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there and I knock my brother down, pretend, with the rifle butt and then shoot him while he clutches his hat.
    But Tony is always a problem. Finally Donnie says, “Tony, you’re dead. You have to lie down.”
    â€œI’m not dead, Donnie.”
    â€œYou wanted to be a German. The Germans die,” Donnie insists.
    â€œOkay, I’m surrendering.”
    â€œYou can’t surrender. You’re a German.”
    â€œAll right,” Tony says, and he just leaves the yard and walks home.
    â€œTony!” I shout. “My hat. You can’t take my hat!”
    But he just keeps walking. I have to have my parents get it from his parents, which is embarrassing. But that is what Tony is like.
    â€œI got da hat,” says Donnie in a perfect Scaratini voice. We all do Scaratini but only Donnie does it well. Donnie has a perfect voice and when we have to sing in school he is the one the teachers pay attention to. Tony has a voice like a cough. But Donnie does it best and we all laugh and try to do it too: “I got da hat.” We all laugh, but I’m the one who has to tell my parents.
    Stanley Wiszcinski is the smallest kid in the neighborhood, so we make him play the Japanese and surrender in a serious ceremony in which he turns over the flag. Then we push him around a little for bombing Pearl Harbor, but also because everyone likes to pick on Stanley.
    Rocco Pizzutti doesn’t play war. Rocco is a perfect cube—as wide and thick as he is tall—with one thick black eyebrow that goes all the way across the top of his face, marking it like a Hebrew vowel. Rocco never says very much and he looks at his sister, Angela, in a way that makes everyone afraid to talk to her, which is too bad because she is the only girl I know that you could actually call pretty. Lucky for her, she didn’t get the eyebrow.
    Rocco and his sister do not have a father because their father was killed in what we always call “the Korean conflict.” It is never called a war and when I ask my mother why not, she explains that it wasn’t a war, it was “a police action.” I don’t understand what a police action is but I know it was bad enough for Rocco and Angela Pizzutti’s father to die. If asked about their father, they don’t get upset but they always say, “He was killed in the Korean War.”
    They are the only ones who call it a war.
    Sometimes, if my brother complains about being made to play a German all the time, I tell him to be quiet or I will make him play a Korean. Then he would still die, but it wouldn’t even be a real war. That usually makes him be quiet.

    Bernie, the vegetable man, is making a delivery while we are playing and we attack him with our toy guns, our helmets and hats, and our flag. Bernie Vegetable—that’s what we call him—starts sweating, and his hands, holding fruit, start to shake. He picks up a squash and shakes it like it is a musical instrument. But he isn’t joking around.
    Bernie was a marine in the Pacific and maybe he has the same thing as my dad had. We don’t know that much about him. There is a teacher in school who was in Europe and if you drop your books really loudly, he jumps and shakes and sweats. Kids slam things on purpose to see if they can get him to shake. His name is Mr. Schacter but we all call him Mr. Shaker. He teaches older kids and we are very glad that it will be a lot more years before we have to have Mr. Shaker for a teacher. Maybe Mr. Shaker and Bernie Vegetable have the same thing. I heard my father call it “battle fatigue.” Is that like my jacket that is called “fatigues”? Does wearing the jacket make you that way or are they called “fatigues” because people wearing fatigues often get fatigue? I don’t know.

Chapter Three
    The Champions
    Now that I am almost eight years old, I feel I am old enough to take a stand on things. I may try to do this more