First and foremost, I am an Army brat

In honor of Veterans Day, I want to dedicate this column to my parents.

My mom did 10 years of service in the U.S. Army. My dad retired from the Army last year after 23 years of service. My feelings toward the Army and how it raised me have always been complicated.

Army brats are part of an unknown subculture, an “invisible tribe.” Often we don’t know anybody longer than two years. We never grow up with anyone. We are raised in a complex community with its own culture and rules, its own set of standards, its own very serious problems.

Emerging from this community, I am conflicted about many things. I am torn between feeling a deep, bubbling hatred for the fruitless war in Iraq and immense pride for the sacrifice soldiers made for it. Service is both horrific and heroic to me.

I am both jealous of the students I’ve met here that grew up with their friends and town and grateful that I’ve never had to be still for very long and for the many hands I’ve been lucky to shake.

I felt safe in the Army community and also trapped, wondering if I would repeat the sometimes-poisonous cycle, if I would inevitably enlist and sign my life away to this world within a world.

I am resentful toward the war and the profession for stealing my father for a year at a time.

I am grateful for my experiences overseas, my resilience and adaptability, the tradition and patriotism practiced in this community.

My complex version of patriotism is tinged with a growing concern for the mental and physical states of soldiers and their families. I sometimes feel the military is disorganized, unfair and overbearing, but I love it deeply in the same way you love your parents in spite of everything. I will always have this complex relationship with the military, but I wouldn’t trade my connection to it for anything.

Before anything else, I identify as an Army brat, and it, more than anything, has shaped who I am.

In a poem titled “I am a military brat,” a fellow, anonymous army brat writes it perfectly: “As I stand to honor that flag, so also do I stand to honor all soldiers, most especially to the man whose life created mine — my father. Because of him I have shared in the rich heritage of Army life.”

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your service and for the opportunities it has given me.
You can’t know how grateful I am.

­— ambhendr@indiana.edu