Free Air Force Brat by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Page B

of us whether it was Okinawa or Tullahoma.) I think the debit
side of this ability can be seen by the fact that I don’t tend to
become quite as invested in things, as perhaps I should.
    It can go very strongly the other way too. I
know ex-dependents who have a striking fear of loss in
relationships. This fear can end up causing them to either avoid
relationships or break them off prematurely.
    Not surprisingly, most military brats tend
to have a strong affinity for the military. We ex-brats don’t just
have a tolerance for the sounds of heavy aircraft but a downright
preference for it. This love of things military is born from being
in the “in” crowd for so long—the special passes, the gate guards
saluting your car as you entered the base, the wave of your ID card
that got you admittance into the Commissary, the BX or PX, the O
Club—all of the privileges of the special club to which you
belonged.
    I have lived in thirty-four different places
in my life, sixteen of them before the age of twenty. When I buy a
house now and look lovingly at it with the key in my hand and the
ink barely dry on the mortgage, I do not imagine my grandchildren
bounding down the front porch or an endless parade of beloved pets
piling up in a backyard graveyard. I comfortably hold in my mind
the idea that this place is not permanent at the same time I think
of what trees and bushes I want to plant. Getting used to living in
temporary quarters is something military dependents understand.
    Even if they never quite get used to it.
    It doesn’t take much self-knowledge to
figure out that if one moved less, there would be an increased
likelihood of having a more established place in a community, and a
sense of belonging. Unfortunately for some Brats, and I am one of
them, the constant moving from my years as a military dependent set
in motion a continuum of needing to continue to move throughout my
life. It is a restlessness that had no real cost to me when I was
young, but has become increasingly inconvenient the older I get.
(Moving a lot, especially if it’s not backed by the US government
is expensive.)
    Most military brats, especially the ones who
experienced overseas tours of duty with their families, have a
mechanism in place to explain why they are the way they are and how
growing up in the military may have shaped or affected that. Like
many of my adult friends who were ex-military dependents, I had pat
explanations for my impatience with sloth or tardiness. In fact, in
most cases, one didn’t need to even offer up an explanation, you
just needed to mention that your Dad was a retired Colonel. If you
were restless, the reason was because you moved a lot as a kid. If
you chose, tenaciously, to stay in one spot for the rest of your
life, the reason was the same—you moved around a lot as a kid.
    Today, my brothers and I all share the
indelible markings of ex-military dependents. We have dined off our
stories of growing up in Europe our whole lives long. We have
chosen to either dig in at one location for the physical stability
that was always just out of reach growing up, or to continue the
journey of relentlessly moving, over and over again.
    Most military brats find they have the
ability to mimic accents or pick up whole languages easily. There
is a larger percentage of ex-military brats who prefer to work for
themselves—like all three of my brothers and myself do—and who
would refuse to consider the idea of working in a
closely-supervised situation within an organization.
    When we moved back to the States in 1965, we
settled back at Patrick A.F.B. My father built a home for us on the
side of AIA facing the Atlantic Ocean. We lived there for seven
years until we kids launched in different directions, looking to
find who we were meant to be, and until the Cape coasted to a
standstill when the space program transferred its focus to the
Shuttle program.
    I traveled the world, married late and had a
son in 1994 who is crazy for jets