories that were happening outside those pages with that group of guys are the ones that mean the most to me, and that’s the Damn Truth.