Military Brats

MILITARY BRATS

Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress

Mary Edwards Wertsch

****

Published by:

Mary Edwards Wertsch at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 1991-2011 by Mary Edwards Wertsch

****

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

****

Military Brats gives the experience of a military childhood a weight many of us have never fully admitted, allowing our pain, finally, to be saluted alongside our pride.

—The Atlantic Monthly

*

Fascinating and edifying….

—The Sunday Oregonian

*

…a comprehensive, well-written and moving study of the effects of military life on children, who ‘serve’ with no recognition or glory….

—United Press International

*

Wertsch’s deeply felt book has much to say about the fragility of the family and about the dark side of human nature.

—Publisher’s Weekly

*

Her attention to the dark side hasn’t resulted in a gloomy book. I found it wise and helpful.

—Navy Times

*

Mary Edwards Wertsch offers…clarity for those of us born into military families with her ground-breaking study…. Wertsch writes eloquently, weaving together personal experience, extensive research, and interviews…. For those who were raised in the Fortress who are still searching for the missing pieces to their lives, Military Brats will provide valuable clues.

—Sober Times, The Recovery Magazine

*

Wertsch’s Military Brats is a long-needed corrective that goes a long way toward explaining to civilian society the demands it places not only on its soldiers but on their offspring…. Her work merits a wide audience on both sides of the no-man’s-land.

—Chronicles

*

A good choice for many public libraries and for any library serving a military population.

—Library Journal

*

Despite its many handicaps, a military upbringing also offers unique bonuses, and Wertsch stresses the particular strengths that military brats can, and often do, develop.

—Kirkus Reviews

*

Brats will read this book and recognize themselves…. Civilians, particularly spouses of brats, may read it and begin to understand…. Regardless, when Mary Edwards Wertsch says she’s ‘proud to be a military brat and despite the high price exacted by the Fortress,…would have it no other way," she speaks an interesting truth that many brats will recognize.

—Raleigh News and Observer

*

Wertsch is a very thorough researcher and a superb storyteller who gives readers an understanding of what it’s like to grow up in the military.

—The Associated Press

*

If you’re one of my fellow brats, if you live with a brat or work with one, this is must reading.... She has done her fellow brats a great service... we can at last stop being strangers to ourselves.

—The Capital Times

*

The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from the following: Bless Thou the Astronauts Who Face, copyright 1969 by Ernest K. Emurian, used by permission; Gardens of Stone by Nicholas Proffitt, copyright 1983 by Nicholas Proffitt, reprinted by permission of Carroll and Graf Publishers, a division of Avalon Publishing Group; The Great Santini, by Pat Conroy, copyright 1976 by Pat Conroy, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co.; Incest in the Military Family by Patricia W. Crigler in The Military Family: Dynamics and Treatment, edited by Kaslow and Ridenour, copyright 984 The Guilford Press; The Military Family Syndrome by Don M. LaGrone in American Journal of Psychiatry, copyright 978 by the American Psychiatric Association; The Paternal Roots of Male Character Development by Tess Forrest in Psychoanalytic Review, copyright 1967 by the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis; The Wounded Woman by Linda Schierse Leonard, copyright 1982 by Linda Schierse Leonard, reprinted with the permission of The Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, Athens, Ohio. Wertsch, Mary Edwards Military brats: legacies of childhood inside the fortress Copyright 1991, 1996, 2006 by Mary Edwards Wertsch Introduction copyright 1991, 1996, 2006 by Pat Conroy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Number 91-76227 ISBN: 0-9776033-0-X Previously published by Harmony Books, a member of Crown Publishing, part of Random House; by Ballantine Books; by Aletheia Publications. Brightwell Publishing P.O. Box 16171, St. Louis, MO 63105 USA First Brightwell Publishing Edition: January 2006

***

With love and gratitude

to Jim, my husband, friend, and favorite civilian;

to my mother, Dorothy,

and my brother, David,

troupers and survivors both;

and to the memory of my father,

Col. David Lincoln Edwards (1912-1985),

West Point class of ’36

***

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

INTRODUCTION BY PAT CONROY

1. Troupers

2. Masks

3. The Play Within the Play

4. Daughters of Warriors

5. Sons of Warriors: Mirroring the Warrior

6. Sons of Warriors: Ghosts of the Fortress

7. Military Brats as Casualties

8. Military Brats as Nomads

9. Upstairs/Downstairs

10. Outsider/Insider

11. Legacies

12. Military Brats as Survivors

NOTES

INDEX

***

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many to whom I wish to express my thanks for the significant roles they have played in helping me complete this book. Mark and Lorrie Duval are the friends who took me to see the film The Great Santini and talked with me for hours afterward; that evening was instrumental in planting the seeds for the idea of this book. Dr. Diane Martin is a marvelously gifted Jungian analyst whose wise guidance renewed my spirit and helped me greatly in improving my relationship with my father; she has also been an invaluable source of encouragement throughout this undertaking and provided helpful comments about the material I shared with her. The Revs. Tom and Carolyn Owen-TowIe, ministers at First Unitarian Church in San Diego, were warmly supportive at the critical stage when the book idea was taking root.

Pat and Lenore Conroy provided unflagging encouragement and a depth of friendship that energized this project throughout; their kindness and generosity of spirit have been light and comfort to me during dark times of struggle with some of the difficult personal material presented here. Pat’s commitment to this effort, both as a military brat who believed in the idea of this book and as a writer who threw his support behind it early on, has been vital. I cannot imagine having a better ally with whom to fight the good fight.

