Off to War

by Deborah Ellis

  Dad came home on break two-thirds through his war time, so when he left to go back, we didn’t cry, because we knew that the longest time was over, and he’d be back soon. Also, he came back safe once, so he’ll come back safe again. We don’t have to worry so much.

  We have other things to worry about, though. Mom and Dad have been fighting a lot, and they might get divorced. They fight when he’s away and they fight when he comes home on leave. I think it’s because he’s away that they fight so much. It takes time to get along with people. It takes time if you disagree with someone to work through what you disagree about, and Mom and Dad never have time. They really try, but they don’t have enough time.

  When Dad was home on leave, Mom wanted him to fix the pipes in the basement. He’s a mechanic and he knows how to do things like that. But there were a lot of other things to do, to fix, plus we went on a holiday, plus he was really tired. He doesn’t get much sleep in Iraq. So he tried to get to the pipes but he ran out of time and energy and they were still not working. And now they’ve really broken and our basement is full of water. So Mom’s angry with Dad about that, because she’s got three kids to look after and pipes that are a mess, and it’s really hard for her. That’s the kind of thing they fight about.

  To make it worse, Dad’s mother is always going at my mom, blaming her for Dad having to go to Iraq. That’s really hard on my mom, because it wasn’t her decision to send Dad over there! And it’s not her decision when he comes back! But my father’s mom is too upset to really believe that. It’s easier for her to blame my mother than the government, because she can get to my mother and the government is far away.

  I just came home from a summer camp that was all military kids. It was great because I usually don’t get to spend a lot of time with other kids like me. Our dad’s in the Reserves, not in the full-time army, so we don’t live on a base. We did a lot of fun stuff at the camp — ordinary kid stuff, but we also did things just meant for military kids.

  They told us at the camp that we should be proud of ourselves, because we are also serving the country, even though we are just kids. We’re serving by being proud of the people we love who are fighting to keep us free.

  It means a lot to me to be proud of my country, and to be happy about Americans being good people and doing good things in the world. Not that all Americans are good. Some people here think we should go back to the days of slavery. But most people here are good.

  Probably most people in Iraq are good, just like we are. They’re not all trying to bomb us. But a few people are not as good as we think they should be, and I guess that’s why we’re in Iraq. Although I don’t really know what we’re doing there.

  Truthfully, I don’t understand 9/11, either. We hear about it all the time, and we have tapes and DVDs about it at home, but I was really young when it happened — five or six — and I really don’t understand why we were attacked, or who did it. People talk a lot about it, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Plus, it was a long time ago.

  I don’t know if I’ll join the military or not. I guess it would be a job, but all my friends think I should be an artist or a writer. I write awesome stories, and I’m writing a novel now. I’ve got three chapters done. It’s all about magical tricks. I think it’s pretty good. My friends think so, too. Plus, I draw.

  The good thing about being a military kid is we get to see military things close up, which most people don’t get to do. A regular person couldn’t go up to a tank or a helicopter and look around inside, but we can because of our parents. Plus I got to go on a holiday when all the other kids in my class had to sit in school, because of when my dad got his war break.

  The bad thing is having my dad leave for a long time. Even when he’s here, he’s not here a lot. He works a really long shift so that he’ll get paid a little more money. When we first moved here, we weren’t doing all that well financially, so he worked a lot. We’re doing a bit better now. He gets paid extra for being in Iraq. I think it’s called Danger Pay, although I don’t think he’s in danger. He works on a base with a high fence and a lot of guards, and he sleeps in a hut. It’s not fancy, but it’s not dangerous.

  Some of the kids at the camp who have had their parents come back from Iraq said their parents have changed. They talk differently, like with a different accent almost, and their attitude is different because they never get enough sleep. I worry a little bit that Dad will be different when he comes home, but he was fine on the break, so I don’t worry too much.

  I worry more about the divorce, that my parents won’t have the time they need to work things out, so they’ll just give up. As soon as Dad gets home, he has to report to the Reserves in Pennsylvania to join the unit there. So he’ll be living far away. Well, not far like Iraq, but still away. We might stay in Maine, or we might move back to Alabama to be with my aunts. We might visit him in Pennsylvania, but it’s not the same. People need time, and it doesn’t look good.

  To other military kids, I’d say it helps you get through it if you can be proud. I know it’s hard when someone they really love is far away for a long time, but they need to be proud that their parent is overseas fighting to be sure that everyone is free. Then it feels like it’s all worth something. And I’d say you can learn to calm yourself down when you’re upset. When I get worried, I take a lot of deep breaths and say, “He’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” Most of the time I can make myself believe it.

  Sigrid, 11

  In Canada, people who want to join the military must be Canadian citizens. But there are tens of thousands of non US citizens currently serving in the US military. Among them are 1,500 from Mexico and 5,000 from the Philippines. Recent rule changes have created a fast-track citizenship process for those who serve in the military.

  Sigrid’s family comes from the Philippines, where the US has a number of military bases. For her family, the military was a way out of poverty. It has also been a way for them to see different parts of the world. They now live in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg, where her father is a staff sergeant serving in Iraq.

