Where do wierd ideas come from?

I often try to imagine the genesis of a writers' ideas.  What incidents went into their background that produced such a tales.  In my particular case--how did the story of Stepha and the tank come about?

In the fifteenth chapter of Slogans, the older boys take Stepha to see an armored car destroyed by the Reds.  After they lead Stepha to the burnt out hulk and tell him to look inside.  When he does, Stepha recoils from the sight of human remains. 

Austin-Putilov Armored Car

This chapter is based on personal experience.  In the late 40's and early 50's, prepubescent boys in small towns like mine were free-range.  The world was ours to explore and explore we did.  My friend Andy's family owned the local junk yard (salvage yard in today's vernacular) and if we were lucky, we could sneak in and inspect fresh wrecks.  Andy was always eager to point out the latest gruesome artifacts: a bloody windshield shattered by a head or a steering wheel twisted by a torso's impact.  While I never saw a body as did Stepha, my buddies did get me to peer into a trunk that held the decomposing remains of a dog.  The image haunted my dreams for weeks.

Putting Stepha in a similar situation was a natural.  But instead of a small American town, he lived near a battlefield.  Enter Sasha the Russian translator.  During one stint in the Soviet Union, I struck up conversations with Sasha and discovered he grew up near the Russian city of Stalingrad.

Destroyed Nazi equipment in Stalingrad

His explorations of the weapon-littered battlefield far surpassed my junk yard and he had the scars to prove it.  After one hair-raising tale, he removed his tunic revealing an arm and shoulder disfigured by fused tissue.  "Little boys playing dangerous games," he explained.  He went on to say that he and his friends would find unexploded ordnance and set them off.  His wounds, he told me with the usual Russian shrug, were the result of a miscalculation.

It didn't take much imagination to pen a sub-plot based on Sasha's and my experiences. Unfortunately, Stepha's friend Maksim, like Sasha, was victim of little boys playing dangerous games.