The Must-Have Toy from the Mid-80s
Reflecting on the GI Joe Aircraft Carrier, War and Peace, and Finding our True Self
Randy Tucker was one year older than me and a whole decade cooler. His coolness was made known in a myriad of ways, but none more clear than this: at the age of 8 Randy Tucker owned every GI Joe character and vehicle imaginable, including the GI Joe USS Flagg Aircraft Carrier.
If your childhood did not overlap with the mid-80s, I am afraid there are not words sufficient enough to describe what this was.
“Toy” deeply insults it.
“Big toy” vastly underestimates the complexity of this faux-nautical bastion of freedom.
“Six-feet long and 2 feet wide” vaguely tells you that this thing was ridiculously huge for any 8-year-old to own, but dimensions alone do a profound disservice to the vitality that coursed through this behemoth’s shimmering strength.
The best way to describe the carrier is to know this: If a child owned this particular GI Joe entity, then it went without saying that this child also owned every other GI Joe figure and vehicle that Hasbro had ever created.
Because nobody started out with the Aircraft Carrier. Nor did any child stumble upon this as the third or fourth GI Joe thing they decided to purchase with their accumulated Saturday allowance.
No, to own the Aircraft Carrier was to arrive at a spot in your GI Joe days wherein there was nowhere else to go but to the very top.
It was no small gesture for your parents to have bequeathed to you not only this pantheon of plastic but also the space of a single adult bed so that said pantheon could have a home. But what choice did they have, really, when your child was the General of the largest standing military of the entire neighborhood?
Randy had the Aircraft Carrier and so, yes, he of course owned everything Hasbro had ever delivered upon in the realm of GI Joe.
Alongside him I spent glorious days of imaginative war where good guys won, bad guys lost, and nobody ever saw blood or faced the true permanence of death.
Sure, there were tough injuries and heroic men and women overcoming great danger to save the lives of others. Sometimes a medic was needed. But always life prevailed. Or, even if it did not for a few moments, all it took was a quick restart of the game. At that point, everybody – GI Joe (the good guys) and Cobra (the bad guys) – came back onto the scene for another round of battle with the Carrier as the centerpiece to our ever-restarting world war.
—
Parker Palmer asks, “When we lose track of our true self, how can we pick up the trail? One way is to seek clues in stories from our younger years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts.”1
Which is to say, if and when the day comes where we wonder about our soul and who we really are and what it looks like to most fully offer that gift in the world…maybe start with the back-in-the-day stories and see what they might reveal.
Looking upon my countless hours of GI Joe-and-Cobra warfare, one might quickly observe, “Well of course. This is why he went into the Army during and after college. He played Army everyday.”
Palmer presses here, however, saying that while the stories of our younger years can help us see who our true self is, they rarely provide an obvious, ready-made insight. These stories - at best - contain “clues.”
And “clues, by definition, are coded and must be deciphered.”2
What the quick observer of my childhood would miss is how much my insides strained and recoiled at seeing a GI Joe - or even a Cobra - have to die during the wars.
Sometimes I would let a good guy get a really bad-but-heroic injury.
Sometimes I would let a really bad guy not just get wounded, but die.
But…
Always I made sure the medics lived and attended.
And always I gloried in the knowledge that within a few minutes I could restart the whole thing.
Which is to say, when I played war, I was most fascinated by life.
Preserving it.
Saving it.
Restarting it.
Even believing Cobra fighters had children back at home and it really would be great if we could do this war in such a way that they could get back to the kids after we’re through.
And the Aircraft Carrier?
You know, I never got a kick out of the astronomical amount of firepower it could deliver from all angles. I mostly loved that at 6 ft x 2ft, you could set on top of it every single one of the dozens of GI Joe and Cobra figures that we owned. Which is to say, it was the singular toy in all of toy-dom that had space enough for everybody.
I played hours and hours of war…in which the things I cherished most were life and space enough for everyone. Which is to say, oddly enough, the thing I cherished most was peace.
I wonder, if you looked at how you spent the hours of your childhood…
What are you drawn to remember?
What does your soul truly sing in those times?
Does it tell you anything about your True Self?
And perhaps most importantly - how is that Self making itself known today?
Me? Aircraft Carrier memories help me see more clearly that for reasons I cannot nearly explain, my heart was foremost captivated by life, space, and peace. And I am confident that each of these says something about my true self.
Perhaps it is why, yes, I did join the Army. As a chaplain.
Perhaps it is why, yes, I see the very real wars of weapons, words and culture of our day - and somehow I am always foremost drawn not to the theoretical debates of good and evil so much as the humanity of each involved.
Perhaps it is why when I think of the cool people in my life today, it has far less to do with whether or not they have the biggest toy on the block, but rather the size of their heart.
To me, the cool people have 6x2 hearts, (perhaps painfully) enough room for everybody, and are those who might especially welcome the blessing below by Kate Bowler:
a blessing for the kind of love that costs something
(It's the best, worst kind)
Love can break your heart.
(I think it’s probably in the fine print.)
Blessed are you, whose ability to love
crosses differences and divides
that would keep others apart.
Whose love advocates for weakness and fragility.
Soft heartedness and “Are you okay?”
You who know that this kind of life-expanding love
will cost you something, maybe everything.
Blessed are you, whose heart has grown three sizes.
Regardless.
You who push through the fear of intimacy,
the fear of loss, the fear of all the unknowns
and love still.
Blessed are we, loving beyond our limits.
Loving when it doesn’t make sense.
Loving without any lifetime guarantees.
Loving when it might break our hearts.
That is, of course, the best thing about you:
Your great big heart.
AMEN
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 13.
Palmer, 13.
Another great story! I grew up on a poor dry land cotton farm in West Texas, so it is hard to relate to expensive toys growing up. But as a young Marine Officer, I got to spend 10 months aboard a real aircraft carrier ( CVA-14) in the Western Pacific. That was quite an experience both in the air operations and the countries We visited. Later in the 60's I got to spend two combat tours in Vietnam.
And before that was the Mobile Command Center! Thanks for writing this.