Military Brats: A Misunderstood American Subculture

My father was a career military man, in the U.S. Air Force. So, I was born and grew up on foreign soil. I'm what is affectionately called a military brat and part of a unique subculture. My father, who grew up as a hillbilly in West Virginia,  married a local woman, while he was stationed in Okinawa in the late 1950s and that's how I came to be. So, as it often happens, both my parents were from completely different cultures than the one I grew up in.

Military brats and the children of missionaries (like President Obama) have some things in common. A new term has been coined to cover us all... third culture kids (TCK). You know you're a TCK  if you don't have a hometown, if all your siblings were born in different countries, if you can at least curse in more than one language and if when someone says Transformers, you don't think of the movie; you think of that thing you have to plug in the wall to get your toaster or curling iron to work.

Military brats grow up without overt racism because it's not allowed on a military base. A military base is a place where white guys are routinely bossed around by black, Hispanic or whatever color other men/women that outrank them. We grow up in ethnically diverse military communities, often in one foreign country or another. We move around a lot and have to learn to make friends quickly. Because we move around, we get the opportunity to reinvent ourselves in new places. We also learn early in life to let people and things go, whether we like it or not.  As adults, in civilian life, we discover that others find our ease at moving on, somewhat cold and maybe a little disturbing.

We are the middle class kids lucky enough to travel the world and be "in it," and not above it, the way rich kids often are. People who live in the same place all their lives (in the States), often think the rest of the world envies the U.S. and is ready to grovel at its feet. When you're a military brat, you find out early that this isn't true and you mostly understand why. When you see tourists in a foreign land, they seem just as goofy as they do to the locals.

A military brat also has to live with the idea that when your military parent goes away for a tour of duty, there's a real possibility that they won't come home in one piece... and maybe they won't come home at all. Then, when you finally grow up and move out on your own, unless you join the Armed Services yourself, you find it difficult to get your bearings. You're often clueless about how things are done in civilian life, you don't really "fit in" and often feel like a foreigner in your own country.

There has only been one film documentary about military brats, that I know of. I've written about it on the blog, Thing of it is, I've posted the trailer of the video there. Yes, I cried a little.  I hope you'll take a look at the video and leave a comment. I'm very interested in all your reactions.