Off to War

by Deborah Ellis

  There are protesters against the war in the United States, too. I believe that if you live in America — I’m not trying to put down anyone’s religion or opinions — but if you’re going to be an American you should believe in the military and in what the military is doing. It’s because of the military that America hasn’t been taken over or blown up.

  If terrorists see the protests, they might think our country is weak and try to blow us up.

  If we were attacked, who would protect us if not the military? Random people? Random people might be good people, but that doesn’t mean they can protect the country. They’d need weapons and someone to tell them what to do and how to do it. That’s what an army does.

  I can understand being angry with the president. When I was six, I wrote a letter to President George W. Bush. I asked him, “Why did you send my daddy to Afghanistan?” I asked Mom to mail it, but she didn’t. I was just angry because I didn’t want Dad to leave.

  So you can be angry, but you should still support the president, and the army, because that’s how you support America. I know a lot about being a military kid because I came from many generations of military kids. My dad was in the army, and my grandfather and my great-grandfather and my mom, and maybe my sister will be. I know of some military kids whose parents didn’t make it back. Even if parents just stay in the United States and don’t go overseas, it can still be dangerous. To get into Fort Indiantown Gap, you need a special ID badge, but terrorists could copy those, and then there would be a lot of people in danger, right here in America!

  My advice to other military kids? A few things. One is don’t send your parents stuffed animals. We sent one to our dad — a bear in a uniform — but he sent it back to us because it would have gotten dirty in Afghanistan. Send them practical things like pencils and notebooks so they can write to you. And pray, of course. Prayer can be your best friend.

  When your parents go away, you have to believe in yourself, and believe in your parents, and believe you can all get through the ups and downs together.

  Matthew, 11

  Before the invasion of Iraq, military families had lower rates of child abuse than civilian families did. But a 2007 study funded by the military and published by the American Medical Association showed that after the invasion, rates of abuse rose to become higher than in civilian families. Children were at greater risk when their military parent was overseas. The stress on the remaining parent — often a combination of financial and child-care worries, combined with exhaustion and constant anxiety about their partner’s well-being — is seen as the reason behind this rise.

  Matthew and his mother live on base at CFB Petawawa. They have a good relationship, and have learned how to work through the difficulties they had while Matthew’s father was in Afghanistan, where he commanded a tank crew in Kandahar and was involved in direct combat, including the 2006 attack on a building called the White School, a Taliban headquarters, which resulted in several Canadian casualties.

  I’m in grade five. My father is a sergeant. He’s been with the army for eighteen years. I have one brother. He’s six years old.

  Canada has always been one of the world’s main peacekeeping countries. We’re part of the United Nations, and we’ve helped out in Israel, Croatia, Bosnia, Egypt. Lots of places. We’ve kept the peace there and prevented people from fighting. We’ve also helped to stop wars before they even start to happen. No one wants World War One or Two again.

  The Taliban is causing a lot of trouble in Afghanistan. We’re trying to stop them, through being there with our tanks and through aggressive negotiations.

  Dad had a rough time in Afghanistan, a very stressful time. He was right in where all the heavy fighting was. We all knew that there was a strong possibility that he could be hurt or killed. Mom in particular was really stressed. She kept hearing on the news and from her friends about all the fighting that was going on, and that made her very jumpy and upset. I guess it made me get that way, too. Dad was close to dying a few times over there. We knew he was in trouble, and Mom and I didn’t always handle it well.

  She was stressed so she’d yell a lot, and I was stressed and I’d yell back, and the whole thing was really a mess. What was really going on was that we were both worried about Dad, and there was nothing we could do about that. We couldn’t go over to Afghanistan and make him come home with us. So we didn’t have any power to make our worry go away. We were scared and frustrated and angry, and we yelled at each other because we didn’t know what else to do.

  It’s hard for me to talk about that time. It wasn’t good, with Dad being away and with Mom mostly really angry or really sad. I tried to keep myself away from conflict and bad emotions, but I wasn’t always successful.

  One of the things Dad was involved in over in Afghanistan was the attack on the White School. It was a bad time. Dad got shrapnel in his shoulder, really close to a vein. He could have died from blood loss.

  Two of his commanding officers have died in Afghanistan. Lots of other soldiers have died there, too. Lots from Petawawa.

  There was one time when they were in a battle with the Taliban. The Taliban had a makeshift base, maybe in an old prison or something, right beside a big marijuana field. The Taliban grows opium and marijuana to help them fund the war. It was a big battle, and five soldiers died.

  Dad doesn’t talk about the war very much. He talked just one time about it, but since then he’s basically just kept quiet. I don’t really like to ask him. I don’t want to let my mind go to it. I’d rather focus on things I like, such as reading, video games, normal eleven-year-old-kid things. I don’t want to think about Dad walking in the desert, maybe having someone shooting at him.

  He would phone every three weeks or so when he was away. That’s how we learned he’d been wounded, because he didn’t call for awhile, so we figured something was wrong. He was in the hospital and couldn’t call us.

