Off to War (8 page)

Dad worked in clothing when he was in Afghanistan, getting people uniforms and other stuff they needed. He left for Afghanistan on August 16, just four days after my birthday. He was actually going to leave earlier than that, but then it was extended so he got to be here for my birthday. So my birthday party was mixed with a going-away party at the same time. It was a happy day. I mean, I was happy he was there, because he wasn't going to be there, so it was like an extra present. I was really upset that he was leaving, but happy he was at my party.

We had the party in my backyard, with a huge ice-cream cake. All our neighbors came over, and my grandma and my great-uncle, and my uncle and his girlfriend. It was a great party.

After Dad left, it wasn't the same at home because he wasn't there, but we were kept really busy. We went to the movies and went out a lot and went to dinner quite a bit. I do dance at a studio just outside Petawawa, at a place called Stars in Motion. I do hip-hop. We just had our recital, and we got gold! And Dad was back to see it.

Dad was gone for about six months altogether. When he came home in November for his HLTA — that's just a short holiday — he was a little jumpy when somebody came up behind him. He wouldn't really say anything, he'd just jump a bit. He was only home for a short time, but it didn't seem like a short time because we were so excited to have him home. We went to pick him up in Ottawa and he ran down the escalator. It was actually kind of funny because we didn't see anyone else
actually jumping down the escalator, just my dad! And then he tried to hug us all at once and we were very happy.

It was really sad when he went back, but when he came home again he brought us presents. He brought us all a silver bracelet and a chain. He brought my mom back a gold puzzle ring, and charms for our necklace, and white gold earrings with our birthstones, and other things.

He also got me an Afghan bracelet and a little animal made of marble, and a little figurine of a camel.

He was the same Dad when he came back. There were Afghan people working on the base and Dad got to know some of them. Once he saw some Afghan people sitting on the ground in a circle. They had a bit of rice they were sharing, eating it with their hands, but they didn't take big handfuls, they'd only take a little bit, then pass it along. They would all share it. There were like twelve men sitting there, grown men, and they had only this little bag of rice and they were all sharing it. And then they even offered some to my dad.

My dad bought them some Timbits, those little doughnuts. He didn't know what they were going to do with them. They each took one, and shared the rest out to take home to their families.

If we'd get a box of Timbits, we'd just look at them and think, “How many can I grab?” It's just amazing to me to think about how they'd share even a little thing like that.

I think kids in Afghanistan have a lot harder time than I do. If I want something, I'll just go and get it, but if they want something, they have to work for it more. I'll want food and I'll just go to the fridge and get what I want, but they don't even get as much as they need to not be hungry.

I think Canada is in Afghanistan to help people who need help, to keep them safe, and to let them have their rights.

I don't think I'll join the army. I have other jobs in mind.
I'd like to be a clothes designer or a kindergarten teacher, or a writer. I wouldn't mind the military, but it's just not my dream. Sometimes I get to go down to the kindergarten room and help out at lunchtime, and it's just amazing to watch the way kids learn. I was helping them with their letters, and there was this one boy who didn't want to write his letters. All I had to do was give him a little bit of encouragement, and he did it. That felt really good.

Although frequent moving has always been part of life for military families (the average military kid goes to between six and nine different schools between kindergarten and the end of high school), the recent trend toward compulsory testing has made this more of a challenge. Many states, for example, require students to pass exams on the state's history before they can graduate. The Military Child Education Coalition (MCEC) helps to ease the transition of military kids in the US when they change schools, helping families finding their way through the red tape and lobbying for changes that would make life easier for military families. Some states are now considering passing laws that would remove that requirement for military kids, or allow them to carry over the results of state-specific exams they have taken in a previous state.

Dahshan and his sister, Malia, have moved many times, and they now live on post at Fort Bragg. Their neighborhood is called Cherbourg, named after a French seaport that played an important role in World War II.

Dahshan
— Our father works at the motor pool, fixing cars. He's also a medic. The cars he fixes are the ones they use to rescue people who have been injured, like when the paratroopers get injured on a jump.

Malia
— I've been to where he works. It's very big with lots of rooms and stairs.

Dahshan
— He's been in the military since I was three or four. I have no idea why he joined.

Malia
— He had to go to Iraq, and now he's home.

Dahshan
— He was gone for over a year and came back last January. It was his first time in Iraq.

Malia
— But we all lived with him in Germany. We had a dog there named Niko. He was a brownish kind of Chow dog.