My mother and my brother, both brave and loving people whose moral example informs this book, were consistently supportive of this project; I alone, however, take responsibility for the interpretation of our family presented here.

Tamara Dembo played a very important role as friend and adviser; the example alone of this remarkable woman has been an inspiration. Others who offered valuable support include Fran Hagstrom, Karin Junefelt, Mary Bauer, Sally and Reggie Lewis, Norris Minick, my cousin Savannah, and my cousin Alice Lane. I am also grateful to those not previously mentioned who gave of their time to read and criticize portions of the manuscript: Jim Youniss, Sandra T. Azar, Cynthia Enloe, Larry Wertsch, Bonnie and Michael Kanner-Mascolo, Sheila Cole, Doreen Lehr, Judy Rosselli, Sarah Shaw, and Mary Kay Magistad.

Special thanks go to Margaret Garigan, my editor at Harmony and a sterling Army brat, who handled the editing with grace and wisdom and has in every way been devoted to the cause. Thanks also to Peter Guzzardi, who shepherded this book through the final stages. I am grateful to Natalie Bowen for her excellent skills as a copy editor, and to Andrea Connolly, who handled production.

I would also like to express devout thanks to the kind, responsible, and loving women who at various times cared for my children while I worked on my book: Julie Angulo, Elfrieda Van Veen, Kate Osgood, Dorie Hutchinson, Eileen Strong, Jeni Bivens, Fran Hagstrom, Natasha Selivanova, Beth and Sarah Farnham, and Ana Smolka. This is the invisible but vitally important support women provide for one another, and which for the writer-mother is in my view the late twentieth-century equivalent of Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own.

Above all there is my husband, Jim, who helped immeasurably in every way mentioned above, from initial encouragement, to guidance, to criticism of the manuscript, to doing more than his share of child care—particularly in the last three months when I needed every possible minute at the computer. He has backed me up all the way, and it is in large part because of the love, tolerance, and humor I receive from him and from our two sons that I have been able to approach this personally challenging subject from a position of emotional strength.

Finally, I owe deepest thanks to the eighty military brats who shared their stories with me. Thank you, all of you, for opening your lives and sharing your insights into our collective experience. I learned so much from you. I am the first beneficiary of your generosity; I hope I have presented your stories in a way that will allow others to benefit as I have. In the integrity and resourcefulness with which you conduct your lives and which reflect so well on our tribe, you make me very, very proud to be a military brat.

I particularly wish to thank Lisa, who suffered terribly in sharing her story of extreme abuse, and whose courage in doing so is a shining light to others. I pray that the public telling of her story, which she chose to do here for the first time in the interest of helping other victims of abuse, brings her the measure of peace she has long sought.

If there were such a thing as medals for military brats, all of you would deserve bronze and silver stars.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

When I was living in Chicago in 1980, a couple of friends stopped by one night and asked me to go to a movie. The decision to drop what I was doing and go along turned out to be one of the most fateful ones I’ve ever made.

The movie was The Great Santini, made from Pat Conroy’s novel about a Marine Corps pilot and his family, and the overall effect on me was like being struck by a thunderbolt. Whole scenes, whole sections of dialogue could have been lifted right from my childhood.

Not that there weren’t important differences; for starters, my father had been in the Army, not the Marine Corps, and he was not a pilot. There were plenty of other differences, too. But the movie nonetheless was a revelation: It spoke to me in my own idiom, out of my own military experience—something I had yearned for without realizing it. For the first time in my life I saw that my brother and I were not, as we’d thought, rootless; we were the offspring of a lifestyle that is unique, intense, demanding, steeped in characteristic rules and values—and a lifestyle that literally millions of children have shared.

It took me several hours to calm down. What a revelation to suddenly understand that one is not alone! To all at once be given the gift of perspective on one’s experience, and shown the ways to both cry and laugh about it!

In succeeding days I began to marvel that it had never occurred to me before. How was it that I had somehow grown up with the impression that other people had backgrounds, but I did not?

Then I started to piece together my assumptions about the differences between civilians and myself. They came from real places. I didn’t. They knew their relatives. I didn’t. They identified with a region of the country. I didn’t. The implication, of course, is that all the time I was growing up, I felt my parents were in a sense more real than I: They came from towns in Georgia and Ohio that were rich in history, where they had friends from childhood. Their language was laced with regional idiom. They grew up knowing, really knowing, their grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. They had friends from childhood who recognized in them the children they once had been, with whom they could share the sacrament of memory.

Seeing The Great Santini made me realize that until then I had assumed I was some kind of generic nobody, a kid from nowhere and everywhere, with an American speech so homogenized that not even the most expert linguistic detective would be able to deduce my origins. I saw that I had actually believed my life had only been real since I attained adulthood. And I saw how very wrong I had been.

So The Great Santini, as painful as it was to watch in parts—for the family depicted is a dysfunctional one, like my own, and its problems were all too familiar—was nevertheless for me a redemptive experience. Soon after, I read the novel, and in its even richer treatment of military family life I had a still more powerful feeling of connection to my origins. I realized there must be millions of us military brats caught up in the same sort of psychological diaspora, aching to get home.

