Off to War Read online

  He doesn’t talk much about the Taliban and bad stuff that’s happened because he doesn’t want us to worry about it. He talks more about the good things.

  When he first started going over there it was really funny, because he’d almost talk without thinking. We’d always put him on speaker phone, and he didn’t always realize that, so he’d say things like, “A bomb went off and everybody ran for the bunkers but I could just crouch down by the wall,” and my mom’s like, “Please don’t tell me anything more.”

  Dad works mostly with the Canadians, but he also helps the US. They gave him an award for helping them. There was a time when a man needed a pole thing to go in his leg, and the Americans asked my dad to make it, like, make a template. Dad’s template of it was so good that they put it right into the guy’s leg. He got an award from the Americans for that.

  I don’t think I’d want to join the army unless my dad got hurt or killed in Afghanistan. Then I’d join, so that whoever hurt him would get hurt, too. My dad is always saying, “I don’t think you’d make it in the military.” He thinks I’m too much of a girly-girl. And I’d really rather be a teacher. But if something happened to my dad, I could do it because I’d want to prove to my dad that I could do it. I wouldn’t be afraid of it.

  My little brother wants to be in the military but he wants to either weld or fly a plane. He doesn’t want to be a soldier on the ground.

  My mom’s holding up okay, but she doesn’t really tell much to me and Tyson. Mostly she goes over to her best friend’s house, and they talk. That helps her a lot.

  I don’t think I have anything in common with children in Afghanistan because they don’t really do the things that I do. My dad says the only thing I might have in common with them is that they play a lot of soccer, and they’re really good at it. Me and my brother both like soccer. My dad saw this one Afghan kid who was just wearing flip-flops and he was kicking the ball over his head and bouncing it off his head, and my dad was amazed.

  This is the second base I’ve lived on. I also lived at CFB Borden. My dad wants to get posted back to Borden because he wants to become a teacher, and Borden is a training base.

  My advice: If this is your life, just deal with it.

  Bailey — My mother is a corporal, or maybe she’s a master corporal. Anyway, she’s a medic. She got back from Afghanistan last February.

  My dad was in the military, too. He died in South Africa. He was a security guard, so he traveled to different places at different times with his boss. The Canadian embassy was there. He did security for Canadian VIPs. He died in a car accident. I lived with him for three months in South Africa. He traveled to Zimbabwe and Madagascar, and all over.

  My stepdad is in the military, too. I don’t know his rank or his job, but he’s here in Petawawa. I have tons of sisters and brothers, step siblings.

  Mom was in Afghanistan for six or seven months. It was her second time in Afghanistan.

  When Mom goes overseas, we don’t really have a structure in our lives. I’m the oldest, so a lot of responsibility falls on me. There’s always a big rush in the morning. I’m used to doing the cooking, even when Mom’s home, because everybody likes my cooking. Hers is sometimes burnt. I had to do a lot more cleaning and cooking, though, when Mom was away. My grandparents, Papa and Nana, came up, and they did a lot, too.

  Mom first went away in 2004. I lived in a house in Kingston with my dad while she was gone. Dad was still alive then. She called us from Afghanistan and we’d talk about school and what I did that day.

  When she came back the first time, me and my sister moved back to Petawawa where my mom was stationed. I didn’t notice any changes in her the first time she came back.

  The second time, yes.

  She used to be really strict, and now she’s like, sure, whatever.

  One thing that happened was that she got blown up. She was in an armored vehicle and it hit a bomb or a bomb hit it, and she was injured. A bunch of nerves in her neck were damaged, and she bruised her leg badly and damaged nerves in her arm, too.

  She was kept in Afghanistan while she recovered. She was only in the hospital for two days.

  The army told my nana and papa about it first. My nana was going to tell me, but I found out by overhearing a conversation.

  Kaylee — We were hiding out in my basement one night and we could hear them talking.

  Bailey — My sister didn’t know until after my mom got back. I didn’t tell her. I heard about it two days after it happened. Mom usually called once or twice a week — once on Saturday and once on Sunday — but she couldn’t call when she was in the hospital, so I thought that maybe something was wrong.

  I didn’t tell anybody that I knew. I was worried that I’d get into trouble for listening in on their conversations, so I kept it a secret. For a long time it was just me and Kaylee who knew that I knew. It was hard not to say anything to my sister. It was hard for me because I wanted to ask questions and get more information, but I couldn’t.

  One person died when my mom was hurt, and I think some other people were injured, so it was a bad, bad day for a lot of people. My mom was lucky.

  She suffered a concussion, which still bothers her sometimes, and she can’t really hear me if I’m talking to her in a whisper, because she damaged her ear in the explosion.

  I don’t think she’s going to go back to Afghanistan. Two trips there is enough. I think she signed up in the military for twenty years, and she has ten years left, so I guess if they order her to go she’ll have to go. The longer you sign up for, the more money you get when you retire. I think that’s how it works.

  I can’t join the military because I’m diabetic. They wouldn’t take me. I’m relieved, actually. I’d rather be a photojournalist.

