I hate to be morose and a downer, but there are times when I’m just bummed about my losses. Sometimes I just think I need to write away those feelings. Just to recap, in the summer of 2022 I lost my son Casey. Six months later I lost my Daveshoe. Last year I lost David Sullivan. I know I am not the only person who lost them. But, I can only write from my perspective, and their passing has left huge holes in my heart and in my life that are just holes.

Losing Casey was and is indescribably difficult. He was my son, my gamer buddy. We are coming up on Thanksgiving which was his favorite holiday. He would come early, give attention to the dogs, and pretend to be helpful–kind of wishing there was a way he could be helpful, even if he wasn’t. Casey was a baseball hater, and he loved terrible music. Poor Casey would take the position that the Beatles weren’t that great and would have to fend off arguments from Patrick and I about how wrong he was. But he was an amazing son, a profoundly good person, a dedicated on-line gamer, and a very good board gamer. We miss him and talk about him every single day.

In the case of Shoe (Dave Schueler for those who might have no clue who I’m referring to, but he’ll always be Shoe to me,) I just miss the brotherliness of our relationship. We didn’t talk on the phone often, but sometimes, and the conversations were always enjoyable. It was always the collaboration, the getting together to share ideas about projects, new games, inevitably the Mariners and sometimes politics that I enjoyed most. I won’t recount all the games we did together. But we did love David Manley’s rules, and we hosted air games using his jet rules, Airwar C.21 and his WWII rules Airwar 1940. I was the chief painter of planes, but Dave crafted the scenarios and built the ships that would inevitably become targets.

2019 was the last time Dave and I ran any Manley air games. Covid canceled a lot of gaming including Enfilade in 2020, and his illness came right on the heels of the worst of the pandemic, so he had to stay away from exposure to germs. I’ve simply lacked the confidence to run these games on my own. I have Dave’s ships and some of his planes, but not the willpower to use them.

However, for at least the past decade George Kettler has pestered me about doing some Viet Nam era air games. I had the planes. And then I had some of Dave’s planes. And then I had even more unpainted planes. But the past few months something changed, and I embraced those challenges. A week ago we did get together at George’s with Scott Abbott and Bruce Syvinski and we tried a little Airwar C21. It was an easy-does-it walk through of the rules and we did pick it right up and it was easy to play and most importantly it was a lot of fun. Honestly, the two sets of Manley Airwar rules were similar and I’ve even figured out how to make the air data cards Shoe was so good at. I foresee more air games in the future, but I’ll be thinking about Shoe and all the trouble we would have gotten in together.

The game at George’s house was pretty simple. Four F-105’s commanded by yours truly were tasked with bombing a bridge. They were intercepted by four MiG-17’s that took too wide a turn to catch me. They were met by four F-4’s that launched piles of missiles at them, but mostly missed. All the Thunderchiefs got to their target, didn’t miss, rolled well and kablooey. All photos by George Kettler.

When David Sullivan developed pancreatic cancer and then passed away last March, I was just kind of lost. He was also a master collaborator, but had his own distinct and separate interests too. Again, we did so many things together, I don’t think it’s worth it to make a list, it would just go on and on. David had more stuff than we could all imagine. Some of it was stuff we’d done together, and some of it was his personal projects. When we moved it all mostly out of his garage, the question was what to do with it. David had gorgeous terrain, beautiful miniatures and just an incredible pile of unpainted miniatures. I tried to hang on to our cooperative stuff, and made sure that there was plenty to get out to others. I ended up glomming on to a lot that was unclaimed. For the past few months, it has mostly sat in my garage glaring at me, hoping for a plan. Unfortunately I don’t really have one.

Just to be clear, there isn’t any trash here. David and I had some big plans–He has a tub o’ Mexican War figures that we really need because we don’t really have enough Mexicans. There are two giant batches of American Revolution figures, that almost exactly match my giant pile of American Revolution figures. We were going to paint up some for Rebels and Patriots and some for Regimental Fire and Fury–Perry figures, Foundry figures and Front Rank British line. The good stuff. He has some beautiful Navis German Pre-Dreadnaughts that need a little bit of attention. And that isn’t half of it. Now if David were here, and I knew about all this stuff, perhaps we could give it all some direction. Or maybe we both would have run off in some other direction doing different things. But at least we would have talked about it and laughed about it and shaken our heads over lunch.

I’m in the middle of painting 26 of David’s remaining Crucible Crush figures. 11 are European and 15 are Indians. Added to the 50 or so figures we already have painted, that’s plenty to mess around with. They are great figures and a pleasure to paint.

I’ve taken some of David’s figures into my den to have close by in case I’m ready to do something with them. I’ve started working on some of the beautiful Crucible Crush Europeans and Native Americans Bob Murch did for his Flint and Feather rules. I’m revisiting The Song of Drums and Tomahawk rules David and I used to do the early contact Native American stuff back in the days. It’s very stylized, but quite fun, true skirmish. I’m going to run a game using our figures at our December 6th game day. Looking forward to it.

I’m just having one of those moments when I’m missing my guys.