Over the next five years, I found I was full of questions about my experience as a child of the warrior society. Santini had given me a framework and an emotional identification, but there was much still to be explored. I knew I needed to read a book that would explain my roots inside the Fortress, as I call the military, that would reveal the patterns of experience I share with other military brats, that would explicitly speak to the psychological legacies of the warrior life, and help me understand who I am.

That is the kind of book I needed to read, and as there were none remotely like it, that is the kind of book I have tried to write. I am a journalist, not a psychologist, but I am a journalist in search not only of ways to describe the roots I share with my subjects, but ways to understand those roots and deal with their implications. My approach is to look for patterns and try to trace them backward to their probable origin, and forward to their possible consequences. If The Great Santini was our first family portrait—and I have quoted liberally from it in this book because I believe it is—then what I have tried to do is part family analysis and part ethnographic description. I believe that military brats are America’s most invisible minority; what I have tried to do is make us more visible—and understandable—to ourselves and to others.

It has taken me five years, during which I have had two children and, like a typical military brat, moved four times. I have done in-depth interviews with eighty military brats, all of them well into adulthood, who were raised in all four armed services. I have also done many dozens of additional interviews with military parents, teachers, physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, historians, and scholars.

It is my contention, based on this research, that not only does the military constitute a separate and distinctly different subculture from civilian America, it exercises such a powerful shaping influence on its children that for the rest of our lives we continue to bear its stamp. Warrior society is characterized by a rigid authoritarian structure, frequently mirrored inside its families; extreme mobility; a great deal of father absence; isolation and alienation from the civilian community; an exceedingly strict class system; a very high incidence of alcoholism, which also suggests possibly high rates of family violence; a deeply felt sense of mission; and, not least, an atmosphere of constant preparation for war, with the accompanying implication for every family that on a moment’s notice the father can be sent to war, perhaps never to be seen again.

Many aspects of warrior life described in this book are not unique to the Fortress, but that does not detract from the uniqueness of Fortress life. It is the particular combination of characteristics, as well as its own self-perception, that sets the Fortress apart from civilian society. Indeed, civilians will certainly see aspects of their own experience reflected in that of the military brats presented in this book. Children of police officers may be familiar with the authoritarian family structure, and the stress of knowing that the parent might be killed in the line of duty. Children of corporate executives may recognize the effects of extreme mobility. Every PK—preacher’s kid—knows about the sense of mission that infuses the family. And the children of foreign service personnel—dip brats, as they call themselves—know about rootlessness and the perpetual status of outsider.

There are people who carry an idealized notion of childhood in their heads, and feel cheated if their own was at variance with it—as though childhood should be free of stress and disappointment and loss. That is not the premise of this book. Nor is it the premise that these things are good in themselves. I’ve approached the subject of military childhood from quite another angle: that what is important is that we understand it, all of it, its joy and its pain, its humor and its cruelty, in full measure. Only if we cut through the secrecy, stoicism, and denial that are so much a part of warrior culture, only if we look at our Fortress experience unvarnished by myth, can we know who we are.

The military brats I interviewed were all very anxious to find their Fortress roots and understand the psychological legacies, positive and negative, they still carry. They understood my need to ask about very private and sometimes very dark aspects of their family experience inside the Fortress, and they were extremely candid. Because their information is so deeply personal, I have accorded them anonymity. The first names I use for the military brats are not their real names. If another person is referred to by name in a quotation, I have changed that name as well. As further protection, I have left out the names of places where interviewees reside.

They come from all parts of the country; military brats are to be found everywhere. Just over half the interviews were done in person, in several regions of the country. The rest were accomplished through a combination of phone interviews and correspondence; most often I received very lengthy taped responses to questions, after which I would follow up by letter or phone call. I received all of the names of interviewees by word of mouth, or in response to a couple of newspaper articles about my book research. There were nearly as many different sources of names as there were interviewees. I did not go to any organizations such as Adult Children of Alcoholics to find interviewees, since this would have seriously biased my research. Although this book is not presented as scientific research, I have tallied some figures in the interests of journalistic reporting. This is primarily a work of interpretive journalism; its goal is less to present a flawlessly accurate portrait of many millions of military brats—something clearly beyond the scope of what one writer can do—than to present voices that reveal aspects of our collective experience. There will be those who accuse me of giving too much space to military brats who have suffered in the course of their rearing inside the Fortress. My response is that those voices are important voices which have been stifled for too long; it is my conviction that these voices need to be heard, and indeed that we must listen to what they have to say if we are to grasp the dimensions of the Fortress experience.

There are some generalizations and assumptions in the book that I would like to clarify. Throughout, it is assumed that it is the father, not the mother, who is the member of the military, and I invariably refer to the warrior as he. I am keenly aware of the implied sexism in this assumption, and as a feminist I do not undertake it lightly. However, when the interviewees for this book were growing up—they were born between 1952 and 1964—this was the applicable model of military family life, and indeed all of their families conformed to it. To suggest otherwise by nonsexist wording would be misleading and distracting. Today the American military is changing rapidly; there are many families in which the mother is active-duty military, and there are many single-parent families as well. These differences are bound to have important effects on the current generation of military brats, and it is my hope that someday their generation will produce a similar book to probe the new set of legacies.

For this book I interviewed as many black and Hispanic military brats as I could find, but I did not find as many as I wanted, and I suspect there are important elements of their experience I have failed to bring out. I interviewed no Asian military brats. Nor did I find any military brats who are the offspring of mixed American-Asian marriages; they present special issues which I regrettably have not covered. It is my hope that they will raise their voices and add to the military brat story, of which so little has been written.

