It all started in the vast, dusty expanse of the Sonoran Desert, where only the hardiest of creatures -- rattlesnakes, scorpions, Gila monsters and the like -- can survive under the brutal and ceaseless heat of the summer sun.

On a typical weekend, Neil, Jake and I -- a trio of knuckleheaded teenagers with too much time on our hands and an inexplicable lack of attention from girls -- would drive to the eastern outskirts of Phoenix, near the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, to make war.

Like many teenage boys, we were fascinated with war. Mimicking our favorite characters and scenes from "Apocalypse Now," "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket," we scrounged up whatever Vietnam War-era surplus military gear we could find and made our own war.

And we did it with BB guns.

Yes, we'd all seen "A Christmas Story," too, and knew you could shoot your eye out, so we made plastic goggles -- and a one-pump rule on air guns -- part of our safety regimen.

It was a heck of a lot of fun scurrying about the parched rocks and Joshua trees, dressed like a "Soldier of Fortune" reject, shooting my friends with my weapon of choice -- a vintage Daisy repeater with genuine plastic butt stock.

Years later, in the summer of 2003, long after a very real stint in the Army had nearly washed away the gut-tightening feeling of "war" in the desert, another kind of war came to visit me in Alaska.

My old buddy Neil had moved north and lived in an apartment just down the alleyway from me, right in the heart of bustling Fourth Avenue in downtown Anchorage. I forget exactly how it happened but as the Alaska summer began to assert itself that year, somebody bought somebody else a squirt gun as a present.

You know, just for fun.

Something about the squirt gun, though, stirred Neil's and my souls, taking us back to the good ol' days when war was fun. Soon the little squirt gun became two squirt guns -- then three, then four and then somehow a giant, shotgun-like Super Soaker entered the mix.

After rummaging around in our closets for the old Army fatigues and posing for photographs with a signed "Declaration of War," the Great Water Balloon War of 2003 was on.

It began with a recruiting campaign -- Neil had his roommate, Matt, and I had my 7-year-old son, Gabe -- followed by all-out frontal assaults on each other's fortresses, both of which had high vantage points on the upper floors of apartment buildings. Soaking the alleyways and drawing looks of awe from tourists, we would take turns trying to throw water balloons up through each other's windows, sometimes drawing the "enemy" out for full force, close quarters combat.

As the summer wore on, our armies grew. Neil had a few friends, co-workers and intrigued acquaintances join his army, and so did I.

One time, I dispatched my artist friend Alex, her bicycle basket filled to the brim with water balloons, to "assassinate" Neil in front of the Pioneer Bar. Another time, my friend, Paul, bought one of those huge, three-foot-wide punching bag balloons, filled it with water and wrote "Shock and Awe" on it with a Sharpie. It took two of us to lift it out the window the next time Neil's army attacked.

Later, Neil and Matt perfected their design of a giant water balloon slingshot -- made from PVC pipe, some surgical tubing and a red, plastic funnel -- and successfully used it to launch water balloons across Fourth Avenue as I was on my way to work.

Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of muffled voices outside my third floor bedroom window. Neil and Matt, employing an extension ladder, had climbed onto the roof of the building next door and jimmied open my window. As I sprang out of bed, the water balloons burst all around me, soaking everything in sight.

Like all wars, the Great Water Balloon War of 2003 soon descended into madness. I couldn't shower anymore because my bathtub was filled with water balloons. I couldn't leave my windows open -- not even a crack and not even on the hottest summer nights -- for fear of waking up to two inches of standing water in my living room.

Then, late in the summer, the war devolved into sporadic guerilla attacks and it was no longer safe to walk anywhere, as there might be a deadly water assassin lurking behind the next mailbox or Dumpster.

At the end of summer, the Great Water Balloon War of 2003 came to a merciful end.

As in all wars, nobody won.

A couple of weeks ago, I got the war bug again when a late night summer barbecue led to a mission to steal some lawn furniture. Our friend and neighbor, Cat, has this beautiful, wooden chaise lounge carved into the shape of a fish. I'd been coveting it since the first time I sat in it so, logically, I led an expedition to relocate it to our yard, where my wife promptly took photos of the chair and posted them on Cat's Facebook page, along with a short ransom note.

A day later, Cat and a friend showed up with a flatbed truck while we were gone and stole back the fish chair -- plus all of our lawn furniture.

I managed to get the lawn furniture back last weekend and now I've learned that Cat will be out of town for a couple of days, leaving her fish chair all by its lonesome in her front yard.

Anybody want to play war?

Aaron Selbig can be reached at aaronselbig.@homernews.com.