wars

My Dad did this one, when I was a little girl I used to ask my Dad what happened to his fingernails to make them so short and ugly he told me that he had fought in the Indian Wars in the 1800's and that the Indians had cut his fingernail off with a tomahawk. (My Dad used to make us watch John Wayne movies all the time so this seemed like somewhat plausible) For years I believed this cause why would my Daddy lie to me.. Then in school we were talking about the Indian Wars and me being me I had to open my big mouth luckily this was still in grade school so no one thought I was too crazy they just told my Dad to stop telling me stories like that.

Michelle

For years I used to have the fear that Russia was going to wipe this country out with a nuclear bomb. I had that thought always in my head until I was around 16 years old. I'm now 37.

Spot"68

i used to think that when two countries had a war, there was a specific battle ground where they would fight all the wars. just one, in like asia or something. and then when i heard about someone bombing some city, i went to my mom adn said "ooooo they broke the rules!!!"

jangles

I thought when people said World War I or II they were saying "whirr whirr I/II" and I didn't get what it meant

Nate

When I was 7 years old I heard a news report about the Vietmnm cease fire, and I thought the reporter said "Sea Spyer" and I thought that the "Sea Spyer" was a secret agent on a ship.

Charlie

When I was annfant my mother wished to keep me away from an electricity sub-station by telling me that the bogey man lived there. It had the opposite effect to that intended, as I thought that the bogey man sounded nice, and I would go up to the sub-station to try to attract his attention.

Another thing: I was born in World War II, and my father was called up for army service. After the war i remember my mother saying to my father at one breakfast 'If there's another war you're not going in it!' I asked why. 'He might get killed', she said. Who would kill him, I asked. 'Some nasty men', she replied. As I had visited my father while he was stationed near the sea, I somehow thought that the war was a cave, and these nasty men lurked in a corner.

Anon

We had a cannonball in our back garden (I had a strange upbringing), and my brother told me it was the very one that had destroyed the castle at Scarborough, where we would go on holiday each summer. Later, it transpired this was a lie - it came instead from a museum my mum used to run in Dundee, and dates probably from the nineteenth century.

Nicholas Jones

I used to believe that during the war and before that, that TV and cameras hadn't been invented and I used to be confused when I saw photos of Hitler. I have no idea why.

Fiz

when i was 5 my mum told me that hitler was an evil man, from then on i thought he was the devil

death bunny

when i was ten i was in the classroom with my teacher and some kids rushed in and excitedly announced that we were all going to die on sunday because some guy was going to blow up the world. i was terrified and criwed about it all the time, no matter how many times my mum tried to reassure me, explaining that they'd just overheard something on the news about saddam hussein and nuclear weapons. i was convinced that the world was going to blow up right up until sunday.

paranoid

i used to belive that my dad was in the veitnam war as a helicopter pilot.well thats what he told me,it wasnt until modern studies that i uncovered his filthy lie.

duped

When I was small, I believed that Geurrilla warfare was apes running around with guns. Zoos terrified me!

Michael

I was like five and a half during desert storm, and I didn't quite get how we could be at war if there were no soldiers in army greens tearing through our neighborhood (like in mash) or fighter planes in the sky (like in topgun). Even though I had a very very dim view of what was going on I still would watch the news and it wasnt until about three years ago that I realized that the guy I believed was george Bush snr when I was little was actually donald rumsfeld.

child of the 80's

When I was a kid growing up in fear of nuclear devestation, I used to think that Vietnam footage was ancient (since they were using guns, grenades, etc and NOT nukes). I could not grasp the fact when my dad told me that Vietnam was only a few years before I was born and not around 1930.

Pablo

My little brother is severly misinformed about World War II. First of all he thinks everyone hates the Germans and that we're still at war with them. He also thinks we (US) killed Hitler. And he thinks everyone except Americans are communists. I can only guess that he's somehow mixed up things he's heard on TV or in school because he leanred nothing of that sort in our house.

Anon

When I was very young, probably about six or so, my father told my younger sister and I that he had been a Ranger in Vietnam. Until I was in my second year in college, I had this mental image that he was one of the people that made sure that the two sides “played nice” and that he made sure that the animals in the jungle weren’t hurt.

It was a bit of a shock to finally figure it out...

- Saint

Back when the Iraq war first started, I thought that Iraq was where Canada is!

Haha, xD

Holly

I used to believe that on a battlefield there was a huge wall separating the two sides. Each side would throw over bombs and grenades. The only contact that they had was one message carrier who traveled through a little door in the wall/

Zoe

Fortunately, the first time my grandpa mentioned "guerrillas" in Central America to me, he explained that they "weren't like gorillas at the zoo", they were people, and it was spelled differently, so I didn't have that confusion.

But when I heard someone mention "guerrilla tactics" in a cartoon, I thought it meant fighting like a gorilla-- beating your chest and all of that.

Kai

When I first heard about the Cold War, I though it was called that because it snowed all the time during iT.

Anon