Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
Normal life is
a very weird thing
for military bratsWar is hell on the home front, too, wrote Nashville songwriter Curly Putman. And I can attest to that. My Mom should have gotten the medal of valor for putting up with my brothers and me after my Dad decamped to the relative peace and tranquility of Vietnam.
With so many of our fighting men and women, including many from Hawaii, going off to war in Iraq, it's a good time to think about what it is like for the families left behind. I mean, how weird is it to come home from school one day and be told that your old man is heading off to a shooting war? (Is Billy's dad going? No, son, he's an insurance salesman. Is Becky's dad going? No, he's a factory manager. So, I'm the only kid in the neighborhood with a dad whose job is fighting people with guns and bombs? That's about it, kid.)
Actually, military brats have an extremely skewed idea of what weird is. When I was a kid, I thought it was weird that the other children in my class couldn't speak a word of Arabic. What was wrong with them? Hadn't they ever lived in Morocco? How weird.
In my world as a military brat, normal was being told to watch out for scorpions while playing out in our back yard. It seemed perfectly normal that the back yard was the Sahara Desert. It was normal to have a goat for a pet instead of a dog. It was also normal to move to a completely new part of the globe every two years. And to change schools two or three times during those two years. And it was normal to always, ALWAYS, be hopelessly behind in class. It was normal to start a school year learning Latin in Alabama and end it learning pidgin in Hawaii, which is what happened when the old man got back from his little trip to 'Nam.
MILITARY BRAT LIFE came back to me the other day when I had a chance to take a tour of Fort Shafter and Schofield Barracks with a few friends. I hadn't been on a military base in decades. At least, I hadn't really taken a close look at one. They are nothing like the bases I remember as a kid. Schofield Barracks is simply gorgeous. If it weren't for all the guys (and girls) walking around in camouflage carrying guns, it would look like a college campus. It's eerily peaceful, especially considering the heightened tensions we are living through.
The soldiers' lives go on, with their families. We saw darling little girls being carried by their moms, who happened to be wearing combat fatigues. We saw kids playing in parks where a short way away, soldiers practiced putting on gas masks. These kids were Army Brats, but they weren't brats at all. They were kids who lived in a world where it was perfectly normal for mom to wear a jungle fighting outfit and for adults to play war just yards from where they played.
Life is much better today for military brats then when I was one. They still go off base to public schools, where they are exposed to hundreds of weird kids with parents with 9-to-5 jobs. But their houses are modern and warm, not the stark, bleak quarters I remember. There are tons of things to do on base, from movies to sports to shopping in name-brand stores.
Normal for military brats is becoming like the normal for other kids. Except for the one day when Dad or Mom takes you aside and tells you they are going away for a while. They've got to go fight for their country. It's a kind of normal that hurts.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com