Military Brat Life

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by Barry Evans

It was great to find Military Brats Online. I got tears in my eyes reading about looking for home. I've been moving for years. 12 schools in 12 years. Different colleges. Living and working on the Navajo and Gila River Reservations. Always looking for a place or a group where I belong; never finding it.

We were at Ft. Barry north of Frisco when I was 8 years old. I visited recently and found it had become a park; the old house still standing, the trees so much larger, but mostly as I remembered--probably one of the few placed I've called home that still exist as they were.

For the most part I live my life in a kind of permanent exile, with no hope of going home and no place to call home.

What's hardest is seeing the absurdity of the idea of home as defining a group to which one belongs; knowing how much damage that idea has caused; and yet not being able give up the wish to belong.

I wonder if military brats are all existentialists?

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Operation Footlocker
by Vann Baker

What is green, covered with stickers and filled with memories and icons which only a Military Brat can understand? Operation Footlocker.

We've all grown up with footlockers, but Operation Footlocker doesn't travel with one person from destination to another�it travels to brat reunions, events and military bases as a mobile memory project.

Operation Footlocker is a grassroots effort to celebrate the shared cultural identity of Military Brats and grew out a discussion in the spring of 1996 on the Military Veterans of America site within America Online.

Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of the book Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, and one of the participants in the discussion, first conceived the idea of taking a real footlocker and sending it around the country as a way of gathering memorabilia and bringing brats together. Reta Jones Nicholson provided the first footlocker and was the catalyst who brought Operation Footlocker from discussion to realty.

Operation Footlocker is a volunteer effort and requests can be made to have the footlocker shipped to for brat events or sharing brat history with the general public.

For more information on appearances or to bring the Footlocker to your event, visit the Operation Footlocker web site.

This article first appeared in On The Move, Volume 1, Number 1.

Did You Know . . .

. . . Pat Conroy is a Military Brat?
Have you heard of the book and movie "The Great Santini?" Or "Prince of Tides", "Lords of Discipline"? Pat Conroy's father was a career Marine Corps Aviator.

For a more complete list, be sure to take a look at Glenn Greenwood's Famous Overseas Alumni & Military Brats list, located on the American Overseas School Historical Society web site.