Off to War

by Deborah Ellis

  By Deborah Ellis

  Looking for X

  The Breadwinner

  Parvana’s Journey

  Mud City

  Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak

  I Am a Taxi

  Sacred Leaf

  Jakeman

  OFF TO WAR

  OFF TO WAR

  VOICES OF SOLDIERS’ CHILDREN

  DEBORAH ELLIS

  Copyright © 2008 by Deborah Ellis

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2008 by Groundwood Books.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyight). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  All photographs are courtesy of the author.

  Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

  or c/o Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ellis, Deborah

  Off to war : voices of soldiers’ children / Deborah Ellis.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-894-1 (bound).–ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-895-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-88899-894-5 (bound).–ISBN-10: 0-88899-895-3 (pbk.)

  1. Children and war–Juvenile literature. 2. Children of military

  personnel–United States–Interviews–Juvenile literature. 3. Children of

  military personnel–Canada–Interviews–Juvenile literature. I. Title.

  U765.E45 2008 j303.6’6083 C2008-900523-6

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  A common comment from adults (parents and educators) is some version of “military children are adaptable, tough and resilient kids, who usually have wonderful rich life experiences.” Still, they are children first and connected to the military second.

  — From Parent Guidebook, US Army Secondary Education Transition Study, Military Family Resource Center, Arlington, Virginia

  OFF TO WAR

  Introduction

  For the past several years, Canadian and American soldiers have been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. One million American military personnel have taken part in these wars, and about 13,500 Canadian soldiers have been in Afghanistan. The reasons for their participation are complicated and controversial, and their ongoing role in these countries is highly debated.

  Beyond the financial and political costs of these wars, there is a high human cost. Untold numbers of civilians living in Iraq and Afghanistan, including many children, have lost their homes, their livelihoods and their lives due to these wars, which they did not seek and in which they have not participated other than as innocent victims.

  But participating in a war as a soldier also carries a high cost. Part of that cost is being paid by the military families who are left behind, especially the children. As the wars drag on, deployments (time spent in war zones) are extended and repeated. Mothers and fathers are returning home altered by their experience of being involved in killing and surrounded by devastation, and sometimes finding their families changed, too, in their absence.

  According to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, 1.2 million young people in the United States have at least one parent in the armed forces. In Canada the numbers are smaller, but the war in Afghanistan involves a large percentage of Canada’s armed forces, many of whom have families.

  In this book we will meet some of these children. Some live on military bases and some live in civilian communities. Some have grown up surrounded by military culture; others have suddenly found themselves thrust into the middle of it. Some support the wars and their governments, some oppose them, and still others have other things to think about.

  Their voices remind us that the military is made up of individuals with different viewpoints, beliefs, reasons for joining, and ways of being with their children. They remind us that when we send an army off to war, we are sending human beings with families and friends. And they remind us that in any war, it is always children who are the biggest losers — children whose voices are rarely heard.

  It was an honor to meet these children and their families. They have much to tell us.

  Deborah Ellis

  Matt, 16, Allison, 11, and Lewis, 9

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is one of the largest military bases in the United States, with 45,000 soldiers and 8,500 civilian employees. These numbers do not include the families who also live on post. Founded in 1918 to train infantry, or foot soldiers, it was expanded to become a training center for airborne regiments (soldiers who are flown or parachuted into battle) and for Special Forces (highly trained soldiers who fight in secret missions).

  In addition to training areas, Fort Bragg has many neighborhoods where families live. There are schools, shops, restaurants, skating rinks, bowling alleys, golf courses, swimming pools, movie theaters, museums and a library alongside shooting ranges, a parachute jump school, and top-secret training areas for the Special Operations Unit. The Tolson Youth Activities Center includes dozens of clubs offering arts, sports, computer and social activities.

  Matt, Allison and Lewis come from a long line of military relatives, and their father has been deployed overseas several times. Their mother is a leader with the local Family Readiness Group (FRG), a military-sponsored program to help communications between families and the military.

  Allison — Our father is a sergeant major. He goes overseas a lot, and he’s about to go over again, this time to Afghanistan. I’m kind of used to it happening. It happens so often.

  Before he goes we try to do special things together and have fun, and whenever he comes back we do another fun time. We’re planning to go to Hawaii when he comes back from this trip.

  When he’s away, we’re not able to go to as many places because he’s not around to drive us there. Mom can’t drive us everywhere, and sometimes she has meetings of her own to go to. She’s the Family Readiness Group leader for the battalion.

  Dad’s been to Albania. He gave me a teddy bear from there. He’s been to Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Bosnia, Panama and the first and second Gulf Wars. This is his sixteenth tour.

