<sarcasm> Everybody loves war, right?  I mean, how could you not?  It’s a super fun way to make friends, get exercise and enjoy the outdoors.  If you’ve never been lucky enough to fight in a real war at least you can still play war thanks to G&G Armaments and Airsoft.  They make pellet guns for adults that are modeled after real military-grade weapons like the M16.  G&G announced the results of their “Greatest Glory” video contest last month and the winning videos are pretty impressive.  For this contest, grown men were supposed dress up like real soldiers and pretend to blow each other away in their own, homemade war films.  Here’s the video from Finland that won the grand prize.  The takeaway lesson from this entry is that war is a great way for friends to bond.  And since these dudes are all shooting each other with pellets they get to skip the part where they spend the rest of their lives mourning the buddies they lost in battle.

Grand Prize winner.  Prize: $10,000 + a trip to trade show in Nuremberg, Germany:

That was really slick and the editing was great.  It’s really hard to successfully sentimentalize war so my hat’s off to the guy who directed this.  The scrapbook full of fun memories was really a nice touch.  (Every solider should get one once their tour is over!)  It was also a good idea not to show any simulated blood or carnage.  The world would be a much better place if real firefights ended with guys gleefully tapping each other on the shoulder.

So that video was great but I actually prefer the entry that won the “creative award.”  In this video, an “American” soldier encounters various bad guys from history.  First he spots some Nazis, then some Viet Cong and finally he encounters some Taliban fighters.  Each time he sees a different historical enemy, he changes his costume and pellet gun to match the enemy’s era.  This video is especially impressive because it was also shot by a group of guys from Finland.  It must be extra hard to pretend to be an American Soldier if you’ve never met one or heard their exciting war stories first hand.  So these guys just had to guess what kind of generic Asian music would play if real bad guys in bamboo hats were creeping around an abandoned factory.

Creative Award Winner.  Prize:  $5,000:

The word is that G&G is going to run this contest again in 2013.  So if you happen to have a friend or father or uncle or grandfather that actually served in a war (assuming they’re not too traumatized to talk about it) ask them if they remember any fun missions that you could recreate with $350 toy guns and maybe you can win some cash!</sarcasm>

Ok, I’ve just got to say one or two non-sarcastic things here; First, I have no problem with war films and I think participating in historical reenactments is actually a really admirable hobby.  But reenactments and war movies portray combat in a realistic way.  They don’t glorify war or make it seem fun and harmless.  The problem with the G&G contest is that the entries show the action and excitement of war and totally leave out the consequences of war.  And here’s another thing that bothered me; ten videos received prizes in this contest but only one of the winners was from the US.  (3 came from Finland, 3 from Poland and the rest came from Spain, the Ukraine and Sweden.)  But most of the actors in these videos are dressed up in American or American-style uniforms.  winning video from Ukraine even features fighters wearing incorrect American flag patches; one has an arm patch on her hat and another has an arm patch on his chest.  When I was a kid my grandpa explained to me that Army arm patches look backwards because that’s what the flag looks like when you’re charging forward.  It’s a minor and unimportant detail to some guy playing make-believe in Europe but it’s a serious sign of disrespect if you happen to be an American.  It just feels wrong to see all these people from Finland and Poland running around and acting like being an American Soldier is just a big harmless game.  Wikipedia just told me that Finland was actually allied with the Axis Powers during WWII and they had some pretty gruesome battles with the Russians.  If me and my Midwestern American buddies went out to the woods this weekend and put on homemade Finnish and Soviet WWII uniforms and crawled around pretending to reenact the Battle of Tali-Ihantala even though we had absolutely no understanding what actually happened there well….that would be sort of sick, wouldn’t it?