Off to War (16 page)

I'm in the fifth grade. Math is my best subject, but I'm pretty good at everything. I'm on the safety patrol at my school. We wear orange vests.

It's been very quiet with Dad gone. He makes everything seem more fun, because he takes us to the park and the pool.

He's been in the army since before I was born. He joined up to help the country, I guess. He's like one out of one million. There's a lot of people who want to help the country, and he's one of them.

I don't know much about Iraq or about his job there. It's something to do with protecting the people.

With Dad gone, we have to do everything by ourselves. I help around the house, like with getting groceries.

Fort Bragg is a pretty nice place to live. I've made some good friends here. We've been here for three years.

Before that we lived in Okinawa, Japan. We lived in a culde-sac, so whenever I came home from school I could keep playing outside because there was no traffic. This was on an air force base. We saw a lot of Japan. Okinawa is a great place. A lot of people there talk English, and it's really beautiful with lots of birds.

Dad lived with us there. He took us to Okuma Beach, only two hours away. Sometimes the tide would be out, and we'd have to walk farther to get to the water, but you had to be careful not to step on a sea urchin. They can really hurt if you step on them.

Every weekend we tried to go to different places. Japan is small, so places are easier to get to than they are here.

We spent two years in Okinawa. It's close to the Philippines, where I was born. My parents are both from there, too. That's where they met. My father's father is an American, and his mother is Filipino. There's a big American base there, and they were asking all the American citizens to join the military,
so my dad did. He joined in l996. He was supposed to be shipped out in September of that year, but I was born then, so they let him stay with us for another month.

Dad left when I was one month old and he came back when I was eighteen months old. I was a whole new person. All the time I was growing up, I would see Dad for maybe a month, then he would go away again for a year or more. We were in the Philippines for five and a half years, and Dad only had three vacations in all that time, each for about a month.

I wouldn't remember him when he came back. His picture was in the house, but a picture doesn't look the same as a living face. It was always a little weird when he came home.

When he got sent to Japan, he did some paperwork that allowed us to live there with him, and then I could really get to know him more. I saw him almost every day. Sometimes he'd be away, but it was only for short trips.

Mom says that when I was little and Dad left, I would sometimes call her “Dad,” just because I missed him. I didn't believe her at first, but now I see my little sister doing the same thing.

It's a bad thing that my dad's in Iraq because I don't get to see him. I email him about what's going on in school. I'll be eleven when he gets back. I keep getting older and he misses most of it.

Moving can be a good part about being a military kid because you get to see a lot of different places that ordinary kids don't.

We live off post, so I go to a school off post. The best things about school are recess and PE. I read a lot, too, and I sing with the school choir. I'm not going to join the military because I don't think it would be much fun. It's also full of boys who think they can do things better than girls. Instead of joining the army I'm going to be a scientist, a teacher and an athlete.

Most of our family is still back in the Philippines. That's hard, being so far away from our grandparents and cousins.

Mom finds it hard being without Dad. We don't know any other Filipino families down here, and she's always worrying if we don't hear from Dad for a few days.

I get worried that Dad will get hurt again. He broke his leg once, and he has back problems. I think he got hurt during a jump. Mom is always trying to get him to go to the doctor because he still has pain from all that. He also hurt himself on a ruck march. That's when they have to go on long marches with heavy bags on their back, even up to one hundred pounds. He fell, and then he couldn't drive himself to work for awhile because he was on pain medication.

Even when he's home, I don't get to see him much because he's training all the time. He leaves before I wake up, and he comes home after I've gone to bed. He did help me with my homework once. And once I woke up at the same time he did and got to have breakfast with him before he left. And sometimes we can take lunch to him at his office. He likes Filipino food that Mom makes.

When my parents were growing up in the Philippines, they didn't have anything. Their whole home was like the size of our bathroom. Mom would wake up in the morning and wonder if they could afford to buy something to eat that day. Now she sends money every month to support her parents and brothers and sisters. Before Dad joined the military he was earning only 1000 pesos, or about $20 a week. My uncle still earns only $6 a day. Now it's better for us. We have a car, we have a house, we have lots to eat. So the military has been a good life for my family, even though my dad is away all the time.

My advice for other military kids is try not to think too much about your parent being away, and try to have fun with your life.

Jamie's mother is one of the founders of the Military Wives Sisterhood, an organization based at CFB Shilo in Manitoba. There are similar groups, large and small, across North America, where military spouses can share ideas, complaints and companionship. There's even a magazine,
Military Spouse
, full of articles about the challenges of military family life.

Jamie's stepfather, a master corporal, is away on training before possibly being sent to Afghanistan. Soldiers train in Wainwright, Alberta, where a model Afghan village has been set up to mimic what they will see and do in Afghanistan. A similar Iraqi village has been set up at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and Iraqi Americans have been hired to role-play the Iraqis the soldiers might meet when they go to Iraq.

My stepdad is in Wainwright now, on training. He was in Afghanistan last year. He might have to go again. A lot of soldiers from here are heading over there in February, so he may go with them.

Before he went to Afghanistan, there would be
Remembrance Day services at school, and kids would be crying, but I wouldn't understand why. Then when he was gone, at the Remembrance Day ceremony I started to crack up and bawl. All my friends were there to support me.

