For
more than a year, my senior in high school talked about joining the military.
She’d met some women who served on the ship with my husband and suddenly saw
herself as one of them — strong, tough and doing jobs a lot more important than
making duplicates at the copier.
I could understand that. Those women impressed me too. I’d also read figures from the Department of Defense that said up to 50 percent of all military children consider the military as a career for themselves. So I sat back and watched while she filled out applications, drove herself to interviews, attended functions and talked to a recruiter.
Then this month, she changed her mind.
Just like that.
One night while we were busy praying for her poor recruiter and his ulcer, she came in and threw herself down on our bed.
“I don’t want to join the Navy,” she confessed. “But I’m afraid if I don’t join the military I won’t be anything worthwhile. Both of you work in the military, and you love them. You think they are the best people in the world. I don’t want to be less than that.”
My husband and I sat there in our pajamas and gaped at her. Was that what she learned being raised in our house? That the only life worth living is one in which the military figures prominently?
That surely wasn’t our intention. We didn’t line up our children for inspection every morning. We didn’t teach them to recognize a sergeant at 300 paces or to identify aircraft in the sky. We didn’t march them to school in combat boots. So how did she pick up that kind of a message when we didn’t teach it to her?
Filmmaker and Army brat Donna Musil told me military children absorb a lot of similar unspoken messages.
While she was filming “BRATS: Our Journey Home,” she identified many patterns of thought military children carry into adulthood. For example, military children rarely think of money as a big factor in a career choice.
“Money (is) not a big motivator for military brats,” Musil said in a recent interview. “People don’t go into the military to make money, so you don’t teach children that’s something to value. You teach kids that mission, honor and duty are the things to value.”
I know we’ve done that, and I thought it was a good thing. But it worries me my daughter thinks the military is the only good form of employment — especially when I value the work of so many different kinds of people in our country.
“A great thing that comes out of military life is a sense of mission, a sense of honor,” Musil said. “It’s a great trait to hand down to your kids. You have to help kids understand that there are a lot of honorable things out there in the world and that they have (to) pick the things that they love.”
I think of that now every time I see a baby in a onesie printed with “Thank my daddy for your freedom” or “My mom wears combat boots.” I think of it every time I see another minivan with a “Sexually Deprived for Your Freedom” bumper sticker. We military parents must be aware this unspoken message is part of the legacy of living a military life. We want our children to have pride in their parents and in the military, but we also want them to live the adult life for which they are best suited. We have to remember the freedom we are fighting for is really theirs.