“While scholars and theorists have endlessly debated man’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for battle and conquest, one need not look very far to discover the true cause for war. Sometimes, the seeds of conflict can be found in our own back yards.

 

That was certainly the case with the Great Bottle Rocket War. That obscure engagement was fought on and around the Fourth of July in 1971 in the Great White North, where northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan grapple on the balmy southern shores of Lake Superior.

 

That conflict saw the flower of the youth of two townships take the field to defend the honor of their respective homelands, spurred on by a perceived insult misheard by an elderly woman eavesdropping on the multi-party telephone line. One comment predictably led to another, and then: Conflict!

 

The township located north of U.S. 51 (hereinafter called “The North”), formally opened hostilities on our sister township south of U.S. 51, (The South), by delivering a declaration of war on a parchment sealed with red wax and gold cord to the bemused clerk at their township hall.

 

The unfortunate juxtaposition of events, so near the July 4th celebration, meant that fireworks were easily attainable from any number of sources, all of whom gleefully sold explosives to both sides in the brewing conflict.   In no time, both factions were equipped with all manner of ordnance, including the usual Black Cats, smoke bombs, Roman candles, and the AK-47 of fireworks fights everywhere, the bottle rocket.

 

Small, inexpensive and highly effective, the bottle rocket consists of a thin wooden shaft bearing a small black-powder rocket with a tiny warhead on the business end.

 

In those care-free pre-litigation days, the missile could be launched by hand, if you didn’t care about the shirt you were wearing, or it could be lit and tossed at the target, if your timing was good.

 

Hostilities developed slowly, as wars often do, with the first day of fighting consisting of sporadic rocket ambushes and drive-by fire-crackerings. On the second evening of the conflict, the warring forces met en masse at the border, where a continuous exchange of small rocket fire across the highway soon attracted the attention of the local gendarmerie. This provoked an immediate truce as both sides scrambled to be elsewhere as a pair of county cruisers with red lights ablaze dove into view.

 

To settle the matter once and for all, an unused gravel pit was chosen as the perfect venue, a remote location enshrouded by trees where a series of small explosions were not likely to attract much attention.

 

At the agreed time, columns of vehicles descended on the battlefield from opposite directions. The worked-out gravel pit was overgrown with brush and weeds, with two main hills in the middle separated by a catch basin deep and muddy enough to discourage all but the most determined charge towards the enemy rampart.

 

Each vehicle disgorged young men bearing brown paper shopping bags bursting with all manner of rockets and sundry explosives, each costing a week’s worth of minimum-wage pay and all about to go up in smoke in one last boyhood hurrah. 

 

Earlier that day, “Northern” mothers had been puzzled over their inability to locate the chrome extension tubes for their vacuum cleaners, and fathers muttered about missing lengths of plastic pipe in their workshops. The boys had been busy, duct-taping handles and crude sights on these purloined objects, a one-day cottage industry devoted to the home-made bazooka.

 

The southern forces scrambled up their chosen hard gravel hill, digging out a firing position and throwing up earthworks topped with hastily cut brush to offset the slight height advantage the adjoining sand hill gave the northern forces.

 

Having obviously outspent the northerners, the southerners opened the exchange with a rain of bottle rockets, which hissed as they buried themselves around our foxholes, exploding in small sprays of stinging sand. Our first volley with the new bazookas nearly proved decisive, as the southern brush barrier only served to stop the rockets in flight, allowing them to detonate close to the noses of the cowering Southerners instead of sailing harmlessly past.

 

Tearing aside their brush barrier, the southerners were then at the mercy of the accurate northern fire raining down from the sand hill. Trapped in an untenable position, they were contemplating retreat when a single northern rocket landed in a bag full of theirs, still bound together with rubber bands.

 

Fuse lit fuse, and the whole of the remaining southern ordnance went up with a mighty roar. Bundles of flaming rockets roared around their position, leaving the demoralized combatants with the choice of climbing the impossible cliff to their rear, or crossing the deep cold water pond before them, all under unrelenting northern rocket fire.

 

Mercifully, before they had to choose a last desperate action, the northern positions fell silent one by one, ordnance expended.  The sudden silence was startling as we picked ourway through the clouds of low-hanging black powder smoke and up the narrow trail out of the pit, stamping out any remaining embers on the way.

 

With just about enough cash left for a couple of cold ones each, we all repaired to the local beer garden, which, ironically, was located on the township border line and accepted donations from all sides, as long as they were in U.S. currency.