Off to War (18 page)

I'm not saying we're not proud in Canada. But here, if they go to Iraq, it's because they're proud of their country. In Canada you wouldn't hear that so much. It's just different.

Kira
— The whole war on terror started with 9/11.

Oliver
— It's all about who's going to control what. It started with going against terrorists, and now it's oil, or something else. Something to do with money.

I guess the Americans went into Iraq to help the people, but I'm not sure if everyone in Iraq is happy with the Americans not exactly imposing stuff on them, but giving them some ground rules. I'm sure they weren't happy with the government they had before, but if it's your country and another country comes in and puts in their own ground rules and changes things, you would be happy in one way but in another way you would not be happy.

Jasmine
— I can't believe that a human would be so cold inside as to want to start a war.

Kira
— There will always be countries that start wars.

Oliver
— I think it's part of human nature. People will always want power. I hope it can stop some day, because I don't think it's going to get us anywhere, all this killing people, but it's in our nature to be aggressive and to want power and control.

Jasmine
— It's like animals attacking other animals that stray into their territory. We're just like animals.

Oliver
— Some people get manipulated with their beliefs, like their religious beliefs. Some people use religion to control other people and get them to do terrible things. It's not just Islam. Christians do it, too, like with the bombing in Oklahoma City. I'm sure the people who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were working for someone higher up who had ideas and made the plans.

Jasmine
— I don't know if I'll join the military or not. I'd prefer to dance. There's a military dancing team with the US Air Force called Tops in Blue, and they dance and sing and perform
overseas. I hear it's very hard to get in, a very prestigious thing. They go all over, to Iraq, Afghanistan, dancing and putting on skits. They performed at the Coliseum here, too.

Kira
— I thought for awhile that I might go to the Royal Military College in Canada, but I changed my mind. I change my mind a lot. What happens if there's another war? If I join the military, I'll have to go, and I don't know if I'm ready. I'd be scared.

Oliver
— I'm sure Dad gets scared, too, but he likes his job. It's normal to be scared. But he doesn't let that stop him. He's doing it for his country, for the people of Canada, and I respect that.

I don't want to join the military, but I do want a job that's going to help people. I was thinking of the police, or Special Operations. I grew up with the military, so I'd like to do something different and new when I get out of school.

Jasmine
— When Dad came home from Afghanistan, I was just a kid. I was small. Mom said we were going to the base just to pick up his stuff, but then there he was, like a surprise! We didn't know he was coming back then.

Kira
— His hair was a lot shorter.

Oliver
— He was stronger, too, and tougher and stricter. He was over there for awhile, giving orders, and so he was kind of like that when he came home, too.

Kira
— He was really happy to see us, though. He had a big smile when he came back.

Jasmine
— He'll be in Iraq for almost two years. That's a long time.

Oliver
— We'll be staying here in Fort Bragg while he's in Iraq. Most of our family is in Montreal, so we'll just be on our own in our own little corner here. Besides, it's a change. We're so used to moving around, it's tough to stay in one spot for too long. After awhile, we're like, okay, what's next? We've been living in Canada for twelve years. Time to see something different. I'll probably keep moving all my life, from one country to another, because I don't like staying in one place too long.

Kira
— We've built friendships wherever we go, but we always know we're going to leave one day soon, so it doesn't hurt so much when we go. But it's tough to move from one school system to another. Even from the schools in Quebec to the schools in Ontario, it was hard.

Oliver
— We're used to Dad leaving us. It's a regular thing. Not every kid has the opportunity to live in a different country. That's one of the reasons I agreed to come down here.

Jasmine
— I think the people protesting the war are kind of right. War is a bad thing.

Oliver
— It depends on your family. If your parents are not for war, you will also grow up to be against war. If you grow up in the military, you will probably join the military. It's just a matter of how you were raised. You can look at the military in an awful way. They go in there, into another country, to invade and all that, or you could look at it that they're going in to help the people.

Kira
— I think the protesters are right, too, but if we stop the war one day in one country, what will keep it from starting again in another? And if it starts again, it could be much worse than it is now.

Oliver
— I sort of agree with the protesters, because we have to have free speech, but if we stop war, what will we replace it with? They say they want things to change, but they don't say what they think the change should be.

Jasmine
— There are some big differences between military kids and civilian kids. They don't get to go down the same pathways we've passed through.

Oliver
— Civilians look at the world in a totally different way than the military does. Our parents work all over the world, so we get to learn about the world from them, what it's like and how it works.

Kira
— Plus, we get presents from all over the world. Dad brought us back a whole box of burnt CDs, dresses, earrings. In Dubai, you can get all kinds of stuff, like gold and white gold jewelry, chocolate, picture frames. And whatever deployment he's on, he gets a group photo taken with everyone in his deployment group.

Oliver
— We got a didgeridoo from Australia, a hat from Afghanistan. Lots of things. He gave me this watch, too. I wear it all the time because it reminds me of him.

Jasmine
— Military kids are more self-sufficient and self-reliant. But sometimes it's hard to know where we're from when someone asks us. It's like, do you want to know where
we were born, or where we've lived the longest, or where we were posted last?

Kira
— The American military is much more welcoming than the Canadian military. The day we moved here, people in our neighborhood brought us homemade bread, they made us lunch. They band together down here more than they do in Canada, maybe because they get deployed overseas more than we do in Canada. Base housing is more expensive in Canada, too.

