It Never Ceases to Amaze Me....

that I meet Military Brats every day, and I think, aha! That's why I took an instant liking to this person. Recently on our writers Yahoo group, I discovered one of our members was a Navy brat, but I chastized him and told him we were taught to call them Navy Juniors.

Memories come flooding back, some good, some not so good. Doing a blog tour with other writers has been therapy for me, as some memories surfaced that I had long ago buried. I was particularly reminded of the incident when we were posted to Seoul, Korea, where I was traumatized by the actions of one of my drunk "Uncles" -- one of my dad's friends, who came home in a rage from the Officers Club while I was baby sitting his smaller children -- not much younger than myself, I might add.

He came in the back door, drunk and staggering, and demanding to know where was the gun? I had no idea where the gun was, and at age 9, I didn't want any part of trying to find it. Somehow, while he was preoccupied by tearing up the kitchen, I found the gun hidden in the linen closet. I picked it up gingerly and hid it under the baby's crib mattress, knowing he wouldn't disturb the baby, no matter how loud and angry he became.

My father arrived, worried about the man's conduct, and afraid he might harm me, too. His wife followed next, crying and wringing her hands, and he turned the dining room table over on her. Then the moment the man saw my dad, he immediately started pummeling him. When Dad had a chance, he grabbed a heavy dining room chair and hit him over the head with it. Out cold.

All this time, I was cowering behind an overstuffed chair, screaming my head off. This wasn't supposed to happen, I remember thinking. This is a friend of Dad's and look how he's acting. And I was also afraid for myself, too, and tried not to scream or make any noise lest he find my hiding place, but my primitive instinct outweighed my common sense, and I continued to cry for help.

And help arrived in the form of Military Police. Dad gave a statement, Mom arrived and took me home and put me to bed, where I continued to shake for hours, unable to sleep. She held my hand until dawn, when I finally drifted off to sleep from sheer exhaustion.

I didn't put that incident in my book. I didn't want to relive that horrific event, and even now, I have made sure that the man's name is not mentioned, for fear of his family thinking I'm "ratting him out." But you know, drinking was a part of being in the armed forces. It was a "good old boy's club" but at the same time, officers were expected to drink like gentlemen. Unfortunately, the force of the alcohol took over after the third or fourth drink, and they ceased being Officers and Gentlemen. Just falling down drunks.

I understand that today's Army is vastly different in this respect. Help is available on post, and if any member of the armed forces is found to be drinking to excess and/or abusing his family, retribution is swift and long-lasting. Thank God for that.

Pat Conroy and I came from that former tradition. His father was a raging alcoholic, and this colored the author's writing. Perhaps that's one reason I like his books so much, not only because they read like poetry, but I can feel the same feelings he went through in his childhood, on a much larger scale.

There is some good that comes out of facing this.

I know now why I'm afraid of drunks. I have yet to consider anybody who is under the influence of alcohol as funny, and laugh at their antics. I keep a wide berth around anybody who even hints of having had one too many. And I certainly don't drink, myself.

I know many people have had more horrendous experiences than this one I described, and I can't imagine how they got through their lives with active alcoholics in the home. Just his one incident long ago in a far-away country marked my life for many years. Going to Al-Anon meetings certainly helped me feel those long ago fears and exorcise them. Certainly there are many who read this who would benefit from attending Adult Children of Alcoholics groups, too.

So now another skeleton in my closet has been rattled. Who knows what may pop up next?

Whatever it is, I know I can handle it.

I'm an Army Brat.

Being a Brat Wasn't Easy

Without telling too much that is in my book, Once a Brat, I can tell you that my life was not an easy life. True, I had advantages that few children could even dream of, but I also was deprived of many things.

Maybe that's one reason I hate diets? I don't like being deprived of anything. No chocolate? No bread? Don't eat this, but do eat that.....a pox on all the diet doctor's houses. I didn't have milk or ice cream while we were stationed in Seoul, Korea, in 1946, and by golly, I missed them. When our ship docked in San Francisco (I was never so glad to pass under the Golden Gate bridge, an emblem of our country, in all my nine years.) So one of the very first things I did when my feet hit solid ground was go to a drug store soda fountain and order an ice cream soda. Yum! I was home!

I missed a lot of other things kids in the states did that I didn't have any awareness of. When I hear people talk about the old "duck and cover" school drills, in case of nuclear attack, I draw a blank. Didn't have to do that overseas. Instead, we had suitcases packed under our beds, and practice evacuations in case Russia should suddenly take a notion to quit rattling the sabre and actually use it.

I also missed radio -- and commercials. Now who would think that would be a loss? But we had Armed Forces Radio, where the only commercials were "Re-enlist" types. And certainly no television; we didn't get our first tv until we reached Fort Hood TX in 1952.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the inoculations we had to take. Before we went to Korea, my mother, brother and I had to undergo several series of shots, some of them hurt, some of them merely made my arm feel heavy as lead. We had plague, Japanese B encephalitis, typhoid, tetanus and lord knows what else. And these had to be followed by "booster" shots some months later.

When I reached junior high school age, where any girl can become an instant "fashionista"(although the word hadn't been invented yet) the arrival of a new girl in my class called for an immediate inspection: Cinch belts must be ïn." Peter Pan collars must be out, we surmised, because she never did wear one. What was the latest dance craze? Hair-do? That was just the girls, of course; I'm sure the boys had their own goals of discovering what was going on Stateside, like who is the ranking pitcher now? Who is going to the World Series? We weren't isolated from news, of course, but it was old by the time it reached us. And definitely given a military slant. We wanted the REAL news.

The worst thing about being a brat, of course, was taking leave of a place I had been for a year, or two or three. Friendships had been forged, and now I must climb into the back seat of my dad's car to drive to the train to catch a ship that would carry us away from this country. I know now why I can't form strong relationships -- it was too painful. So I had many friends, but my feelings were always superficial. Never learned how to work out a problem. We'd be gone in the next few days, so why bother? '

Ah, well, not all of bratdom was negative. I saw things that live in my heart even now, like art museums, monasteries, old Roman ruins, real castles, open air markets where you could buy gorgeous flowers for mere pennies, operas in the afternoons and trains that ran on time.

And, after all, doesn't everybody have some negative incidents in their lives? We get over them, or we get neurotic. Wasn't it Freud who said, "All neuroses are merely substitutes for genuine suffering."

He sure knew what he was talking about.