Free Off to War by Deborah Ellis

need to be.
    I just started going to a regular off-post school, but I’vemade a few friends who are not in the military, and their way of looking at things is very different. They see a lot more than we do. On base it’s very nice, but it’s not like in Germany, where you saw a bunch of different cultures. At least where we were you did, because we were at the hospital, so we saw people from Iraq who’d been hurt, and all sorts of people. But here you see pretty much everybody without differences. There’s no exoticness, I would say, here on base.
    Off base you can go all around and see lots of different cultures and art and music and ways of looking at things. There are band stores where people will come in and play different instruments, and you can meet and talk with them.
    Here it’s kind of like everyone is kind of the same. Even people you don’t know, you feel like you’ve seen them before.
    By the time we moved here, we knew Dad was going to Iraq. If you’re in Germany and you get sent to Fort Bragg, you know you’re getting deployed. It’s guaranteed. This is where Special Forces trains. People get shipped out from here. So we knew. We were getting prepared for it emotionally, so it wasn’t a surprise.
    One of the really hard times when Dad was gone was when I’d walk around my house. Back then, I used to come home from school at three, and no one would be home, unless I picked up my sister on the way. Mom works at the medical clinic for the 82nd Airborne. My dad used to stop by the house around that time, just to check in, make sure I was okay. But then he went to Iraq, and I’d walk around the house and realize no one was really there. I tried to keep busy, to find myself things to do, because you don’t want to just be thinking about how alone you are. You try to do what you can to fill that empty space.
    Me and my dad used to play around a lot. I would say something and he would start laughing. We’d be like bestfriends, almost. Although he’d call from Iraq as much as he could, it seemed like all the stuff I wanted to say was so dumb, like, why even bother? He’s over there, he needs to hear good stuff, so our time would run out and I wouldn’t be able to say anything. It was awkward. It wasn’t normal. I was ashamed of myself that I couldn’t make our phone conversations go better.
    Dad didn’t want us to take him to the drop-off point. He didn’t want us to be there when he left. It was his first deployment, his first time going. I hope it made it easier for him that we weren’t there.
    I hear from other kids who take their fathers to the goodbye place, and they say it can be really hard, with kids clinging to their parents and crying and not letting go and having to be pried away. That’s not good for anybody.
    Malia — After Daddy left, we had to go to school.
    Dahshan — He had to do so much training before he left, too. He really didn’t get much time to be home with us.
    After he was gone, I noticed that without him, things just kind of seemed the same, routine, and nothing seemed important.
    Like, usually, with Dad around, when I’d wake up, I’d want to get going, be dressed, look nice, do things, take on the day. And when he left, it’s like, “I went to school yesterday, it’s going to be the same thing today, and tomorrow’s going to be the same thing after that.” It got to the point where I thought, “Why bother?” I kind of just stopped caring.
    I got through it by finding other things to do. Instead of just going straight home after school, where Dad wouldn’t be, I went to a friend’s house, and he kind of helped me through it. His dad was deployed once before, and he was heading over to Iraq again. My friend kind of kept things even for me.Without him it would have been very different. It wasn’t even that he would talk about it