Category Archives: Air Force Brats

“That was a darker part of my service to my country.  I grew up thinking my father would one day kill me.  I never remember a time when I was not afraid of my father’s hands except those bright, palmy … Continue reading →

“By necessity, I made my own private treaty with rootlessness and spent my whole life trying to fake or invent a sense of place.  Home is a foreign word in my vocabulary and always will be.  At each new base … Continue reading →

“Who would have thought we were in the process of creating a brand new culture in America?  Who could have known that our pain and our joy would produce such an extraordinary testament as that produced by those eighty veterans … Continue reading →

“I think being a military brat is one of the strangest and most interesting ways to spend an American childhood.  The military brats of America are an invisible, unrecognized tribe, a federation of brothers and sisters bound by common experience, … Continue reading →

“Until Mary Edwards Wertsch’s remarkable book Military Brats, no one in this country ever had the decency or took the time to thank us for our service to our country.  This book is both a love letter and a troubled … Continue reading →

There is a book, “Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress,” by Mary Edwards Wertsch.  It was written in 1991, and I bought it in the mid-1990s.  I was an Air Force ‘Brat.’ It probably took me the better … Continue reading →

I had ‘badgered ‘Dear Ole Dad’ for a puppy, for years.  At 9 or 10, it couldn’t have been that many years, but just the same…  Finally, after we moved on base, at Davis-Monthan (DM) AFB. AZ (Tucson), Dear Ole … Continue reading →