The teachers always show this music video at the ceremony, and that's when everybody cries. In the video, there's a dad and his daughter at a grocery store. The one minute of silence comes up, when you're supposed to stop and remember. The girl stops, but the dad doesn't, he keeps shopping. Everybody looks at him. In the background you can see the ghosts of soldiers who have died. They're walking by. Then, finally the dad realizes what's going on, and he stops, too.

Some people from the military gave speeches, and every class made a wreath to put at the cenotaph. We do that to remember the soldiers who went away to fight so that us kids could have freedom. They died for us so we could have a good life.

Dad left for Afghanistan early in the morning. He said goodbye to me the night before. Then when I got up in the morning, he was gone. I cried, because I knew I wouldn't see him for six months. You just think about what could happen. He was in the infantry over there, and he could get into a battle or get shot.

He was in some dangerous situations, but he never talked about them. I've always been nervous about asking him. Once when he came back, we went to see some fireworks, and I could see him jump every time one went off. He plugged his ears. It reminded him of gunshots. I didn't really want to ask him about that, but I did. He said he was okay and didn't want to talk about it.

He came home on a break around Christmas, just for a short while. I was so happy to see him. He brought me back a Kandahar hat. It's a camouflage hat with the word Kandahar
on the back and Tim Horton's on the front. He also brought me a gold necklace.

I saw a video of Afghanistan that his buddies made, of mud houses and marijuana fields. The people there are really poor, so maybe they grow the marijuana to sell it and make some money.

Girls in Afghanistan have a rougher life than me. They don't have as much freedom. Sometimes I'll be down about my life, but then you've got to think about what other girls are living, and be happy that you've got a good life.

I have a family. I'm free. I can go to school. I can make my own decisions. I can do what I want to do. I don't have to marry when I'm young. I can marry when I'm twenty or forty-five or even not at all. I have that choice. And if I don't like what the Canadian government is doing I can say so, and I won't go to jail for expressing my opinion. That's freedom.

My friend is in the cadets, and she's asking me to join but I already have soccer, golf, basketball, volleyball — I play lots of sports. I might join cadets if I can fit it into my schedule.

My stepdad says he doesn't want me to join the military. I don't know why, but he says he really doesn't want me to. He says it's my decision, though. Maybe it's because there aren't as many women in the army as there are men, so the women are given a harder time. It's growing, though. There's more women than there were before.

Women can certainly do whatever men can do. If they believe they can do it and they want to do it, they can do it.

But I still don't know if I want to join the military. I'd really like to be an actor. I've taken acting classes for three years, and been in plays. I even wrote a play, about a plane crash.

Mom delivers mail. She's also part of the Military Wives Sisterhood. They try to support the wives and girlfriends of soldiers around Brandon. They do potluck suppers and Christmas parties, and a lot of just looking out for people, so
people don't feel alone. Shilo is a small base, and it's in the middle of the prairie. Some people come here from the big cities and they think they've fallen off the world. So the Sisterhood helps them be part of the community.

She found Dad's deployment real hard, although she tried not to let it show. Weeks would go by and we wouldn't hear from him because he'd be out in the field without phones or computers. I'd see her getting more and more worried, then we'd hear from him and would relax a bit for awhile.

But sometimes she'd get into this crying thing. She'd start crying when she was delivering the mail, and once she started crying in the dentist's chair because news came on over the radio about another Canadian soldier being killed. She'd get angry with Dad, too, for leaving us, which didn't make sense, because he had no choice. Then she'd get angry with herself for getting angry.

She's a really strong woman, though, and she does a lot to support other women. She's a good role model for me on how to be a member of a community, and also how to respect other women and not try to tear them down. Sometimes girls try to make other girls feel bad.

This week, the Sisterhood is putting on Afghan Awareness Week. Since so many people from Shilo are heading over there in February — more than half the base, I think — the Sisterhood thought the people of Brandon should know a little bit about Afghanistan. So they're bringing in speakers and they've set up a display here on base with a slide show. This weekend there's an Afghan marketplace, with food and clothes and crafts and music, like Little Afghanistan on the Prairie!

We sent Dad packages the last time he went overseas, so we'll do that again when he goes away. He really likes Twizzlers, so we'll include those, and maybe some Tim Horton's coffee or gift certificates.

When he first came home, he'd drive the car right down the middle of the highway, because that's how they have to drive in Afghanistan since there are often bombs along the sides of the roads. Mom made him stop driving until he settled down. I guess he'll get into that habit again when he goes back.

My advice to other kids like me is to treasure your friends and your family. They're everything. Without them, I don't know where I'd be.

Soldiers can suffer from ongoing psychological problems as a result of military duties. These can include deep depression, alcohol or drug abuse, bad temper and severe anxiety. Sometimes these symptoms don't show up until some time after the soldier has returned home, and may not even seem to be related to the war. Sometimes the symptoms are mild and fade away in a short time. Other times they are more serious, and require professional treatment.

Anonymous is a young Canadian woman whose family was in crisis after her father returned from the war in Bosnia, where United Nations peacekeepers witnessed horrific violence.