  We’re army brats. Everybody knows everybody on base. You go anywhere, and it’s “Hi, hello, oh, hi,” because you know everybody you see.

  Kaylee — There’s good things about that, too. All our friends are right around here. It’s easy to get together with them.

  Bailey — We belong to the Deployment Program, for kids whose parents get deployed overseas. They give you free tickets to the movies, and we had a Christmas party and a beach day.

  Kaylee — There’s a stress reduction exercise they taught us called Spaghetti Toes. You pretend you’ve got spaghetti in your toes and it works its way up your body. And there’s another where you talk about good things and bad things, and things you want to have happen and things you don’t want to have happen. It’s good because sometimes you end up saying things you didn’t even know you were thinking about.

  Bailey — The non-military kids have no idea about who we are and what our lives are like. They’ll ask “So, where do you keep your gun?” I don’t have a gun!

  Kaylee — They’ll say “So, do you guys drive tanks to school, and is your house surrounded by barbed wire? Do you get checked by the guards all the time?” They don’t get that the base looks just like a regular place, except for all the tank statues and the soldiers. The base has a big gate on it, but it’s hardly ever closed.

  Bailey — It’s never closed, except for one time when there was a bomb threat.

  Kaylee — The whole base got shut down when that happened. My dad was at Borden, and we were off base doing some shopping or something, and when we came back, the guards didn’t want to let us through because we didn’t have our military ID on us. All we had were our memberships to the gym. We had to argue with them until they gave up and said, “All right! Just go!” and we drove through.

  Bailey — I was at home. We had to stay in the house. It was really scary. They found what they thought was a huge bomb. Before they went to open it, they were going to take all the military families into the bunkers. There are bunkers way in the back of the base, off by the highway. But it turned out not to be a bomb. Someone had stuck a refrigerator motor in a big crate, then wrote BOMB on the side of the crate. I don’t know if it was supposed to be a joke or what, but
it wasn’t funny.

  Kaylee — The OPP don’t really come onto the base. It’s just the MPs, the military police. The OPP have to stop at the bridge and turn around.

  Bailey — The OPP can’t arrest the military.

  Kaylee — Once my dad was speeding, and the OPP stopped him and said, “Do you have a licence?” and my dad showed them his military ID and they said, “Okay, keep going.” They didn’t even give him a ticket. Some OPP will give tickets, but a lot won’t, to show their respect for the soldiers.

  Bailey — My mom even backed into a cop car once, and the officer said, “I can’t give you a ticket.” My mom was like, “Just give me the ticket, it’s all right.” But he wouldn’t. He said, “It’s just a small scratch,” and he wouldn’t give her a ticket.

  Kaylee — I think the police favor the military because my dad could die just from doing his job, and so could the OPP, I guess, from doing theirs, so they treat the military better than they do regular people.

  Bailey — The town doesn’t like us, though. If you go into a store in Petawawa and you’re a military kid, the store owners follow you around, and if you go to the rec center, which is off base, the village people watch you and judge you. I was there once, pushing my baby brother in a stroller, and the villagers were staring at me and rolling their eyes and making shameful noises, as if they thought I was a teenaged mother or a bad person. They judge us because we’re military kids.

  Kaylee — We send letters to the troops. I like doing that. Sometimes soldiers get really depressed when they’re over there, and they’ll want to turn to alcohol or drugs or something to help them deal with the pain. So somebody set up a big box on the base and filled it with letters from school kids. And if the soldier is feeling depressed or lonely, they can go and pick out a letter.

  Bailey — The rule is, if they take a letter, they have to answer that letter. So the soldier gets a letter, and then she or he writes back to the kid, and maybe they’re not so depressed anymore. It takes their mind off what they’re doing for a little while.

  Some military wives don’t understand why their husband doesn’t keep in touch when he’s over there. The husbands try to explain it to them when they do call, but you can’t really have a marriage over the phone. Lots of times it ends up in divorce. I know families who get divorced because of this. They just can’t take it anymore.

  Kaylee — Some of the guys in the military here in Canada, they can drink and do drugs, but when they get over to Afghanistan, they can’t do either of those things because they’ll get kicked out of the military. So they get depressed because they can’t do what they’re used to doing to cope. And if they’re an alcoholic they have to completely quit, and that’s hard. There was one time they could drink, though, and that was when the Stanley Cup arrived in Afghanistan. Everybody got two cans of beer that day.

  Bailey — My advice for other kids like me is don’t worry. Just don’t think about it. Daydream about other things, things that will make you happy.

  Kaylee — Think about food instead. If you start to worry, fix yourself something to eat, something nice, and that gets you through the moment. Then you can be okay again for awhile.

  Cherilyn, 10

  In the United States, women make up twenty percent of the armed forces. Although women are not assigned direct combat roles, the nature of warfare today puts women on many of the same front lines as men — carrying and firing weapons, and being killed and injured. About one hundred female American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and many more have been wounded. (In Canada, women make up about fifteen percent of the armed forces; their training is the same as the men’s, and they are eligible for all jobs, including direct combat.)

