Casualties of War

Green army men are a ubiquitos, classic toy that never seems to go out of style. I know of a particular forty-something-year-old (who shall not be named) that I suspect still plays with 'em. In my youth, I for one, once stole about five of the aforementioned nameless person's stash, sawed of their guns and grenades, painted them with white nail polish and used the re-vamped figures in the frieze of my scale-model of a Roman temple. But that's another post.

The green army men, "Casualties of War," produced by the the Manchester, England-based Dorothy collective were inspired by the unspoken "personal hell soldiers live through after returning home". From the Dorothy website:

"In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides...A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined."

Unfortunately these bad boys are not for sale.