Dahshan
— It was a small base in Germany, not nearly the size of Fort Bragg. You could fit three or four of the German base in Fort Bragg easily. It was pretty close-knit. We lived by the hospital, where Dad worked. It was the only hospital around, so we got to see everyone.

Malia
— We were there when I was really little and I had to go to preschool on the base. My mom worked there, too. Her job was to help the teacher. It felt very fine to have my mom go to school with me.

Dahshan
— I went to elementary school on the base. It was pretty big, all US military kids. Before we went to Germany we lived in Kansas.

Malia
— Kansas is very different from North Carolina.

Dahshan
— Kansas is dry, then it's raining a lot. It's cold, but then it's summer and it's still a little cold. Pretty much anything that could strike over there will strike. Tornados, storms, lightning. We were in Fort Riley for three years.

Malia
— We were in New York first. We're from New York. We've been all over. I was born when we were in Fort Riley.

Dahshan
— I liked Germany. I was ten when I got there, and by the time we got out I was thirteen, so it's where I did most of my developmental thought and everything. We got to go on school trips to see other parts of Europe. We went to France once, and Berlin. Germany is a lot like America except for the counting and measurements.

Malia
— We live on post here at Fort Bragg. It's good because I'm close to my school. It's right over the hill. Dahshan's school used to be close, but he goes to one in Fayetteville now.

Dahshan
— We used to live in Fayetteville, in the city, and it was okay. It was just where we lived. But when we moved on post, it was like being back in Germany, only bigger. Instead of spending five minutes to get to the shops, like we did in Germany, we spend an hour to walk there and back. Fort Bragg is the second-biggest army base in the US. Only Fort Hood is bigger, in Texas.

When you come on the base it's like a whole other world, because all these strange things go on and you can see them all. If you just walk around, you can see Burger King over there, with kids yelling at their parents to get more food, then on the other side of the street you can see soldiers training or heading
off to their barracks to sleep, and you can hear gunfire sometimes in the morning from the training, and bombs exploding in the forest. Tons of stuff.

The gunfire's not scary because it's not like the war stories, where you hear gunfire and you hear people yelling and dying. You just hear it. It's nothing alarming. It just goes off, and you're like, okay.

Malia
— I hear the trumpet at night sometimes, and in the morning. It's very cool.

Dahshan
— At night it plays taps. In the morning it plays reveille, and at the end of the duty day it plays retreat. I don't always hear it.

Malia
— I can hear it because my window's open. It's a nice sound to hear before I go to sleep.

Dahshan
— I think they play it on all the bases. When Mom first heard it in Kansas, she was looking for the bugle guy, but there wasn't one, it's all on tape. In Kansas it was on blast, on big speakers, so it sounded like someone was blowing an actual trumpet in your ear. Here it's more like someone is playing a trumpet under your window. It's much quieter. Here you can pretend not to hear it — and sometimes you don't — and you can keep moving if you've got some place to go. But in Kansas there's no way you can't hear it, so you have to stop.

You're supposed to stop your car, get out and stand at attention, or at least stop driving. At Pope Air Force Base, which is right next to Fort Bragg, they play the national anthem, too, and soldiers all have to stand still and salute until it's over.

Malia
— I don't have a military ID yet because I'm seven, but Dahshan has to have one. It's got his picture on it.

Dahshan
— We have a curfew on post, too, of 9:30 if you're under eighteen, which is really trying on Saturdays when I want to stay at my friend's house for a little bit and I have to go home.

You can go anywhere you want to on the base, as long as you can make curfew. It's on you. Well, there are some places we can't go, like we can't go watch the soldiers do target practice, and most of those areas you can't bring a POV into anyway. POV is a Privately Owned Vehicle, like out on Chicken Road where the ranges are.

Malia
— We went on two trips to Florida, to Busch Gardens and to Disney World, on a tour bus from the base, and it was not comfortable at all.

Dahshan
— The seats didn't go back like they were supposed to, so when you were sleeping, you had to sit straight up with your head and shoulders slumping over. It was a nine-hour trip. They were good trips except for that, though. It was all paid for by the army, or most of it was, even the hotel. Sometimes there are day trips to DC, too.

Malia
— Disney World had a great pool. I'm a good swimmer. There are pools on the base, too.

Dahshan
— Everything is great here, as long as you can get to it. One thing on base that Mom likes is that there's one main road, and if you can find that road, you can usually get to where you need to be.

I just started going to a regular off-post school, but I've
made 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 best
friends, 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.