Adding Mud To Your Models – Leman Russ Strike Tank

As a kid, I liked playing in the mud. It was a simpler time of course. Some dirt, some water… ride your bike through it, stomp around in it. Moms didn’t hover around quivering in fear about how unsanitary it might be. They’d simply hose you down when you came home for lunch, pass out bologna sandwiches and real potato chips (not those baked monstrosities), and after several rounds of Kool-Aid from actual Kool-Aid shaped cups, she’d send you back out.

Into the sunshine. Riding your bike. Running through the woods at the back of the neighborhood. Building forts and climbing trees and getting sweaty and filthy with a full day of exertion. If we did slow down and go inside it was only because lightning interrupted the fun. And we went in and watched Speed Racer and The Three Stooges, and as soon as it was even slightly safe to do so… back outside we went.

And we had plastic soldiers, and tanks. We fought great battles, always against the Nazis. We knew they were evil. All around us lived the men who’d fought in Europe and the Pacific and faced down an existential threat. They destroyed that threat, came home, and built modern America. Their main request seemed to simply be “earn this.”

I like building plastic toy tanks and covering them in mud because it reminds me of those days when kids would be kids, and not scurry around Barnes and Noble sipping lattes and discussing if their feelings had been validated after someone referenced something that they felt was a micro-aggression. No, we played. We had a grand and glorious time. And if a bully came along, we only tolerated it for so long until someone realized that all of us together could give the bully an attitude adjustment. And then most of the time he’d join the fun after the blood was wiped away and a round of handshakes took place.. Then we’d get back to playing. Swinging on old ropes, hung from sagging tree limbs, into a drainage pond that was really just a giant mud hole.

I don’t even remember at this point what I’d intended when I started writing this.

Here’s a video of a tank being muddied up. And I know of at least one 10-year-old in 1977 that would have loved to use this in a battle of toy soldiers. Right after the baseball game on the vacant lot, but before building a ramp and trying to attempt to jump a wide ditch as his friends cheered. And when he came home with a bloodied knee and a giant bruise, mom smiled, shook her head, hugged him, and simply said “go wash up – time for dinner.”