“Phineas, you wouldn’t be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg,” said Gene (182). This was the truth about Phineas. He would have been more likely to be a peace negotiator with the enemies than he would be likely to fire a gun at the other side. Finny just was not the type of person to be a killer. He never thought that anybody ever lost at sports. He had said before that everybody is a winner, but that is not the truth. In a war, one side has to lose and the other side has to win, that was just how it was meant to be. He would rather organize a game between the two sides of the war rather than fight in it.
Finny was the type of person that would want to be in the center of the battle, but not the type of person to be in the center of this type of battle. He would want to be in the center of a sports battle. He would be the one that organized the teams between the two enemies and then he would decide what game to play. All Finny ever wanted to do was play and the war was not the place to play. Finny would be better at negotiating an agreement between the two sides. He could do this because he had a way of talking his way through anything and everything. For instance, when he wore his tie as a belt, Gene was sure he would get in trouble but Finny was able to show all of the good points of wearing a tie for a belt and in doing this he never got into trouble.
Finny wouldn’t be able to fire a gun at somebody for the purpose to kill them. He just did not have it in him to kill somebody. The only way he would be able to fire a gun at somebody is if the gun was just shooting paint balls. With this kind of gun Finny would be able to think of the gun as a piece of equipment for a game in which nobody gets hurt. Finny would have given his gun to the enemy before he would fire it at somebody to kill.
Finny never saw anybody as a loser and this is not good in a war because if you die obviously you have lost. Even in sports events Finny never saw the other team as enemies or the losers. He saw them as equals. In his thoughts, both sides were winners and the team that scored less was a true winner, they just were not ready that day.
Finny would like to get the two sides of the war together and have a giant sports event. “They’d get you some place at the front and there’d be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you’d be over with the Germans or the Japs asking if they’d like to field a baseball team against our side. You’d be sitting in one of their command post teaching them English. Yes, you’d get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you’d lend them one of yours. Sure, that’s just what would happen. You’d get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You’d make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war,” said Gene (182).
Finny just was not meant to be in the war. He was meant to be at school on the playing fields playing some crazy game he had invented like blitz ball. In this game there were no teams and there was no winner of the game. That was just how Phineas was, he never saw anybody as a loser. He always saw everybody as a winner. Everybody was equal to him and in that nature he would not have been able to kill somebody. This was just the way Phineas was. He was not meant to kill anybody, he was meant to play sports.