Around this time of year in 1968, we got an audiotape from my father. On it were the sounds of his billet in Saigon being overrun by Charlie in the Tet Offensive. I was 11. The C-130 officers had barricaded themselves on the roof. The Marines swept in and killed every non-American in the building. Pop had the presence of mind to roll tape. That is just one memory that I have in April, the month of the military child.
BRAT comes from the British service and stands for “British Regiment Attached Traveler.” Throughout history the children of warriors watch their fathers go. Tears always fill all of the eyes in that scene, always have, always will. If they are lucky enough to return, or not, tears again flow.
Yet we were lucky in many ways. For almost eight years of my first 16, I lived in France and Germany. We traveled extensively, as my small-town Florida parents wanted us to get the most out of the opportunity.
I went to a French school for a while, and got beat up every day. (I was very tall and people thought I was slow, because they were actually five years older than me and the same height.)
My mother took us to museums, concerts, festivals, cheese markets. We ice skated on the frozen pond of our French village.
In Germany I was a teen, and we could hop a train and go anywhere in northern Europe without breaking curfew. Imagine The Who’s “Who’s Next” concert at the Festhalle Frankfurt, age 16.
Throughout those years over there, my father made sure that we saw the sites of history from the Crusades and Richard Coeur-de-Lion to storming the sea wall at Omaha Beach about age 6, to the exact locations of the Ardennes Offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, Verdun.
We located scenes out of Monet paintings and those fields and black birds of Van Gogh. We saw the scenes that inspired Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.
We saw our father bite his lip at funerals of friends who lost their lives, as military people do too often, in peace-time operations. We felt his bitterness, repressed due to decorum, even though they knew the mission was pointless due to some pin-headed colonel or general officer — my mother calls them AKs still, polite talk for people who kiss up.
Our father would disappear for months at a time and we would read headlines later like, “Belgian Commandoes rescue hostages in Stanleyville,” or “U.S. Forces relieve Indian troops in the Himalayas fighting the Chinese,” or so many other missions that we didn’t hear about until 20 or more years later, “U.S. Air Force in spying mission over Red China, floating spy balloons over the country and retrieving them over the Sea of Japan.” Yeah, they did that!
We were the BRATs and they are still out there today. Some have said that we got that nickname because we were actually freer than civilian kids, immune to the laws of our host countries.
During the Vietnam War, when I was in Germany, we had a huge anti-war movement. Not that we could do anything important, but we all had military jackets, hand-me-downs from our dads (or moms).
We all sewed upside down American flags on the upper sleeves to show our protest. When we wanted to wear jeans to school, we shut down the library and the nurse’s clinic by showing up en masse, we filled the parking lot at lunch, etc., until we could finally wear what we wanted. Yes, we were brats, too.
My father tells the story of a C-130 suddenly depressurizing while flying in the Northeast and plunging toward the frozen winter ground. The plane was diving so fast and shaking so violently that the man who was supposed to squawk an emergency could not get his hand on the button to do so. Pop said he was about to give it up when he thought “Kathy and the kids need me,” and he kept fighting. Everyone was ready to bail out and he did everything he could until it finally started coming out of the dive and he saved them all.
He was right. We did need him.
In this month of the military child, you will not see PBS specials, local TV stories, special series on the TV news or spreads in the newspapers.
But they are out there, nonetheless, those brave boys and girls who shine their shoes perhaps better than the civies do, who say yes sir and ma’am to their elders, whose jaws clinch when their warriors come home and who have no idea really that they are an inspiration that keeps this country strong.
Jim Sutherland of Atlanta is the son of Maj. David E. Sutherland (USAF Retired) of Bartow and is a Peabody and Emmy award-winning TV journalist.
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