Some readers may find that my descriptions of military routine and use of terminology reveal my Army orientation. This is not meant to be exclusionary, and was done for the sake of simplicity. As those of us reared in the military are well aware, there are major differences among the armed services, and within each service there are many distinctions, too. At some point it is necessary to generalize in order to make the commonalities clear. I believe our commonalities are far, far stronger than our differences.

Finally, a word about the term military brat. Of the eighty military brats interviewed for this book, only five objected to the term—two because they disliked a categorization they felt was imposed on them by the military, one because she did not like the implications of brat, and two because they had always been told to say Navy junior instead. The rest all said they identified with military brat and used it themselves; to them it is a term of affectionate humor as well as identification. My own inquiries turned up nothing about the origin of the phrase, although I found a clue in the Oxford Universal Dictionary definition of brat: A child (usu. implying insignificance). I suspect that this points to a historical truth, the age-old point of view of the military-as-institution that children are a bothersome necessity, like the camp followers of whom they formed a not coincidental part. As this book makes clear, there are major ways in which that attitude still directs the military’s policy toward families, to our misfortune and that of the children who are at this moment inside the Fortress.

However, that in my opinion is no reason to cast aside the term military brat. Why deny the truth of the way we have been regarded inside the Fortress? It is part of who we are. But only a part. As to the rest of it, the term refers to our own lived experience. And just as that experience is ours and ours alone, the term is ours too, to define as we will. That is what this book is about: a defining of who we are, in our own voices.

Some years ago the Navy launched an effort to eradicate the term brat and impose Navy junior instead. However well meaning the intention, it has not been entirely successful. Most of the Navy children interviewed for this book prefer brat. My inquiries with social workers at Navy bases confirmed that Navy junior is perceived to be a term for officer children, not enlisted ones. Perhaps sensing the elitist connotations, most of the Navy officer children interviewed for this book would not use the junior term to which they were supposedly entitled by their fathers’ rank. In fairness to those who continue to use the term,

I do not think all who use it are aware of the elitism it implies.

For my part, I’ve been an Army brat so long I’ve become very attached to the term, and I don’t mind pushing my bias. I even see an advantage in being a brat over a junior. To me, junior implies a replica in miniature, without much autonomy or gumption, while brat implies not only separateness, but a certain spunkiness. And when it comes to growing up inside the Fortress and the challenge of coming to terms with the legacies of that life, I believe it is the brat qualities that see us through.

I would like to pose some challenges to the readers of this book.

To civilians: I challenge you to break down your stereotypes of military people that imprison us in simplistic cartoon figures speaking in balloons. If you listen to the voices in this book, you will find that the Fortress is a world of many-layered complexity; its warriors are not so easily dismissed as posturing martinets; its wives are not automatons; and we children might surprise you.

To military parents: I challenge you to listen to your children when they come to you with tough questions that sound uncomfortably close to recriminations. Underneath the hard surface of their questions they may well be saying, ‘There is so very much we weren’t allowed to talk about—so much stress, so much loss, so much love. Now we are trying to figure it all out, and it would help if we could acknowledge it together, talk it through, let it go."

To military brats: I challenge you to go against the grain of all our socialization inside the Fortress, and question everything about your experience there, including all your assumptions about yourself and your family. Where there is pain to face, I ask you to call on the courage and determination that are part of our warrior legacy, and face it. In this book you will find you are not alone; there are many voices joining with yours, and because they share not only their pain but the wisdom they have gained through it, there is comfort as well. I believe you will find, as I have, that the Fortress legacy is rich in strengths, and we have much of which to be proud.

There is one question, only one, that I find not worth troubling about. I mention it because for many military brats from dysfunctional families it is one that naturally leaps to mind: Were our parents wrong to raise us in that environment? Decide as you will, but my own feeling is that the question is not only unproductive, but irrelevant. The fact is we were raised inside the Fortress; all further questions derive from that. Our mission is to examine what was, not what might have been, and to reconcile our Fortress roots—roots that are as rich as they are difficult— with who we are now.

—Mary Edwards Wertsch, Holden, Massachussetts, 1991

INTRODUCTION

By Pat Conroy

I was born and raised on federal property. America itself paid all the costs for my birth and my mother’s long stay at the hospital. I was a military brat—one of America’s children in the profoundest sense—and I was guaranteed free medical care and subsidized food and housing until the day I finished college and had to turn in the ID card that granted me these rights and privileges. The sound of gunfire on rifle ranges strikes an authentic chord of home in me even now. My father was a fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corps and fought for his country in three wars. I grew up invisibly in the aviator’s house. We became quiet as bivalves at his approach and our lives were desperate and sad. But when the United States needed a fighter pilot, we did our best to provide one. Our contribution to the country was small, but so were we most of the time, and we gave all that we could.

Until Mary Edwards Wertsch’s remarkable book Military Brats, no one in this country ever had the decency or took the time to thank us for our service to our country. This book is both a love letter and a troubled meditation on the way children are raised in military families. It is the first book that I know of that records the testimony of those of us who were raised in these families and analyzes our common experience. I wept while reading much of this book, I found myself roaring with laughter in other sections.

