Off to War (10 page)

My advice: If this is your life, just deal with it.

Bailey
— My mother is a corporal, or maybe she's a master corporal. Anyway, she's a medic. She got back from Afghanistan last February.

My dad was in the military, too. He died in South Africa. He was a security guard, so he traveled to different places at different times with his boss. The Canadian embassy was there. He did security for Canadian VIPs. He died in a car accident. I lived with him for three months in South Africa. He traveled to Zimbabwe and Madagascar, and all over.

My stepdad is in the military, too. I don't know his rank or his job, but he's here in Petawawa. I have tons of sisters and brothers, step siblings.

Mom was in Afghanistan for six or seven months. It was her second time in Afghanistan.

When Mom goes overseas, we don't really have a structure in our lives. I'm the oldest, so a lot of responsibility falls on me. There's always a big rush in the morning. I'm used to doing the
cooking, even when Mom's home, because everybody likes my cooking. Hers is sometimes burnt. I had to do a lot more cleaning and cooking, though, when Mom was away. My grandparents, Papa and Nana, came up, and they did a lot, too.

Mom first went away in 2004. I lived in a house in Kingston with my dad while she was gone. Dad was still alive then. She called us from Afghanistan and we'd talk about school and what I did that day.

When she came back the first time, me and my sister moved back to Petawawa where my mom was stationed. I didn't notice any changes in her the first time she came back.

The second time, yes.

She used to be really strict, and now she's like, sure, whatever.

One thing that happened was that she got blown up. She was in an armored vehicle and it hit a bomb or a bomb hit it, and she was injured. A bunch of nerves in her neck were damaged, and she bruised her leg badly and damaged nerves in her arm, too.

She was kept in Afghanistan while she recovered. She was only in the hospital for two days.

The army told my nana and papa about it first. My nana was going to tell me, but I found out by overhearing a conversation.

Kaylee
— We were hiding out in my basement one night and we could hear them talking.

Bailey
— My sister didn't know until after my mom got back. I didn't tell her. I heard about it two days after it happened. Mom usually called once or twice a week — once on Saturday and once on Sunday — but she couldn't call when she was in the hospital, so I thought that maybe something was wrong.

I didn't tell anybody that I knew. I was worried that I'd get into trouble for listening in on their conversations, so I kept it a secret. For a long time it was just me and Kaylee who knew that I knew. It was hard not to say anything to my sister. It was hard for me because I wanted to ask questions and get more information, but I couldn't.

One person died when my mom was hurt, and I think some other people were injured, so it was a bad, bad day for a lot of people. My mom was lucky.

She suffered a concussion, which still bothers her sometimes, and she can't really hear me if I'm talking to her in a whisper, because she damaged her ear in the explosion.

I don't think she's going to go back to Afghanistan. Two trips there is enough. I think she signed up in the military for twenty years, and she has ten years left, so I guess if they order her to go she'll have to go. The longer you sign up for, the more money you get when you retire. I think that's how it works.

I can't join the military because I'm diabetic. They wouldn't take me. I'm relieved, actually. I'd rather be a photojournalist.

We're army brats. Everybody knows everybody on base. You go anywhere, and it's “Hi, hello, oh, hi,” because you know everybody you see.

Kaylee
— There's good things about that, too. All our friends are right around here. It's easy to get together with them.

Bailey
— We belong to the Deployment Program, for kids whose parents get deployed overseas. They give you free tickets to the movies, and we had a Christmas party and a beach day.

Kaylee
— There's a stress reduction exercise they taught us called Spaghetti Toes. You pretend you've got spaghetti in your toes and it works its way up your body. And there's another where you talk about good things and bad things, and things you want to have happen and things you don't want to have happen. It's good because sometimes you end up saying things you didn't even know you were thinking about.

Bailey
— The non-military kids have no idea about who we are and what our lives are like. They'll ask “So, where do you keep your gun?” I don't have a gun!

Kaylee
— They'll say “So, do you guys drive tanks to school, and is your house surrounded by barbed wire? Do you get checked by the guards all the time?” They don't get that the base looks just like a regular place, except for all the tank statues and the soldiers. The base has a big gate on it, but it's hardly ever closed.

Bailey
— It's never closed, except for one time when there was a bomb threat.

Kaylee
— The whole base got shut down when that happened. My dad was at Borden, and we were off base doing some shopping or something, and when we came back, the guards didn't want to let us through because we didn't have our military ID on us. All we had were our memberships to the gym. We had to argue with them until they gave up and said, “All right! Just go!” and we drove through.

Bailey
— I was at home. We had to stay in the house. It was really scary. They found what they thought was a huge bomb. Before they went to open it, they were going to take all the military
families into the bunkers. There are bunkers way in the back of the base, off by the highway. But it turned out not to be a bomb. Someone had stuck a refrigerator motor in a big crate, then wrote BOMB on the side of the crate. I don't know if it was supposed to be a joke or what, but it wasn't funny.

Kaylee
— The OPP don't really come onto the base. It's just the MPs, the military police. The OPP have to stop at the bridge and turn around.

Bailey
— The OPP can't arrest the military.

