A Documentary About Military Brats

"BRATS: Our Journey Home" Movie Trailer
(Windows Media Player)

"BRATS: Our Journey Home" website

Discovering My "Tribe"

Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini, in his introduction to Mary Edwards Wertsch’s Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress:

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.

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 a 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.

I am so grateful to my counselor for recommending this book to me! I’ve only just begun reading the excerpts available online, but the little I’ve read so far resonates like nothing ever has before. Mary describes military brats as belonging to a tribe of our own, that we "are America's most invisible minority", and although "many aspects of warrior life described in this book are not unique to the Fortress, 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."

One more quote from the preface of Mary Edwards Wertsch’s Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress that I think is important to include here:

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 your 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.