I think being a military brat is one of the strangest and most interesting ways to spend an American childhood. The military brats of America are an invisible, unorganized tribe, a federation of brothers and sisters bound by common experience, by our uniformed fathers, by the movement of families being rotated through the American mainland and to military posts in foreign lands. We are an undiscovered nation living invisibly in the body politic of this country. There are millions of us scattered throughout America, but we have no special markings or passwords to identify each other when we move into a common field of vision. We grew up strangers to ourselves. We passed through our military childhoods unremembered. We were transients, billboards to be changed, body temperatures occupying school desks for a short time. We came and went like rented furniture, serviceable when you needed it, but unremarked upon after it was gone.

Who would have thought we were in the process of creating a brand new culture in America? Who could have known that our pain and our joy would produce such an extraordinary testament as that produced by these eighty veterans of military families who opened their hearts to Mary? Our lives may have been hard to endure, but from the clear evidence of this book, what American subdivision has produced more passionate or generous appraisers of their destinies than the voices cited here? Until now, military brats had done everything except tell their own stories. We’d never stopped to honor ourselves, out loud, for our understanding service to America. No one ever gave us our ticket to the homeland until Mary Edwards Wertsch wrote this book.

I was drafted into the Marine Corps on October 26, 1945, and I served the Corps faithfully and proudly for twenty-one years. I moved more than twenty times and I attended eleven schools in twelve years. My job was to be a stranger, to know no one’s name on the first day of school, to be ignorant of all history and flow and that familial sense of relationship and proportion that makes a town safe for a child.

By necessity, I made my own private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to fake or invent a sense of place. Home is a foreign word in my vocabulary and always will be. At each new base and fresh assignment, I suffered through long months of trying to catch up and learning the new steps required of those outsiders condemned to inhabit the airless margins of a child’s world. None of my classmates would ever remember my name when it was time to rotate out the following summer. My family drifted in and out of that archipelago of Marine bases that begins with the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and stretches down the coast to Parris Island in the South. I spent most of my childhood in North Carolina and not a single person in North Carolina knows that salient fact. I’ve been claimed as native son by more than a few southern states, but not by the one I spent the most time in as a child.

I’ve spent my life and my writing career thinking I was southern. That was only partly true and a tribute to my mother’s fiery sense of belonging to the South. Because of this book, I know now that I’m something else entirely. I come from a country that has no name, the one that Mary Wertsch discovers in this book. No Carolinian, no Georgian, has ever been as close to me and what I am in my blood than those military brats who lived out their childhoods going from base to base.

My mother, the loveliest of Marine wives, always claimed to her seven children that we were in the middle of a wonderful, free-flowing life. Since it was the only life I’d ever lived, I had no choice but to believe her. She also provided me with the raw material for the protective shell I built for myself. As excuse or rationalization, it gave me comfort in the great solitude I was born into as a military brat. My mother explained that my loneliness was an act of patriotism. She knew how much the constant moving bothered me, but she convinced me that my country was somehow safer because my formidable, blue-eyed father practiced his deadly art at air stations around the South. We moved almost every year preparing for that existential moment (this is no drill, son) when my violent father would take to the air against enemies more fierce than his wife or children.

That was a darker part of my service to my country. I grew up thinking my father would one day kill me. I never remember a time when I was not afraid of my father’s hands except for those bright, palmy years when Dad was waging war or serving in carrier-based squadrons overseas. I used to pray that America would go to war or for Dad to get overseas assignments that would take him to Asian cities I’d never heard of. Ironically, a time of war for the United States became both respite and separate peace for my family. When my father was off killing the enemy, his family slept securely, and not because he was making the world safe for democracy.

My mother would not let us tell anyone that Dad was knocking us around. My silence was simply another facet of my patriotism. My youth filled up with the ancient shame of a son who cannot protect his mother. It would begin with an argument and the Colonel’s temper would rise (one did not argue with the Colonel or the Major or the Captain or the Lieutenant). He would backhand my mother, and her pitiful weeping would fill the room. Her seven children, quiet as Spartans, would lower their eyes and say nothing.

Later, my mother would recover and tell us that we had not seen what we had just seen. She turned us into unwitnesses of our own history. I breathed not a word of these troubling scenes to my teachers, coaches, relatives, or friends of the family. If asked, I think I’d have denied under torture that my father ever laid a hand on me. If the provost marshal had ever arrested my father for child abuse, his career in the Marine Corps would have ended at that moment. So my mother took her beatings and I took mine. My brothers and sisters, too, did their part for the Corps. We did not squeal and we earned our wings in our father’s dark and high-geared squadron.

To this day, my father thinks I exaggerate the terror of my childhood. I exaggerate nothing. Mine was a forced march of blood and tears and I was always afraid in my father’s house. But I did it because I had no choice and because I was a military brat conscripted at birth who had a strong and unshakeable sense of mission. I was in the middle of a long and honorable service to my country, and part of that service included letting my father practice the art of warfare against me and the rest of the family.

*

The military life marked me out as one of its own. I’m accustomed to order, to a chain of command, to a list of rules at poolside, a spit-shined guard at the gate, retreat at sunset, reveille at dawn, and everyone in my world must be on time. Being late was unimaginable in the world I grew up in, so I always arrive at appointments early and find it difficult to tolerate lateness in others. I always know what time it is even when I don’t carry a watch.