  Lewis — I’m the third Lewis, and Dad is the second. The first Lewis is our grandpa, who served in Vietnam. My mother comes from a military family, too. And my father’s stepfather did a combat jump in Europe with the 82nd Airborne in World War II.

  Matt — I’ve gotten used to the transition of him leaving. Now I hardly even think about it. There’s more responsibility put on me. I have to assume, to some degree, the role of the father figure. If the kids have a question, they don’t have Dad to go to, so they come to me, or to Mom, whoever’s there. I have to watch over them when Mom’s away, instead of Dad. I do spend more time with the kids when Dad’s deployed than I do when he’s here, I guess because when he’s here I’m more concentrated on separate matters, like on what I want to do. When he’s gone, I have to balance out what I want to do with what’s going on with everybody else.

  There’s more chores to do, too, without Dad’s extra pair of hands. It wasn’t until recently that these two started doing chores. It’s little things that add up. When Dad’s here, he does the laundry, but when he’s gone, that falls on me. I don’t mind doing it. And fixing things around the house. When h
e’s here, I try to pick up a few of his skills so that I can take over when he’s gone again.

  Allison — I do the dishes more when Dad’s gone. Matt usually does them, but he gets busy with the laundry.

  Lewis — I don’t do any of Matt’s chores. He wants me to, but so far I’ve managed not to. I’m on garbage detail. That’s my chore. The house would be pretty smelly if I didn’t take care of it.

  Matt — It’s kind of a give and take. If you want to receive, you have to give. I’ve found that if you give more than you receive, oftentimes people are a lot happier with you.

  I have to think of the family as a whole to make it all work. If I only thought of myself, then the whole family would be miserable, which would make me miserable, so I wouldn’t be happy anyway.

  It makes me feel better when everything works, and when I’ve had a hand in making it work.

  Even though Dad’s been in the army all my life and has always gone away, I never really adjusted to it until two deployments ago. It hit me that it’s only going to get longer from here on out.

  At first, I’d be bawling every time Dad left. Eventually it just kind of sank in. There’s no point in crying over it because I know he’s going to come home.

  I remember one time he got deployed, came home for a little while, and was gone so long I forgot what he looked like. That’s not exactly a pleasant thing. He showed up in the car and I thought to myself, “Maybe. Maybe that’s him.” Then he called out to me, and I’m like, “Yay! Daddy!”

  Allison — I’m used to Dad leaving. I’m not a good rememberer, so I don’t remember me bawling for Dad, but I do remember I was happy when he came home. I wasn’t happy when he left, but I wasn’t crying all over the place. I know that he goes, a couple of months go by, he comes back, then he goes again.

  Lewis — I haven’t gotten used to it. I’m not used to it at all.

  Matt — I don’t think we ever talked about the dangers Dad faces. He goes into some pretty dangerous situations, but we’ve never sat down together and talked about what could happen.

  Allison — We kind of did when he was hurt that time, when that bomb went off. He was in Iraq then.

  Matt — Mom found out through an email that he’d been hurt. It just said that he’d been wounded. We were in Florida on vacation — it was over the holidays — and we drove back to North Carolina right away. The army set up a video teleconference so we could see Dad. His deployment had just started and he had another six or eight months to go, so they didn’t want to send him home if he could heal there. A suicide bomber drove a car onto Dad’s military installation. Dad got some cuts on the face and shrapnel wounds.

  It helped that we could see him and see that he was okay, even though he was wounded.

  Allison — Daddy had a lot of hair then. He’s bald now.

  Matt — We’re certainly aware of what could happen.

  Lewis — When I was little, I’d see Daddy get on the plane and the plane would fly away and I thought Dad was in the plane for the whole deployment. I kept looking up at planes in the sky, in case he was on one of them.

  Allison — We have a map where we can keep track of where Dad is. And we have a box where we can put in our school papers and report cards we want him to see. When the box is full we send it off. He’s going to miss our whole school year this year, but we’ll send him our papers so he’ll know what we’re doing. Mom videotapes our school plays, too.

  He’s leaving in a few days and he won’t be back until next year.

  Matt — Dad’s work is so secret that we don’t know what he does. We don’t even ask him about it because we know we’re not allowed to know. Mom is the leader of the readiness group, so she gets information and knows more than a lot of people about what’s going on, but even she’s not allowed to know what Dad does.

  She says it’s sometimes a good thing that she doesn’t know everything. She’ll hear on the news that we’ve lost another soldier and they’ll give the location, and if she knew Dad was there she wouldn’t sleep for days until she heard that he was all right.

  She gets notified whenever a soldier from the battalion is killed because it’s her job to help the families.

  Allison—We all help with that. We’ll cook meals and take them over to the family of the fallen soldier, or spend time with the kids so their mother can make phone calls and plan the funeral.

