Ann Marie Potter
Children of the American Military Machine
A few years back, in the middle of a phone conversation, a very nice man in Arizona hung up on me. The conversation had begun on a great note; I’d won a prize from a writer’s organization and he wanted to publish the essay in his newspaper. The five-hundred-word nonfiction essay was about the year I’d spent in Japan as a ten-year-old Air Force dependent. In particular, it talked about a 4th-of-July memory—watching the largest fireworks show in military history being shot off Tachikawa Air Base’s runway #3. Roses bloomed in the sky, then faded in the twilight shadow of Mt. Fuji.
“It was a nice piece,” my newspaperman said. I never caught his name and can’t remember the name of the newspaper, but he sounded… nicely matured. I pictured him in an oak-saturated home office, drinking coffee from an earthenware cup. His neatly trimmed steel colored hair would match his wire-rimmed glasses. It would barely graze the collar of his oyster-colored button-down sweater. He’d be a retired anesthesiologist or small-town optometrist who took over the small town newspaper to stave off boredom. His wife would peek into the office to remind him of his late morning dentist appointment, and he would smile indulgently. We chatted amiably for a minute, but when I mentioned growing up in the military, things changed. I could hear the pieces falling into place in his mind, with tiny doors clanging shut behind them. “Well,” he said, “thank you for your time.” Click. Dead air. I never heard from him again and I haven’t found any evidence that the essay was published.
It took me a bit to put it together, to realize that the conversation had gone south when I’d reminded him that all of America isn’t Arizona dreamscape. There may have been roses in the sky over Tachikawa, but I’d been honest about life on the ground, life in a family steeped in mental illness, addiction, and a slow-simmering rage. I’d let it slip that the family I’d described as “treacherous” was an American military family. And that it was an American airman—my father—who had drunk himself “into an alcoholic stupor that he never escaped.” I’d crashed headlong into an invisible wall of denial—the seemingly impenetrable fog of toxic nostalgia about the American military.
The American military machine has devoted a lot of spit and money to polishing its image. Vintage recruitment ads espouse a fight for liberty and democracy. Ads from all eras promise travel and adventure. None of the pictured uniforms, sharply creased and crisp, sported blood or mud or bullet holes. The promise of glory brought many a farmer’s son to an early grave, but historians agree that the concept began losing its shape and shine in the yellow haze of mustard gas. Many of today’s recruits respond to the promise of an education or a steady income, although families of enlisted personnel often earn so little, they qualify for food stamps.
The military’s façade has been reinforced so often that it would take something monumentally image-shattering to lay it to ruin. But things that should cause the walls to shudder and turn to dust fail to penetrate—they land like plastic arrows from a child’s game: the dreadful pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib, the frequent homicides, many of them sexualized, occurring on military bases around the country, and the massacre at Ft. Hood. There is the fact that members of every major street gang, as well as some prison and outlaw motorcycle gangs, have infiltrated the United States military in order to train their members and traffic weapons and drugs. Finally, we have the sad truth that dozens of active duty and reserve military participated in the attempt to overthrow the United States government on January 6th. It takes a special kind of oblivion to salute the uniform in the face of all that. We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Some of us who grew up behind the khaki curtain aren’t surprised in the least. The mythological American military, with its attendant air of respect and honor, was a hologram that shifted and shimmered, but never quite fully materialized. It was a rose that bloomed with great promise, then faded instantly in our skies.
In 2017, the folks at Chicken Soup for the Soul headquarters published Military Families: 101 Stories about the Force Behind the Forces. Predictably, the book was a litany of interviews that showcased the strength of military families, the glue provided by the nearly deified military wife. The book acknowledges the hardships of military life—the transient lifestyle, the need for yellow ribbons and military funerals, and the reality of PTSD. But, according to Chicken Soup wisdom, the well-glued military family handles this all with grace, strength, and good old-fashioned American pluck. I have no doubt that many military families flourish in this chosen lifestyle. My objection is with the unwritten rule that silences troubled military families, those who are not dealing gracefully with the stress and strain of military life. I call this the “no whiners allowed” rule, and it keeps struggling families from getting the help they need. The military awards this secrecy with promises of promotions and the attendant pay-raises. It punishes “whiners” by withholding the same. The military has programs in place for troubled families, but the silent messaging that seemingly saturates the aging buildings on any military base is still strongly patriarchal. It’s as old as the Bible—the belief that a man who can’t maintain order in his own family can’t be trusted to oversee an army. This dogma translates easily in modern military life—a man with a hooligan child or an unstable wife doesn’t deserve that coveted duty station in Hawaii or the extra four hundred bucks that comes with another stripe. This can easily lead to the unspecified “necessary” parental discipline crowed about in Chicken Soup, or the need for a military wife to isolate in order to not appear fragile or troubled to prying eyes.
The scars of a chaotic childhood can last throughout adulthood, but so can the denial that prevents that chaos from entering our conscious mental process. A brief visit to one of the Brat websites (sites dedicated to those who grew up in the military) will showcase the collision of these two vying attitudes. Even a hint of emotional honesty—truth-telling that doesn’t paint military life in the rosiest of glows—will be quickly and harshly rebuffed. “Now,” the fatherly voice admonishes, “we’ll have none of that.” Unfortunately, no whining means no healing. This is sad in that even military kids with happy home lives will face the grief and loneliness of nomadic lives. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that military children change schools between six and nine times before graduating from high school. That’s a lot of goodbyes and, if they are honest with themselves, Brats will tell you that they learned early on to sink shallow roots to avoid the bloody tearing and painful wrenching that comes with each new duty station. They will tell you that growing up in the military has made them incapable of forming or holding on to relationships as adults. Some of us will tell you that we simply can’t settle down. I’ve had driver’s licenses in seven states and even contemplating a permanent home fills me with anxiety. I must admit that my itinerant childhood had some lovely byproducts: a childish wonder at the creatures of the red-stone desert, a second-grader’s fascination in the tide pools of Monterey, and a passion for all things Japanese. I can recognize the trees of Northwestern Pennsylvania. I have a well-seasoned sense of adventure. But I also have inner-children so lonely that they panic, then grieve, if I separate bottles from their lids in the trash. In many ways, I had a bountiful childhood, but in many ways those early years broke me. I am healing, but only because I chose to do an appropriate amount of “whining” and when the myth of the perfect military childhood started to shatter, I chose not to cut my hands to ribbons holding on to the shards.
I’ve had to remove myself from the Brat websites because they were diligently recreating a childhood built on deception and denial. Nobody is going to put me in that box again. If I could talk to my Arizona newspaperman, I’d tell him to print the truth rather than the myth that keeps crippling military families year after year. I’d tell him to do the research and reveal the dismal statistics about bullying and suicide in Department of Defense schools. I’d tell him that roses in the sky aren’t real, and neither is the perfect military family.
“Writing ‘Children of the American Military Machine’ was a small part of a long and arduous healing journey. The essay forced me to ponder the many messages I received as a child member of the American military community and allowed me to sort fact from fiction.” —Ann Marie Potter
After earning a PhD in creative writing from Oklahoma State University, Ann Marie Potter officially retired from academic life. She currently lives in the beautiful state of Wyoming where she watches the wind blow, the sky snow, and the deer play—and poop—in her front yard. Her work has appeared in The Muleskinner Journal, The Meadow, Peauxdunque Review, and Literally Stories.