  My dad has been in Iraq for four months, and he has a year left to go. He’s also been to Afghanistan.

  I was sad the day he left. I stayed home. We didn’t go with him to watch him leave. He thought that would be too hard for us. I wrote him a letter before he left that he took away to keep with him. It said, “I miss you,” and I let my sister draw on it.

  I’m in the fifth grade. Math is my best subject, but I’m pretty good at everything. I’m on the safety patrol at my school. We wear orange vests.

  It’s been very quiet with Dad gone. He makes everything seem more fun, because he takes us to the park and the pool.

  He’s been in the army since before I was born. He joined up to help the country, I guess. He’s like one out of one million. There’s a lot of people who want to help the country, and he’s one of them.

  I don’t know much about Iraq or about his job there. It’s something to do with protecting the people.

  With Dad gone, we have to do everything by ourselves. I help around the house, like with getting groceries.

  Fort Bragg is a pretty nice place to live. I’ve made some good friends here. We’ve been here for three years.

  Before that we lived in Okinawa, Japan. We lived in a culde-sac, so whenever I came home from school I could keep playing outside because there was no traffic. This was on an air force base. We saw a lot of Japan. Okinawa is a great place. A lot of people there talk English, and it’s really beautiful with lots of birds.

  Dad lived with us there. He took us to Okuma Beach, only two hours away. Sometimes the tide would be out, and we’d have to walk farther to get to the water, but you had to be careful not to step on a sea urchin. They can really hurt if you step on them.

  Every weekend we tried to go to different places. Japan is small, so places are easier to get to than they are here.

  We spent two years in Okinawa. It’s close to the
Philippines, where I was born. My parents are both from there, too. That’s where they met. My father’s father is an American, and his mother is Filipino. There’s a big American base there, and they were asking all the American citizens to join the military, so my dad did. He joined in l996. He was supposed to be shipped out in September of that year, but I was born then, so they let him stay with us for another month.

  Dad left when I was one month old and he came back when I was eighteen months old. I was a whole new person. All the time I was growing up, I would see Dad for maybe a month, then he would go away again for a year or more. We were in the Philippines for five and a half years, and Dad only had three vacations in all that time, each for about a month.

  I wouldn’t remember him when he came back. His picture was in the house, but a picture doesn’t look the same as a living face. It was always a little weird when he came home.

  When he got sent to Japan, he did some paperwork that allowed us to live there with him, and then I could really get to know him more. I saw him almost every day. Sometimes he’d be away, but it was only for short trips.

  Mom says that when I was little and Dad left, I would sometimes call her “Dad,” just because I missed him. I didn’t believe her at first, but now I see my little sister doing the same thing.

  It’s a bad thing that my dad’s in Iraq because I don’t get to see him. I email him about what’s going on in school. I’ll be eleven when he gets back. I keep getting older and he misses most of it.

  Moving can be a good part about being a military kid because you get to see a lot of different places that ordinary kids don’t.

  We live off post, so I go to a school off post. The best things about school are recess and PE. I read a lot, too, and I sing with the school choir. I’m not going to join the military because I don’t think it would be much fun. It’s also full of boys who think they can do things better than girls. Instead of joining the army I’m going to be a scientist, a teacher and an athlete.

  Most of our family is still back in the Philippines. That’s hard, being so far away from our grandparents and cousins.

  Mom finds it hard being without Dad. We don’t know any other Filipino families down here, and she’s always worrying if we don’t hear from Dad for a few days.

  I get worried that Dad will get hurt again. He broke his leg once, and he has back problems. I think he got hurt during a jump. Mom is always trying to get him to go to the doctor because he still has pain from all that. He also hurt himself on a ruck march. That’s when they have to go on long marches with heavy bags on their back, even up to one hundred pounds. He fell, and then he couldn’t drive himself to work for awhile because he was on pain medication.

  Even when he’s home, I don’t get to see him much because he’s training all the time. He leaves before I wake up, and he comes home after I’ve gone to bed. He did help me with my homework once. And once I woke up at the same time he did and got to have breakfast with him before he left. And sometimes we can take lunch to him at his office. He likes Filipino food that Mom makes.

  When my parents were growing up in the Philippines, they didn’t have anything. Their whole home was like the size of our bathroom. Mom would wake up in the morning and wonder if they could afford to buy something to eat that day. Now she sends money every month to support her parents and brothers and sisters. Before Dad joined the military he was earning only 1000 pesos, or about $20 a week. My uncle still earns only $6 a day. Now it’s better for us. We have a car, we have a house, we have lots to eat. So the military has been a good life for my family, even though my dad is away all the time.

  My advice for other military kids is try not to think too much about your parent being away, and try to have fun with your life.

  Jamie, 12

  Jamie’s mother is one of the founders of the Military Wives Sisterhood, an organization based at CFB Shilo in Manitoba. There are similar groups, large and small, across North America, where military spouses can share ideas, complaints and companionship. There’s even a magazine, Military Spouse, full of articles about the challenges of military family life.