  Matt — There’s a casualty team that helps plan those things, too. Mom says the battalion is like one big family, and we have to take care of each other. We don’t have blood family here. The army moves people around the world. Our nearest blood relative is thirteen hours away. You have to rely on your military family. There are six hundred soldiers in the battalion, and it’s Mom’s job to look after all their families. It’s a big job, so we help her out with that.

  Allison — Sometimes other kids will come over to our house for the night for a sleepover because their mom needs a night off. And we put together fifty care packages a month to send over to the soldiers.

  Lewis — We get it all set up on the living-room floor. We send lots of candy, mini-footballs they can play catch with, sock puppets, card games, books, magazines. Mom finds things at the dollar store she thinks the soldiers would like, and we send it all off.

  Allison — I have no idea what the United States is doing in Iraq.

  Lewis — They don’t tell us.

  Matt — A lot of people say our country is just after the oil. I personally don’t believe that’s completely true. Iraq does have oil, but we’re not over there to steal it. We’re simply trying to clean up a mess that’s been around for awhile. We’re trying to liberate the Middle East, one area at a time. It may seem like a slow process, but I think we’re getting somewhere.

  Lewis — I want to join the military when I grow up to be like the rest of the family and carry on the tradition. I haven’t thought about what job I’d want to do, though.

  Allison — He doesn’t really know much about the military. He just wants to be like his dad.

  Matt — The army life is all I’ve ever known, so I might as well stick to something I’m used to. I’d probably go completely insane if I had to stay in one place for too long. The military has the best benefits out of any job, and it’s a guaranteed job. No layoffs. Every country needs a military, and the United States is never going to be without one. It comes with risks, but I don’t really think I’ll want to do another job. And the military is not just one job. It’s thousands of jobs working together.

  Allison — I’m not joining the military. I’m going to be a veterinarian.

  It wouldn’t change my opinion of Dad if he had to kill somebody. One of my middle school teachers was in the military for twenty-two years, and she said that killing somebody is the last resort of defense. So if you’re defending yourself, it’s okay.

  Lewis — That’s what I think, too.

  Matt — It wouldn’t change my opinion of him at all. In the army, even in the infantry, the aim of things is never to kill the subject, but keep it so they don’t attack. If they attack you, then you have the right to attack back.

  It’s not like the army is telling you, “Aim for the head.” They’re telling you, “Aim for the center of mass,” which is the body. If the enemy dies, it’s because — I don’t want to say they deserved it — but it was called for. They attacked you, you simply retaliated to defend your life. And if someone dies in the process of that, it’s kind of one of those things that is in a sense out of your hands.

  Allison — Dad is always a little different when he comes back from deployments because he has to get used to America again, and the sleeping times are different, too, so he’s really tired.

  Matt — He’s always overjoyed that he’s in the States where no one is trying to shoot at him.

  There’s always the one-hour time period after he first gets off the plane. That’s the only time I ever hear him cuss. He never swears around us, except when he’s just come back from be
ing out in the field for eight months with a bunch of grunts. He has to make his language family-rated again, but that usually takes him only about an hour.

  Mom does counseling with families, and sometimes there are problems with coming back together after being apart. Sometimes people have nightmares. And sometimes a soldier will come back after a year of making others follow orders, and now he’s living again with a wife and kids who don’t want to be ordered around! And it’s sometimes hard for him to know how to fit in, because the family has managed fine without him for a year and a half.

  Allison — Dad leaves for six or eight months. He comes home for maybe two months, then he’s off again for another eight months. We just start to get used to him being around when he leaves again.

  Lewis — We’ve gotten used to it. He misses most holidays. He misses everyone’s birthday, even his own.

  Matt — But you can’t blame anyone for that. That’s just the job. And it makes us want to make the most of the time we have together.

  You have to want to make it work. This is the life my family’s always known, but we still have to work at it. Mom has very strict rules. She doesn’t allow anyone to raise their voice. We have to be respectful to one another. There are moments when we’re not, but we always come back to that.

  Time is short. When we say goodbye next week, it might really be goodbye.

  Allison — My advice for other army kids is don’t overdramatize when your parents are going overseas. If you do, you’ll just make it harder for yourself because you’ll be so worried you could actually make yourself sick. Find someone you can trust if you need to talk to someone, like your mom, or your pastor, or a friend, or a school guidance counselor. Find some way to relieve your stress. You have your own life to live.

  Jordan, 14

  Jordan lives on the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ontario. CFB Trenton was opened in 1931 as a base for the Royal Canadian Air Force. It is still primarily an air base, where giant cargo planes take off for war zones, and where soldiers killed in battle first land when they return to Canada.