  Dad seems a little quieter now than he used to be. I kind of missed him when he was gone, and I kind of didn’t, because he would yell at me a lot when he was around, and I get kind of tired of that. But he’s been a little quieter since he got home. I think he saw real things wrong in Afghanistan, so the things that I do wrong don’t seem like such a big deal anymore. Anyway, he doesn’t yell as much.

  I know he felt pretty sad because of his guys who got killed. They were his friends, but even if they weren’t really close friends, you all want to look out for each other in a war. Even if you don’t know the person who gets killed beside you, it’s still hard.

  Mentally, there is a lot of stress on some soldiers. They’ve been hurt, or even if they weren’t hurt physically, their minds have been hurt from being shot at and bombed. It’s really affected them, and then they go home and it affects their families. They all need help to get through it.

  I don’t think I’ll join the military. I just don’t want to be part of a war. I would stand up for my country, but I hope there’s a way to do that without being part of the military. My ambition is to become a teacher.

  My advice is to try not to focus on the bad things. Keep your mind on the good things. You’ll get through it easier.

  Darby, 12

  The role of the US Special Forces is to put people secretly behind enemy lines, to gain an advantage over the opposition. Special Forces groups include the Rangers, Psychological Warfare Operations, Civil Affairs, Special Operations Aviation, the 82nd Airborne, and others. Formalized during World War II, they are branches of the service that conduct secret military operations around the world. Many of these Special Forces train in Fort Bragg. Their work is celebrated in the JFK Special Warfare Museum on the post.

  Darby is the youngest child in a military family, and she was even named after a colonel. Based in Fort Bragg, her father is a major who works in the area of military intelligence, which means she can never really know what he’s doing. He has been deployed to Iraq five times.

  My father is in Iraq again. I have a photo of h
im here, with a smile on his face. Mom says this was the last glimpse she had of him before he left. That was three months ago. This time is going to be his longest deployment ever, for fifteen months.

  I’m holding up pretty good. I try not to think about it, really. We get a call from him pretty much every day. He’s an F2, a senior military intelligence officer for the Headquarters Company of the 1st Brigade Combat Team.

  When he phones we don’t talk about his work, because that’s secret, so we talk about what’s been going on here, how school is going, what sports I might join, how he liked the last care package, how our pets are doing. We have a Spanish terrier named Colonel and a cat named Major. We call him Major Brat Cat. And we have a Russian hamster named Hagrid. I don’t know how he’s different from a regular hamster, except maybe in the looks he gives us. He has a very evil look.

  I have a twenty-six-year-old sister named Jessica, a twenty-five-year-old sister named Martha, and a twenty-three-year-old brother named Ricky.

  Dad’s deployments are really close together. He was with the National Security Agency in Fort Mead, Maryland, so his earlier deployments were shorter because they couldn’t spare him for very long. He was name-requested for the job he has now in Iraq. He does a lot of briefings, and a general liked him and asked him to go back to Iraq. But he had to go right away, and he had only just gotten home.

  Dad told my mother about it by sitting her down and giving her a piece of chocolate cake and a cup of hot tea. As soon as he put the cake in front of her she knew something was up. We were all set to move to a base in Germany — Darmstadt — but we came here instead. I didn’t really want to go to Germany anyway. We’d already lived there, in Heidelberg, from the time I was three until I was seven. I’d lived in Fort Bragg, too, but not since I was a baby. We moved to Fort Mead after Germany and stayed there for five years. We’d just moved here and bought a house — our first house — and Dad was in it for four weeks and one day before he left.

  We bought a house because there wasn’t anything available on post when we moved here. You put your name on a waiting list, but we were pressed for time because we knew that as soon as we got here Dad would be deployed. So we bought a house. We’re hoping to be here at least three years. Dad wants us to be here until I graduate from high school, but with the army, well, we can only hope.

  Dad’s been in the military sixteen and a half years. He says he joined at college because they’d pay him to stay fit. And he thought it looked cool. And he always wanted to be an Airborne Ranger. Before military intelligence, he was an infantry — a ground-pounder. He’s a walking advertisement for GI Joe. He really loves it.

  Daddy wants me to do any career I want to do. Just because he likes the military, he knows it’s not for everyone, and he wants me to find things that I want to do, and not just join up because he likes it. I think I’d like to be a veterinarian or a doctor.

  The army is in Iraq to give us freedom and to let us live our lives in peace, and to protect America from anything bad that could happen. Freedom means to live in harmony with others, not be bad people, not to hurt anyone, and be a good person to other people who need help.

  The military is special in being able to bring those qualities out in a person because they sacrifice their lives for the United States of America to make sure all the people in America live in peace.

  I’m a pretty good student. I’m the top one in language arts. I just found out today, and I got a pencil with a smiley face on it as a reward! I also enjoy PE, art and social studies. Right now we’re learning about latitude and longitude — that’s very interesting — and the 3A’s, which is Africa, Asia and Australia.

