Denise Woolf remembers the birthday parties she and her husband would throw for their sons at the Bridgewater Armory, where Darren Woolf was the armorer. They’d set up tents and cots, and the kids and their friends would get to look in the vault, where all the weapons were kept. “They just loved it,” says Woolf, who lives in Randolph.

Her oldest son knows every word of “Commando” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and when he was in the third grade he wrote for a class assignment that he wanted to be “an Army guy and a police officer” when he grew up.