I thought I was singular in all this, one of a kind. From Mary’s book I discover that I speak in the multitongued, deep-throated voice of my tribe. By writing this book, she handed me a visa to an invisible city where I’m welcomed for the first time as a native son. Her book speaks in a language that is clear and stinging and instantly recognizable to me, yet it’s a language I was not even aware I spoke. She isolates the military brats of America as a new indigenous subculture with our own customs, rites of passage, forms of communication, and folkways. When I wrote The Great Santini I thought I’d lived a life like no other child in this country. I had no clue that with The Great Santini, I had accidentally broken into the heart of both the military brat’s truth and cliche. With this book, Mary astonished me and introduced me to a secret family I did not know I had.

This great family of military brats has had no voice because we’ve assimilated so well into the slipstreams of American life. We’ve never had a way of reaching out to each other, letting each other know we were around, that we endured and even prospered in our trial by father and the permanent transiency of our sturdy breed.

But Mary takes the testimony of these children of the military experience and tells us what it means. With her brilliant analysis of these far-flung anonymous voices, she lets us know that we are brothers and sisters who belong to a hidden, unpraised country. To those of us without homes or hometowns, Mary Wertsch gives, for the first time, a sense and spirit of place.

*

This is my paradox. Because of the military life, I’m a stranger everywhere and a stranger nowhere. I can engage anyone in a conversation, become well-liked in a matter of seconds, yet there is a distance I can never recover, a slight shiver of alienation, of not belonging, and an eye on the nearest door. The word goodbye will always be a killing thing to me, but so is the word hello. I’m pathetic in my attempts to make friends with everyone I meet, from cabdrivers to bellhops to store clerks. As a child my heart used to sink at every new move or new set of orders. By necessity, I became an expert at spotting outsiders. All through my youth, I was grateful for unpopular children. In their unhappiness, I saw my chance for rescue and I always leapt at it. When Mary writes of military brats offering emotional blank checks to everyone in the world, she’s writing the first line in my biography.

Yet I can walk away from best friends and rarely think of them again. I can close a door and not look back. There’s something about my soul that’s always ready to go, to break camp, to unfold the road map, to leave at night when the house inspection’s done and the civilians are asleep and the open road is calling to the Marine and his family again. I left twenty towns at night singing the Marine Corps hymn and it’s that hymn that sets my blood on fire each time I hear it, and takes me back to my ruined and magnificent childhood.

I brought so few gifts to the task of being a military brat. You learn who you are by testing and measuring yourself against the friends you grow up with. The military brat lacks those young, fixed critics who form opinions about your character over long, unhurried years or who pass judgment on your behavior as your personality waxes and wanes during the insoluble dilemma that is childhood. But I do know the raw artlessness of being an outsider.

Each year I began my life all over again. I grew up knowing no one well, least of all myself, and I think it damaged me. I grew up not knowing if I was smart or stupid, handsome or ugly, interesting or insipid. I was too busy reacting to the changing landscapes and climates of my life to get any clear picture of myself. I was always leaving behind what I was just about ready to become. I could never catch up to the boy I might have been if I’d grown up in one place.

*

In 1972, my book The Water Is Wide came out when I was living in Beaufort, South Carolina. It was not the most popular book in South Carolina during that season, but it was extremely popular at the Beaufort Air Station where the Marines and their wives looked to me as a living affirmation of the military way of life. I accepted an invitation to speak to the Marine Corps officers’ wives’ club with the deep sense that some circle was being closed. Seven years earlier my mother had been an officer in the same club and she’d produced the first racially integrated program in the club’s history. Neither of us knew that my speech would mark a turning point in both our lives.

Instead of talking about my new book and my experiences teaching on Daufuskie Island, I spoke of some things I wanted to say about the Marine Corps family. I was the son of a fighter pilot, as were a lot of their kids, and I had some things to tell them. I was the first military brat who’d ever spoken to the club—I was a native son. I could hear the inheld breath of these women as I approached the taboo subject of the kind of husbands and fathers I thought Marines made. For the first time in my life I was hanging the laundry of my childhood out to dry. I told those women of the Corps that I’d met many good soldiers in my life, but precious few good fathers. I also told them of my unbounded admiration for my mother and other military wives I’d met during my career as a brat. But I told those women directly that they shouldn’t let their Marines beat them or their children.

I thought I was giving a speech, but something astonishing was unleashed in that room that day. Some of the women present that day hated me, but some liked me very much. The response was electric, passionate, immediate. Some of the women approached me in tears, others in rage. But that talk to the officers’ wives was the catalyst that first made me sit down and start writing the outline of The Great Santini.

A year later, the day after my father’s retirement parade, my mother left my father after thirty-three years of marriage. Their divorce was ferocious and bitter, but it contained, miraculously, the seeds of my father’s redemption. Alone and without the Corps, he realized that his children were his enemies and that all seven of us thought he hated our guts. The American soldier is not taught to love his enemy or anyone else. Love did not come easily to my father, but he started trying to learn the steps after my mother left him. It was way too late for her, but his kids were ready for it. We’d been waiting all our lives for our Dad to love us.

I had already begun the first chapters of The Great Santini. I wrote about a seventeen-year-old boy, a military brat who’d spent his whole life smiling and pretending that he was the happiest part of a perfect, indivisible American family. I had no experience in writing down the graffiti left along the margins of a boy’s ruined heart. Because I was born a male, I had never wept for the boy who’d once withstood the slaps and blows of one of the Corps’s strongest aviators. I’d never wept for my brothers or sisters or my beautiful and loyal mother, yet I’d witnessed those brutal seasons of their fear and hurt and sadness. Because I was born to be a novelist, I remembered every scene, every beating, every drop of blood shed by my sweet and innocent family for America.