  For women who are mothers, being sent to war means leaving children behind, and giving over to someone else the many tasks and moments that go into raising kids. For children, having their mothers out of the home often means a different sort of life than they have when it’s their father who goes away.

  Cherilyn and her family live in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, with their two cats, one kitten and thirteen frogs who live in the pond in their front yard. Lebanon is home to a Hershey plant and a cocoa-mulch factory — as a result, the town often smells like chocolate.

  Both of Cherilyn’s parents are military people. Her father is a civilian now but still works with the military, teaching helicopter repair. Her mother is a sergeant first class who works in human resources.

  I live in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. It’s a pretty big town, sort of a factory place and sort of a farm place. My mom calls it pigpoop country.

  Dad spent fourteen months in Afghanistan. I was six at the time. He went over there not too long after the 9/11 thing. I don’t remember him leaving, but I certainly remember him coming home. There was a huge homecoming party at Fort Indiantown Gap, which is a base here in Pennsylvania. That’s where they were coming back to. All the families were there, standing and waiting, and there were TV cameras. The soldiers all came riding back to us from the airport on fire trucks, lots of fire trucks. Everybody cheered, and it all got filmed by the TV cameras.

  I tried to stay away from the cameras as much as I could because I was real little and feeling a bit overwhelmed. But I remember the great food and all the people and my father being back.

  It wasn’t really possible to keep in touch with Dad while he was in Afghanistan. There’s a big time difference, and he had to move around a lot to go to where he was needed. He worked with a helicopter unit. When there was a helicopter crash, he fixed them up, if they could be fixed, and he also rescued and saved people. So he moved a lot.

  Dad videotaped a sandstorm for us to see, and he lived mostly in tents, so it wasn’t a very comfortable place for him to be.

  Dad doesn’t talk much about his time in Afghanistan. He’s the kind of person who can keep stuff to himself. You can really trust him to keep secrets. Maybe he was in danger over there. Probably he was. But he doesn’t talk about it.

  I don’t know if he killed anybody or not. He was there to repair helicopters, but he was also a soldier, but I don’t know. He certainly wouldn’t tell me, and I don’t know if I’d want to know.

  If you kill somebody who is trying to kill you, I understand that. I don’t understand people who try to kill their own people, like with roadside bombs, which kill people besides Americans. But sometimes you have to defend yourself. If someone’s trying to attack you, you can try to get them to back off, but if they don’t back off, you gotta do what you gotta do. And if my dad killed someone for that reason, I could understand that. Sometimes people kill just to kill, not for any other reason, but that’s not my dad.

  I remember that Dad was a little different when he finally came home. At first he was really, really tired. He’d been through a lot and he wanted to just relax. Then, after a week, he got really hyper and energetic. He usually has a lot of energy, but this was a strange kind of hyper. He’d talk a lot, really fast, and we weren’t able to figure out what the heck he was talking about. Then he’d stop talking and wouldn’t talk at all for awhile. It was hard because we didn’t know how to make him happy. I thought he was mad at me. It was a hard time.

  But we got through it. Praying helped. We’re big believers in prayer in my family.

  Mom was given the opportunity to go to Iraq, but she said no for now. She knows people who are over there, so she might go when they get back and she hears from them what it’s like.

  I know she’s more worried about leaving me than about whatever danger she might face in Iraq. She’s the sort of person you can always talk to and has an answer for everything that you can think of to ask her about. She can be very personal and private, and she can also be very open and welcoming, whatever you need. It would be hard on me if she goes to Iraq, but I don’t want to stop her from going.

  Mom loves the military. She likes working hard and being challenged. She talks to a lot of soldiers as part of her job, finds out how they’re doing, if there’s an
ything they need. She says that we should always remember and recognize the work done by women who went into the military before her. It hasn’t always been easy for women, because some men in the military are not very nice or fair. So the women before her really had to struggle, and she talks about that with me. It’s important to respect that.

  I don’t know if I’ll join the military or not. I’m thinking instead of being a teacher or a nurse. With everything that’s going on in the world, I don’t know if I want to be in the army.

  The good part about being in the army is that you sometimes get to save people. There was a helicopter crash at Fort Indiantown Gap, and my father was there to pull people out and save their lives. His father — my grandfather — was there with him, and they saved the people together. That’s pretty special.

  The not-so-good part is that you might have to experience war, and sometimes in war, you don’t make it back, or your friends don’t make it home, or they make it home but they’re hurt really bad. You never know what’s coming in a war. You have to be ready for everything, but is that possible?

  I’ve seen on the news where people in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually having protests against our soldiers. They believe in different gods than we do, and they worship in different ways, so maybe they don’t like the way we believe and worship. I’m a Christian, and we believe in the one true God, and maybe those people don’t like that.

  I understand about them being upset that their president was killed. I’d be upset if our president was killed. But some of the things they protest about don’t make sense. Like, their president was not a good man. Before Saddam Hussein got killed, he was hiding in an underground cell. I heard that he’d peer up from the ground, and when little kids walked by, he’d reach out and grab the kids and put them in the cell with him. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but the American president would never do that.