In Defense of Bob

His name wasn’t really Bob, but I’m calling him that for the purposes of this post, on the extremely unlikely chance that he’s still out there somewhere. It’s been decades and I doubt he’d even remember me. Still, I don’t want to be cruel; there's already plenty of that online. Moreover, that's not my purpose here.

Bob was a teenager I’d see from time to time at hobby stores and at game days at the local libraries in the early 1980s. Like many of us back then, Bob was awkward, intense, and very passionate about the things he loved. For him, one of those things was World War II.

In those days, this was hardly unusual. I’m not sure people younger than a certain age realize just how omnipresent World War II still was in the cultural imagination of the time, even though it had ended more than three decades beforehand. This was especially so in the years after Vietnam, when America seemed unsure of what to make of its recent history, World War II stood apart. According to its conventional presentation, it was “the Good War,” the one where we knew who the bad guys were. Toy aisles were filled with green army men and gray tanks. TV reruns still showed Combat! and Rat Patrol. There were countless paperbacks, comics, movies, documentaries, and model kits. Nearly everyone had at least one older relative or neighbor who’d been “over there.”

So, Bob’s obsession wasn’t strange, not in context. What was unusual, even among kids interested in World War II, was the depth of his knowledge. Bob didn’t just know the basics. He could name operations and battles most people had never heard of. He knew the names of generals and details about their lives. He could tell you how a Panther tank compared to a Sherman and why Rommel’s tactics in North Africa were studied in military academies around the world. He was, for a teenager, astonishingly well-informed. 

Bob was also socially tone-deaf. He didn’t always know when to stop talking, particularly when the subject was German armor or the Eastern Front. Even back then, people would roll their eyes when Bob launched into another lecture about Stalingrad. Mostly, though, we just let him do his thing. He was weird and so were we. More importantly, he played RPGs. That was enough.

Nowadays, I'm sure Bob would be viewed differently. People might hear him talk about German tanks or Guderian’s campaigns and jump to conclusions. They might assume he was some kind of Nazi sympathizer or apologist. That’s not how I remember him at all. Now, I didn’t know Bob well. I didn't have a window into his soul, but I never once got the impression he admired Hitler or fascism or anything like that. He was just a very nerdy teenager who’d gotten fixated on a complex and highly documented period of history. He liked the minutiae. If anything, he treated World War II the way other kids treated baseball, obsessively reciting rosters and statistics no one else cared about.

Bob was not a threat. He wasn’t trying to smuggle dangerous ideas into the games he played. He was just Bob – one of us. He was weird, annoying, and even brilliant in his own narrow way. I feel like it's important to point this out, not to excuse anyone, but to defend the idea that not every interest held by socially awkward people should be a moral test. Likewise, not every off-note conversation from forty years ago is a sign of hidden malice. We were all a little odd in those days; that’s probably what brought us together.

I bring all this up in light of last week's post about my recollections of how odd people of all stripes seem to get along in the hobby of my youth. Back then, the hobby felt – to me anyway – like a patchwork of eccentrics, whether they were metalheads, stoners, bookworms, would-be game designers, history buffs, or, yes, kids like Bob. We didn’t all get along. We didn’t all like the same things. Yet, we shared a love of imaginative play and we didn't care about much of anything else.

Was that everyone's experience back in the day? I highly doubt it, but I also doubt that the worst examples someone could dredge up from those times was typical either. I suspect the truth, as it so often is, lies somewhere in the middle. Judging from the arguments in the comments to last week's post, I suppose I was naive in thinking we could get back to just having fun with RPGs the way I used to as a kid.

I don’t know where Bob is now or what he became. Wherever he is, I hope he has a group of friends with whom he can roll some dice without being judged too harshly for his idiosyncrasies. He deserves that much.

So do we all.