As I wrote, the child of the military in me began to fall apart. I came apart at the seams. For the one thing a military brat is not allowed todo is commit an act of treason. I learned the hard way that truth is a capital offense and so did my family. I created a boy named BenMeecham and I gave him my story. His loneliness, his unbearable solitude almost killed me as I wrote about him. Everything about the boy hurt me, but I kept writing the book because I didn’t know how to stop. My marriage would fall apart and I’d spend several years trying to figure out how not to be crazy because the deep sadness of Ben Meecham and his family touched me with a pity I could not bear. His father could love him only with his fists and I found myself inconsolable as I wrote this. I would stare at pictures of myself taken in high school and could not imagine why any father would want to hit that boy’s face. I wrote The Great Santini through tears, hating everything my father stood for and sickened by his behavior toward his family.

But in the acknowledgment of this hatred, I also found myself composing a love song to my father and to the military way of life. Once when I read Look Homeward, Angel in high school, I’d lamented the fact that my father didn’t have an interesting, artistic profession like Thomas Wolfe’s stonecutter father. But in writing Santini, I realized that Thomas Wolfe’s father never landed jets on aircraft carriers at night, wiped out a battalion of North Korean regulars crossing the Naktong River, or flew to Cuba with his squadron with the mission to clear the Cuban skies of MIGs if the flag went up.

In writing The Great Santini I had to consider the fact of my father’s heroism. His job was extraordinarily dangerous and I never knew it. He never once complained about the perils of his vocation. He was one of those men who make the men of other nations pause before attacking America. I learned that I would not want to be an enemy soldier or tank when Don Conroy passed overhead. My father had made orphans out of many boys and girls in Asia during those years I prayed for God to make an orphan out of me. His job was to kill people when his nation asked him to, pure and simple. And the loving of his kids was never written into his job description.

When my mother left my father she found, to her great distress, that she was leaving the protective embrace of the Corps that she’d served for more than thirty years. She was shaken and disbelieving when a divorce court granted her $500 a month in child support, but informed her she was not entitled to a dime of his retirement pay. The court affirmed that it was the Colonel who had served his country so valiantly, not she. But she’d been an exemplary wife of a Marine officer and it was a career she had carried with rare grace and distinction. Peg Conroy made the whole Marine Corps a better place to be, but her career had a value of nothing when judged in a court of law. My mother died thinking that the Marine Corps had not done right by her. She had always considered herself and her children to be part of the grand design of the military, part of the mission.

There are no ceremonies to mark the end of our career as military brats, either. We simply walk out into our destinies, into the dead center of our lives, and try to make the most of it. After my own career as a military child ended in 1967, I received not a single medal of good conduct, no silver chevrons or leaves, no letter of commendation or retirement parade. I simply walked out of one life and into another. My father cut up my ID card in front of me and told me he’d kill me if he ever caught me trying to buy liquor on base. I had the rest of my life to think about the coming of age of a military child.

Mary’s book has brought it all back again—both the great parts and the hideous ones. She was brave enough to hold nothing back. I felt a great, abiding tenderness for all military brats when I read this book, and a free-flowing, unquenchable pride. Listening to the voices of these nameless men and women included here, I filled up with admiration and pity and love for all of them. We disappear and become invisible the moment we leave our fathers’ homes. We lose everything except the memories of what we’ve done and how we did it.

Mary Edwards Wertsch tells us we did it exceptionally well.

*

As I was reading this book, it moved me so many times that I could feel the novelist inside me fighting to the surface for air. The novelist kept trying to change Mary’s book and make it something it wasn’t. I imagined that all of us could meet on some impeccably manicured field, all the military brats, in a gathering so vast that it would be like the assembling of some vivid and undauntable army. We could come together on this parade ground at dusk, million voiced and articulating our secret anthems of hurt and joy. We could praise each other in voices that understand both the magnificence and pain of our transient lives. Our greatest tragedy is that we don’t know each other. Our stories could help us to see and understand what it is we all have lived through and endured.

At the end of our assembly, we could pass in review in a parade of unutterable beauty. As brats, we’ve watched a thousand parades on a thousand weekends. We’ve shined shoes and polished brass and gotten every bedroom we ever slept in ready for Saturday morning inspection. A parade would be a piece of cake for the military brats of the world.

I would put all of our fathers in the reviewing stand, and require that they come in full dress uniform and in the prime of life. I want our fathers handsome and strong and feared by all the armies of the world the day they attend our parade.

To the ancient beat of drums we could pass by those erect and silent rows of fathers. What a fearful word father is to so many of us, but not on this day, when the marchers keep perfect step and the command for eyes right roars through our disciplined ranks and we turn to face our fathers in that crowd of warriors.

In this parade, these men would understand the nature and the value of their children’s sacrifice for the first time. Our fathers would stand at rigid attention. Then they would begin to salute us, one by one, and in that salute, that one sign of recognition, of acknowledgment, they would thank us for the first time. They would be thanking their own children for their fortitude and courage and generosity and long suffering, for enduring a military childhood.

But most of all the salute would be for something no military man in this country has ever acknowledged. The gathering of fighting men would be thanking their children, their fine and resourceful children, who were strangers in every town they entered, thanking them for their extraordinary service to their country, for the sacrifices they made over and over again to the United States of America, to its ideals of freedom, to its preservation, and to its everlasting honor.