Oliver
— I felt closed in on the military base in Quebec. Maybe because it was in the woods. Here it's big, there's lots of room. It's good for Mom here, too. She joined the women's golf club, and has friends here. In Canada she was too busy to do that because she was going to university. Here she can just relax a little.

Kira
— After seeing the movie
Super Size Me
, I thought everyone in the US was fat, but they're not. Of course, this is a military base, so everyone here is in shape.

Jasmine
— You can have preconceived notions about every country that aren't true. I was worried that the Americans wouldn't like us since we didn't join them in Iraq. I mean, they did that whole weird thing of removing the word French from French fries — Freedom fries, remember that? They have a big if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us mentality. Their president even said it! I worried that they'd hate us, but people have been very good.

Kira
— I go to a public high school in Fayetteville, where it's a whole different world from Canada. They have two sheriffs in
the school at all times. You can't carry a backpack, just a mesh bag that they can see through, so they can make sure you're not carrying a gun.

Oliver
— I go to a smaller, private high school. Nothing gets locked up, nothing gets stolen. Everybody has everything, so they don't need to steal from anyone else. Football is really big here, too. I'm more used to hockey.

Kira
— My advice for other military kids? Have a mom like our mom. Having Mom around keeps us strong. I know she's not going to leave us. She keeps saying, “We're going to get through it,” and she's always right. We always do.

The men and women who are killed in combat are known as Fallen Heroes. They are entitled to military funerals, and stories of their service to their country fill their hometown papers. They make up the numbers scrolled along the bottom of CNN newscasts, a tally that everybody hates even though they accept that it's the cost of doing battle.

The military encourages soldiers to prepare a will before they are deployed and helps families get all their legal and financial affairs in order. Canada has lost more than seventy soldiers in Afghanistan; the United States has lost more than four thousand soldiers in Iraq.

Although the US invasion of Iraq removed Saddam Hussein from power, the American military continues to fight insurgents and train Iraqi soldiers to prop up the new Iraqi government. But there is still huge resentment throughout Iraq against the American occupation, and the situation is unstable and volatile. Patrick's father, Sergeant Patrick McCaffrey Sr., was a member of the California National Guard with the 579th Engineer Battalion. He was killed in Iraq on June 22, 2004.

My father was Sergeant Patrick McCaffrey Sr. I'm named after him. They gave him a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

Dad joined the army after 9/11 because he wanted to help the country and keep it safe from terrorism. Before he joined, he worked at Aikens Body Shop, fixing cars that had been hurt in crashes.

After he joined, he was away a lot on weekends doing trainings, so I sort of got used to him being away, although I never got really used to it.

I was nine when he got sent to Iraq. He told my mom he was going, and then my mom told me. I didn't know anything about Iraq except that it was very far away.

He was killed four months after he got there. An Iraqi soldier he was training killed him and killed another American, Lt. Andre Tyson. They were all on patrol. They were killed on purpose. The Iraqi soldiers were supposed to be on our side, but they weren't, and they killed my dad.

At first the army told my grandma a lie. They told her my dad was killed in an enemy ambush, a regular one. My grandma had a feeling that something wasn't right, so she kept after them and after them, and finally they admitted that they lied. It took them three years to admit it.

The army thought there would be a scandal if they told the truth because they were telling everybody that the Iraqis were ready to take over and everything was going well. But it wasn't, so they lied.

The Iraqi soldiers tried to kill my father two weeks before they did it. They shot at him with rocket launchers, but didn't get him. The next time they tried, they got him.

I was in my room playing when the army came to the house to tell us about my dad. I heard my stepmother crying and went downstairs to see her sitting in the living room, and there were the army guys sitting on the couch.

They told me my dad had been killed in action.

I didn't really understand it. My brain couldn't seem to take it in. They were saying a whole bunch of other stuff and I didn't really understand it.

For a long time I was angry at the army and at the Iraqis. Most kids don't understand it when I tell them Dad was killed by the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army is supposed to be on our side. Two of the Iraqis involved in killing Dad were killed themselves, I think, but I don't know for sure. If they were killed, it doesn't help me.

There were a lot of TV people and media people at our home after news got out that he died. My grandma talked to them. Dad was the first member of the California National Guard to be killed in battle since World War II or the war in Korea, so it was big news. Big news to other people, I mean, not just to me.

And then there were more news people later because the government said no one could take photos of coffins coming back from the war. My grandma didn't think that was right. She said my dad didn't hide when he went over to Iraq, so why should the government hide him when he comes back?

I think my dad's in a better place now. If he were still alive, they'd probably send him back to Iraq again, and Iraq is an even worse place now than it was when he was there.

He went to Iraq so he could make a difference and make things better. He did help a lot of people, too, Iraqis and Americans. Just before he was killed he helped somebody with heatstroke. It gets very hot in Iraq and a lot of people get heat-stroke. It can be very dangerous.

Me and him used to watch football together. The Washington Redskins was our team. We'd play Xbox and PlayStation. He liked movies, too.
Black Hawk Down
was one of his favorites.

He was a really strong guy. Everybody liked him. The US soldiers are good people. People think the United States is evil because of the government, but the soldiers are good people. They have families and feelings just like everybody else.

I'm not interested in joining the military. I want to play football instead.