PLAYING WAR

I know this has little to do with my beginning life with girls, but it's a story involving David and me that I believe needs to be told. As young boys there were many war shows on the t.v. depicting WW11. And the neighbor boys and I would split up into teams and play war. We started out by shooting each other with toy guns and rifles, We would pretend we were hit, fall dead, count to ten, and jump up and continue playing.
Then we got the idea to make it look more realistic we'd go out into the field and get dried clumps of dirt and throw them at each other. If they landed close they would turn into a bomb of dust. I don't know who had the original idea, it could even have been me, but I really don't feel right blaming this next idea on David. We walked into the pony lot, and as you may or may not be aware of, horse manure is round or oval and fist sized.
From all the neighbor boys going out of state at one time or another, we had a near endless supply of those little, zebra and black Cat firecrackers. We walked around the pony lot looking for just right horse manure. We wanted it dry and crusty on the outside (so it wasn't messy to handle) and still nice and mushy on the inside. Then we'd bore one of those little firecrackers into its side. Walla! We had invented the horse shit hand-grenade!!! The idea was to light the fuse, throwing it over the other teams head before exploding. They were quite short fuses and on occassion one would blow up in our hands before we could let go.
We were laughing, and exploding horse shit hand-grenades when my mother came out of the house to see what all the comotion was about. That was the end of horse shit hand-grenades. How green the grass grew, and how thick and plush it stayed.