Mary points out in this splendid book something that’s never been pointed out before: that military brats, my lost tribe, spent their entire youth in service to this country and no one even knew we were there. This book is our acknowledgment. This book is our parade.

I wrote The Great Santini because in many ways the book was the only way I could take to the skies in the dark-winged jets, move through those competitive ranks of aviators and become, at last, my father’s wingman.

And with this book, Mary Edwards Wertsch has taken up the guidon in her father’s well-trained regiment. For this book proves that no matter how brave Col. Edwards was in battle, his daughter is every bit the warrior her father was.

—Pat Conroy

CHAPTER 1

TROUPERS

Life in the military is about fronts. Appearances. Masks. The stage persona. That’s an important part of military life. Our parents were always obsessively concerned about how things looked. When we were growing up, every aspect of personal and private life was a measure of our fathers’ professional competence.

—a military brat

When asked by civilians if it was really all that different to grow up in the military, we children of the Fortress sometimes draw a blank. In our gut we know it was different. Very different. But how to explain? It’s possible, of course, to point out that it’s all the difference between living under an authoritarian regime and living in a democracy, but that doesn’t go far enough. It might supply a bird’s-eye view of structure and form, but it leaves out the heart, the flavor, the drama.

And drama is the key. Growing up inside the Fortress is like being drafted into a gigantic theater company. The role of the warrior society, even in peacetime, is to exist in a state of perpetual readiness: one continuous dress rehearsal for war. The principal actors are immaculately costumed, carefully scripted, and supplied with a vast array of props. They practice elaborate large-scale stage movements—land, air, and sea exercises simulating attacks and defenses. But even apart from such massive stagings, the minutiae of form in each costumed actor are carefully shaped to the last detail. No liberties may be taken with the way a warrior-actor stands, walks, salutes, speaks; this is not a theater of improvisation.

And then there is the supporting cast: the wives—who may lack costumes but whose lines and movements are crafted every bit as carefully—and the children, the understudies.

But the thing about the drama of the military is that it is not confined, as movies would have it, to the most spectacular scenes of families parting and reuniting, of actual combat, of military funerals. Drama is the very medium of life inside the Fortress, its color and texture, a quality that so thoroughly imbues even the most ordinary moments that it cannot be subtracted. Shopping at the commissary, riding home on a bike, sitting in a movie theater—even the most trivial actions can have a staged, rehearsed feeling to them that is largely alien to the civilian world.

Take, for example, something as inconsequential as a tape player at a base movie theater going on the blink. An Air Force son who, as a teenager, happened to be in a theater when that happened one night, described the scene: The airmen, officers, and their families were settling into their seats when, as usual, the curtains opened to reveal a gigantic American flag on the screen. On cue, everyone put down their popcorn and drinks and rose to attention, fully expecting to hear the national anthem as it played over the loudspeakers. But for some reason the tape didn’t play that evening, and the silent crowd began to fidget uneasily, unsure of what to do. With the flag still on the screen, it was impossible to sit down. To stand at attention until the tape player was repaired would be absurd. But to sit down and watch the film without having performed the expected patriotic duty was unthinkable. Then an officer in the audience took charge: In a commanding voice he began reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Every voice in the theater joined him; and at the end, like an umpire at a baseball game or a field commander ordering an attack, he shouted, Show the film! Only then did the audience resume their seats.

Or take another moment of everyday military life: the precise moment of 1700 hours (5:00 P.M.), any day of the week, on any American military base anywhere in the United States or abroad. At the stroke of 1700—one could set one’s watch by it, if it weren’t irreverent—loud-speakers all around the base sound the first bugle notes of Retreat. All movement stops. Forget rush hour, forget the beckoning of dinnertime, forget the shopping and the chores. Cars pull over. Occupants get out. Children dismount from their bikes. Pedestrians stop in their tracks. Golfers put down their clubs. In the base commissary, where the speaker system plays the same notes, shoppers halt, cash registers are silent.

And everyone turns in the direction of the base’s main flag. Even if they cannot see it, they all know where it is. If in uniform, they stand in stiff salute; if not, they stand straight and motionless, hand over heart. Then there is the deep BOOM-echo-echo of the cannon firing, followed by the bugle playing To the Colors. Out of vision of all but a few, the flag is being lowered for the day. In this most nationalistic of all American communities, respect must be paid.

But it bears keeping in mind that the life of the Fortress turns not merely on patriotic fervor. This is an authoritarian world. The reverential nature of the daily ritual of Retreat, one might notice, does not prevent the devout from casting indignant sidelong stares at the few cars or pedestrians that keep moving. If these violators of tradition are recognized, they will be reported. For if 1700 is the hour of patriotic witness, it is also the hour of conformity.

A mile away, perhaps less, the civilian community might as well be on another planet. No mass ritual, no patriotic devotion, no conformity, and, some would say, no sense of mission.

The Militarization of Childhood

The coaching that directs military children to assume their proper roles in the theatrical company of the Fortress begins quite early. For some it starts in the cradle. Many military brats begin life in a way that leaves little doubt about their parents’ wish to imprint the warrior image.

Before they have had time even to suckle their mothers, some military children carry the freight of their parents’ expectations in the form of the warrior names they are given to bear: Dwight (for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower), Omar (for Gen. Omar Bradley), Lewis (for Gen. Lewis Chesty Puller), John Paul (for Adm. John