Jack’s first blaster was a Nite Finder, a pistol that fired single foam darts with rubber tips, and had a mock laser sight mounted in front of the trigger assembly, mimicking the emerging fashion in tactical handguns. Jack’s ambushes became a ritual we’d reenact every time I visited. “Gotcha!” Jack shouted, before sprinting off behind the house in a flash of spindly limbs and towheaded glee.

Still, I remained hypervigilant-ready to fight, or flee, at any second.Īs I approached my friends’ doorstep, I was suddenly caught in an ambush of foam darts, and I looked down to see their seven-year-old son, Jack, grinning behind an azalea bush, aiming his Nerf blaster at my chest. I’d grown used to the simmering sounds of war I would hear the thump of Hamas and Islamic Jihad mortars during my afternoon runs and would wake to my windows rattling as Israeli gunboats fired at Palestinian fishermen. I was on a break from Gaza at the time, where I’d been living for a year and a half while working on a security project for an NGO and reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Virginia Quarterly Review.

One late spring day in April, several years ago-one of the last breezy afternoons before the suffocating summer humidity would descend on the rolling green hills of central Virginia-I went to visit friends in Charlottesville.

When did nerf come out