  This is my first year back in the public school system after being home-schooled for three years. The schools at Fort Mead were awful. Fort Mead is just outside Baltimore and Washington, DC. Even though Fort Mead is a closed installation, particularly after 9/11, the Fort Mead schools are last resorts for kids that were kicked out of other schools, so we got a lot of kids who didn’t want to be there, and they let everyone know. Mom worked there for a year as a lunch monitor, and got all shocked by what she saw, so my parents decided to home-school me. Mom was trying to finish up college at the same time, so we studied together, and it worked out perfect. She’d make sure that I’d get up in the morning and get my work done, and every Friday I went to a community center to do computers and PE. I met up with a lot of my friends there because they were home-schooled, too.

  One of the good things about being a military kid is you get to travel. I don’t get carsick or anything. I’ve skied in the Swiss Alps, I’ve been to the Mediterranean, I’ve been to lots of places.

  I went to Camp Darby in Italy for ten days. It’s a US military installation with a campground and a beach. I’ve been to Poland to go pottery shopping, and to the Czech Republic, where Daddy bought a teapot and we kept going around and around this big traffic circle because he couldn’t get into the right lane. Daddy was hungry and he gets grouchy when he’s hungry. We needed to get food into him so he’d be human again. He was like, “I’m an officer in the United States military and I need to get out of this circle!” It was pretty funny.

  Sometimes the soldiers he works with will call Mom and say, “Ma’am, he’s in a bad mood,” and she’ll go, “Give me five minutes, I’ll bring him some chow.” Then he’ll eat and be all cheerful again. And the soldiers will whisper, “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Dad calls Mom “Headquarters Six,” so that when his aides say, “Headquarters Six is on the line, sir,” he knows it’s Mom calling.

  My mother comes from a military family, too. Her dad spent thirty-two years in the navy. He was in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

  Mom was a combat water-safety trainer for the Fourth Ranger Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia, when she met Daddy. She trained soldiers how to not drown even in full combat gear. Daddy was one of her students. When she first met him he looked down at her — he’s very tall — and said, “There’s no way you’re in the infantry!” and she said, “You’re a smart man!” and pushed him in the pool. That’s how they met.

  The hard part about being an army kid is when your dad has to deploy and you don’t want him to deploy.

  The last time he left, we actually had to go to work with him. And this was unusual because we’ve never been able to do that before. He usually goes overseas with a small group, but this time he was going with a whole battalion. We were there from 08:00 to 21:00. We had to sit in his office and wait for him to have all his meetings and gather all his stuff. It was a very good lesson to see all the other families that it happened to, not just us being affected. We got to see the equipment that he had to be issued, everything he had to wear on him, and all the young families and new soldiers with their pregnant wives who wouldn’t be able to see their babies being born, and mothers who were soldiers saying goodbye to their kids. It was a real education. Some families got mad at each other, too. Mom said for some it would be easier to part that way. We kept trying to leave and Daddy kept saying, “You don’t need to go yet.” That’s not like him to do that, because he’s a very, “Roger that!” and “Hua-hua!” kind of guy.

  I don’t really think about the anti-war protesters. I don’t see them on the news because I don’t watch the news. Daddy doesn’t like us to watch the news while he’s deployed because he thinks it will only get us upset.

  When I saw all the guns he had with him when he was leaving, that got a little freaky. He had lots of guns, and also these night goggles so he can see in the dark.

  I was named Darby by my father, after Darby’s Ranger School. Colonel William O. Darby is the man who started the US Rangers. I’m wearing dogtags Dad gave me. When a person dies in a war, they put this little tag on their toe, and send the long one home to his family to let them know he died. Mine says my name and Love, Papa.

  My advice for other military kids is try not to think about it. Carry on with what you are doing in your own life. Don’t get u
pset, and write letters and send packages to your parents. Licorice sticks — Twizzlers — my dad loves those so I feel better when I send him some. Wet wipes, too, because they don’t get baths every day. Mom sends him smokeless tobacco, too, even though it’s gross, because you can’t always smoke in the field.

  So do all that, and have a sense of humor. My family are all big laughers. That really helps.

  Dylan, 11

  Members of the Reserves and National Guard usually work part-time. When they are deployed, their employers are obligated by law to have their jobs available for them on their return. While they are serving, they are paid at military rates. Military pay is a way out of poverty for some. For others, it brings financial hardship, particularly for those who never expected to be sent into battle for fifteen months at a time. Their military pay may not be enough to cover their civilian mortgages and expenses.

  Several military bases have food banks and charity drop-offs, and 25,000 American military families are eligible for food stamps (a government assistance program that helps low-income families buy food). Some military families would find it difficult to manage without this assistance.

  Dylan and his family live in Ohio. His father, a part-time soldier with the Army Reserves, is now on his third tour of duty in Iraq.

  My father is back in Iraq again now. It’s his third time there. I’m really sad that he’s there, and I miss him a lot. The worst part is all the scary things that could happen to him. He could get shot or blown up or be killed or come back really hurt or different, and it can be really hard to keep those thoughts from taking over my brain sometimes.

  Dad always comes back okay, though. Well, the last two times he did. He just went over there again for the third time, so he’s got another year before he comes back to us. A lot can happen in a year. He drives trucks, transporting food and oil around the country. It’s supposed to be safe, but, you know, things can happen.