Military brats have been around for a long time.
Most people know it’s not an insult, but a term spoken with pride. It refers to children who had at least one parent on active duty who was getting moved around every year or two.
It was mostly a big deal in the 30 years or so after World War II. There aren’t nearly as many families stationed overseas anymore, but during its heyday, an awful lot of kids bounced from school to school nearly every year.
My dad spent his entire career working for the Air Force, but as a civilian. We only moved once because of his job. He was promoted from a position at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio, to a good job at the Pentagon where he spent the last 25 years or so of his career.
We went from what was essentially a pre-Wonder Years neighborhood in Ohio to the suburbs of a great city in a time of tremendous upheaval. Most of my closest friends came from my years in Virginia. The only people I know in Ohio are two of my four first cousins.
The move was definitely a mixed blessing. I was 13 going on 10. I had always gotten good grades in Ohio and I never got good grades in Virginia.
I have a feeling it would have been much worse if I had been a military brat. Adapting to change wasn’t in my wheelhouse when it came to strengths.
So of course I spent the first 10 years of my newspaper career living and working in seven different states from coast to coast, and at age 71 I have accomplished something I think very few Americans of my generation have. I have lived at least 10 years in four different states.
In Ohio as a kid, Virginia as an adolescent and a young adult, California in middle age and Georgia as a retiree. I’ve also lived in Illinois, both Carolinas, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada.
Of course it’s easier to adapt when you’re an adult. Heck, when I loved from St. Louis to Greeley, Colo., in the fall of 1986, I didn’t even have a car.
But I literally cannot imagine being a kid in a different school in a different city every year or two.
Still, I’m seeing something like that in my own family. My daughter Pauline works for the State Department as a foreign service officer. She is in her 19th year as a diplomat and this summer she will be on her way — with her husband and her blended family of six children — to her sixth different assignment.
Her first two postings — to Cameroon and the People’s Republic of China — were two years each. Her next two — to Indonesia and Jamaica — were three years each. She spent four years in Guatemala and is about to start what will be at least a three-year tour in Tunisia. Her half of the blended family — three children — came along in China in 2008, Indonesia in 2011 and Jamaica in 2014.
The other half of her family — her husband and his three sons –have been at least to the Philippines and Costa Rica — in addition to Jamaica and Guatemala.
In some ways, being a child of the Foreign Service is even more difficult than the military. Four of the five countries in which Pauline’s kids have lived (and Tunisia to come) speak a language other than English. The one English-speaking country they’ve lived in was 99 percent Black. So there aren’t really any that remind them of home.
The children do spend part of each summer in the States and generally have a year in D.C. between postings while their parents learn the language of their next destination.
All six of these kids are learning things about the world that non-traveling Americans never will. If some future Rush Limbaugh tells them — as the real one told the world — that homeless people in America live as well as middle-class Europeans, they’ll know better.
(Even though none of the six have actually lived in Europe.)
My guess is that foreign service brats are like their military counterparts in one important respect — they’re less gullible, less likely to be fooled, patriotic without being silly.
I will say one thing. Children who have to move around so much and so often can have as positive an experience as their parents make it for them. Pauline has told me on numerous occasions that if she thought her career was making her children suffer in any way, she would resign.
Mother first.
Diplomat second.
I know six kids who are very lucky to have her as a parent.
Six brats.
In a good way.