Army Brat, Army Bride, Civilian: A Life

My preview text is: “Be true to yourself and to the culture you were born into, . . . . Tell your story as only you can tell it.”

William Zinsser

Introduction

Usually one of the first questions people ask each other upon meeting for the first time is “Where are you from?” For years I had no idea how to answer that question. I might say I was born in Roanoke, VA. However, I had left there at the age of ten and had been back only to visit relatives, other than spending part of one miserable year there as a junior in high school, so I never really felt that Roanoke was home and still don’t. Basically, my home was where I lived at the time. Mary Edwards Wertsch covers this dilemma well in her book Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. She writes, “There are two questions one can pose that reveal rootlessness as instantly as a litmus test. The first: Where are you from? The second . . . Where do you want to be buried?” (249-50) I still have problems with the first question even though I now answer it the same way every time, and I am beginning to think about the second, for which I do not have an answer.

As a former “Army brat” who became an Army bride, I have lived in more than thirty-five different homes—sometimes in foreign countries, other times in various states. Often, I have moved two or three times to different houses or apartments within the same city or town or from one of those to quarters on an Army post as a set became available. Army quarters range from multi-family apartments to duplexes to large houses, depending on one’s rank and availability of housing, and most military folks get to sample a little bit of everything during their careers.

My first identification of myself is as an “Army brat,” but not the annoying kind of brat, which places a negative value on the word--although I can attest to the fact that I could be bratty at times, and my mother called us three kids brats more than once. Instead, in military lingo the word normally has a positive spin and means simply the child of a career military person that has traveled, seen, and experienced much. Most of us former military brats are proud to have that label because to us the term means we were part of a subculture of kids who moved frequently, adjusted quickly, and learned resilience.

During what I call the second phase of my life, I became an Army bride by marrying a second lieutenant in the Army and continuing to move frequently, though not so often as my family had moved when I was a child. Being married to Ray meant that the standard of living was much improved, and the military quarters were considerably better because of the difference between my father’s status as a non-commissioned officer and my husband’s as an officer. It was still military living, though, which required the flexibility and survival skills that I had learned earlier in life.

The third stage of my life is the civilian one, during which I have actually lived in the same house for twenty plus years and have been able to become actively involved in the community. Before we moved into our current house in North Carolina, we had lived in the same house in South Carolina for ten years—