Kaylee
— Once my dad was speeding, and the OPP stopped him and said, “Do you have a licence?” and my dad showed them his military ID and they said, “Okay, keep going.” They didn't even give him a ticket. Some OPP will give tickets, but a lot won't, to show their respect for the soldiers.

Bailey
— My mom even backed into a cop car once, and the officer said, “I can't give you a ticket.” My mom was like, “Just give me the ticket, it's all right.” But he wouldn't. He said, “It's just a small scratch,” and he wouldn't give her a ticket.

Kaylee
— I think the police favor the military because my dad could die just from doing his job, and so could the OPP, I guess, from doing theirs, so they treat the military better than they do regular people.

Bailey
— The town doesn't like us, though. If you go into a store in Petawawa and you're a military kid, the store owners follow you around, and if you go to the rec center, which is off base, the village people watch you and judge you. I was there once, pushing my baby brother in a stroller, and the villagers
were staring at me and rolling their eyes and making shameful noises, as if they thought I was a teenaged mother or a bad person. They judge us because we're military kids.

Kaylee
— We send letters to the troops. I like doing that. Sometimes soldiers get really depressed when they're over there, and they'll want to turn to alcohol or drugs or something to help them deal with the pain. So somebody set up a big box on the base and filled it with letters from school kids. And if the soldier is feeling depressed or lonely, they can go and pick out a letter.

Bailey
— The rule is, if they take a letter, they have to answer that letter. So the soldier gets a letter, and then she or he writes back to the kid, and maybe they're not so depressed anymore. It takes their mind off what they're doing for a little while.

Some military wives don't understand why their husband doesn't keep in touch when he's over there. The husbands try to explain it to them when they do call, but you can't really have a marriage over the phone. Lots of times it ends up in divorce. I know families who get divorced because of this. They just can't take it anymore.

Kaylee
— Some of the guys in the military here in Canada, they can drink and do drugs, but when they get over to Afghanistan, they can't do either of those things because they'll get kicked out of the military. So they get depressed because they can't do what they're used to doing to cope. And if they're an alcoholic they have to completely quit, and that's hard. There was one time they could drink, though, and that was when the Stanley Cup arrived in Afghanistan. Everybody got two cans of beer that day.

Bailey
— My advice for other kids like me is don't worry. Just don't think about it. Daydream about other things, things that will make you happy.

Kaylee
— Think about food instead. If you start to worry, fix yourself something to eat, something nice, and that gets you through the moment. Then you can be okay again for awhile.

In the United States, women make up twenty percent of the armed forces. Although women are not assigned direct combat roles, the nature of warfare today puts women on many of the same front lines as men — carrying and firing weapons, and being killed and injured. About one hundred female American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and many more have been wounded. (In Canada, women make up about fifteen percent of the armed forces; their training is the same as the men's, and they are eligible for all jobs, including direct combat.)

For women who are mothers, being sent to war means leaving children behind, and giving over to someone else the many tasks and moments that go into raising kids. For children, having their mothers out of the home often means a different sort of life than they have when it's their father who goes away.

Cherilyn and her family live in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, with their two cats, one kitten and thirteen frogs who live in the pond in their front yard. Lebanon is home to a Hershey plant and a cocoa-mulch factory — as a result, the town often smells like chocolate.

Both of Cherilyn's parents are military people. Her father is a civilian now but still works with the military, teaching helicopter repair. Her mother is a sergeant first class who works in human resources.

I live in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. It's a pretty big town, sort of a factory place and sort of a farm place. My mom calls it pigpoop country.

Dad spent fourteen months in Afghanistan. I was six at the time. He went over there not too long after the 9/11 thing. I don't remember him leaving, but I certainly remember him coming home. There was a huge homecoming party at Fort Indiantown Gap, which is a base here in Pennsylvania. That's where they were coming back to. All the families were there, standing and waiting, and there were TV cameras. The soldiers all came riding back to us from the airport on fire trucks, lots of fire trucks. Everybody cheered, and it all got filmed by the TV cameras.

I tried to stay away from the cameras as much as I could because I was real little and feeling a bit overwhelmed. But I remember the great food and all the people and my father being back.

It wasn't really possible to keep in touch with Dad while he was in Afghanistan. There's a big time difference, and he had to move around a lot to go to where he was needed. He worked with a helicopter unit. When there was a helicopter crash, he fixed them up, if they could be fixed, and he also rescued and saved people. So he moved a lot.

Dad videotaped a sandstorm for us to see, and he lived mostly in tents, so it wasn't a very comfortable place for him to be.

Dad doesn't talk much about his time in Afghanistan. He's the kind of person who can keep stuff to himself. You can really
trust him to keep secrets. Maybe he was in danger over there. Probably he was. But he doesn't talk about it.

I don't know if he killed anybody or not. He was there to repair helicopters, but he was also a soldier, but I don't know. He certainly wouldn't tell me, and I don't know if I'd want to know.

If you kill somebody who is trying to kill you, I understand that. I don't understand people who try to kill their own people, like with roadside bombs, which kill people besides Americans. But sometimes you have to defend yourself. If someone's trying to attack you, you can try to get them to back off, but if they don't back off, you gotta do what you gotta do. And if my dad killed someone for that reason, I could understand that. Sometimes people kill just to kill, not for any other reason, but that's not my dad.