I posted a comment under my July 16th post about our new HEM News & Commentary editor, Valerie Moon, who also manages The Military Homeschooler site, but I’ve also initiated a new category here titled Interviews, and I’ll start off the listings under that by once again referencing and linking to the great interview with Valerie in this month’s edition of Mary Nix’s marvelous Support Group News!

A brief excerpt, in answer to Mary’s question about how having a parent in the military affects children:

“For Brats (as children in military families are affectionately called sometimes), military life is normal. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis I lived away from any civilian town with jets screaming over the housing area, and having to sit in our stopped car at a ‘plane crossing’ (instead of a train crossing) to wait for B-52s to take off. All the dads wore uniforms. In 1977 during the military exercise REFORGER, our older son watched columns of tanks rumble down the road of the German village where we lived near the East German border. All the (American) dads wore uniforms. Our younger kids showed their ID cards at anti-terrorist checkpoints to get into our housing area in Munich during Desert Storm (and took homemade cookies to the guards) while their brother served in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Ninety-nine percent of the Dads wore uniforms, and some of the Moms did, too. Except in times of crisis, military ’stuff’ is background noise to Brats.

Now what all those anonymous civilians with no nametags on their clothes or houses get up to, that’s a big mystery. And did you know that in civilian theaters The Star Spangled Banner isn’t played before each movie, and the entire theater doesn’t stand to attention? Weird.

This entry was posted on July 20, 2005 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.