  Jamie’s stepfather, a master corporal, is away on training before possibly being sent to Afghanistan. Soldiers train in Wainwright, Alberta, where a model Afghan village has been set up to mimic what they will see and do in Afghanistan. A similar Iraqi village has been set up at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and Iraqi Americans have been hired to role-play the Iraqis the soldiers might meet when they go to Iraq.

  My stepdad is in Wainwright now, on training. He was in Afghanistan last year. He might have to go again. A lot of soldiers from here are heading over there in February, so he may go with them.

  Before he went to Afghanistan, there would be Remembrance Day services at school, and kids would be crying, but I wouldn’t understand why. Then when he was gone, at the Remembrance Day ceremony I started to crack up and bawl. All my friends were there to support me.

  The teachers always show this music video at the ceremony, and that’s when everybody cries. In the video, there’s a dad and his daughter at a grocery store. The one minute of silence comes up, when you’re supposed to stop and remember. The girl stops, but the dad doesn’t, he keeps shopping. Everybody looks at him. In the background you can see the ghosts of soldiers who have died. They’re walking by. Then, finally the dad realizes what’s going on, and he stops, too.

  Some people from the military gave speeches, and every class made a wreath to put at the cenotaph. We do that to remember the soldiers who went away to fight so that us kids could have freedom. They died for us so we could have a good life.

  Dad left for Afghanistan early in the morning. He said goodbye to me the night before. Then when I got up in the morning, he was gone. I cried, because I knew I wouldn’t see him for six months. You just think about what could happen. He was in the infantry over there, and he could get into a battle or get shot.

  He was in some dangerous situations, but he never talked about them. I’ve always been nervous about asking him. Once when he came back, we went to see some fireworks, and I could see him jump every time one went off. He plugged his ears. It reminded him of gunshots. I didn’t really want to ask him about that, but I did. He said he was okay and didn’t want to talk about it.

  He came home on a break around Christmas, just for a short while. I was so happy to see him. He brought me back a Kandahar hat. It’s a camouflage hat with the word Kandahar on the back and Tim Horton’s on the front. He also brought me a gold necklace.

  I saw a video of Afghanistan that his buddies made, of mud houses and marijuana fields. The people there are really poor, so maybe they grow the marijuana to sell it and make some money.

  Girls in Afghanistan have a rougher life than me. They don’t have as much freedom. Sometimes I’ll be down about my life, but then you’ve got to think about what other girls are living, and be happy that you’ve got a good life.

  I have a family. I’m free. I can go to school. I can make my own decisions. I can do what I want to do. I don’t have to marry when I’m young. I can marry when I’m twenty or forty-five or even not at all. I have that choice. And if I don’t like what the Canadian government is doing I can say so, and I won’t go to jail for expressing my opinion. That’s freedom.

  My friend is in the cadets, and she’s asking me to join but I already have soccer, golf, basketball, volleyball — I play lots of sports. I might join cadets if I can fit it into my schedule.

  My stepdad says he doesn’t want me to join the military. I don’t know why, but he says he really doesn’t want me to. He says it’s my decision, though. Maybe it’s because there aren’t as many women in the army as there are men, so the women are given a harder time. It’s growing, though. There’s more women than there were before.

  Women can certainly do whatever men can do. If they believe they can do it and they want to do it, they can do it.

  But I still don’t know if I want to join the military. I’d really lik
e to be an actor. I’ve taken acting classes for three years, and been in plays. I even wrote a play, about a plane crash.

  Mom delivers mail. She’s also part of the Military Wives Sisterhood. They try to support the wives and girlfriends of soldiers around Brandon. They do potluck suppers and Christmas parties, and a lot of just looking out for people, so people don’t feel alone. Shilo is a small base, and it’s in the middle of the prairie. Some people come here from the big cities and they think they’ve fallen off the world. So the Sisterhood helps them be part of the community.

  She found Dad’s deployment real hard, although she tried not to let it show. Weeks would go by and we wouldn’t hear from him because he’d be out in the field without phones or computers. I’d see her getting more and more worried, then we’d hear from him and would relax a bit for awhile.

  But sometimes she’d get into this crying thing. She’d start crying when she was delivering the mail, and once she started crying in the dentist’s chair because news came on over the radio about another Canadian soldier being killed. She’d get angry with Dad, too, for leaving us, which didn’t make sense, because he had no choice. Then she’d get angry with herself for getting angry.

  She’s a really strong woman, though, and she does a lot to support other women. She’s a good role model for me on how to be a member of a community, and also how to respect other women and not try to tear them down. Sometimes girls try to make other girls feel bad.

  This week, the Sisterhood is putting on Afghan Awareness Week. Since so many people from Shilo are heading over there in February — more than half the base, I think — the Sisterhood thought the people of Brandon should know a little bit about Afghanistan. So they’re bringing in speakers and they’ve set up a display here on base with a slide show. This weekend there’s an Afghan marketplace, with food and clothes and crafts and music, like Little Afghanistan on the Prairie!