Jennifer Eden Rogers
Disaster
Seventh grade, almost thirteen and not in love. But definitely in like. I like-like Joe Martine, with his slicked-back, jet-black hair and understanding eyes. Joe and I are the only two in Mrs. Hardy’s class doing advanced math this year. We huddle together doing our work and it’s heaven, but a heaven where he always wears a ski jacket and an awkward perm makes my face look too big for my head. I wear my jacket all the time too. Solidarity.
Two hundred kilometers north of us, a car bomb explodes outside Headquarters at the Rhein-Main Air Base, kills two Americans, and wounds twenty more. Joe and I and all the other kids at school are Army brats and we’re used to the ground shifting beneath us, keeping our balance while we navigate new hallways, cliques, cultures. We know we’ll move in a year or two and start all over again. Here in West Germany, though, we’re not just new—we’re foreign.
Some Germans resent us and throw anti-American protests, but we go to school on an Army base, so we feel insulated, safe. Lately though, I’m less sure—terrorists bombed the Frankfurt airport the week before my grandmother visited last summer. My parents and I walked by the cordoned-off hole in the floor when we picked her up.
But the bombs in Paris this Fall and the December shootings at the Rome and Vienna airports are just far enough away to fade into the background. We don’t really talk about it at school. And they tell us not to worry, we aren’t at war. Plus, I have my own battles to fight—Joe doesn’t like me back.
Our school is housed in a former German hospital, built for captured Allied soldiers. The fire alarm rings. Divided by grade, Kindergarten through 8th, we climb the steep hill across from the building, the hill where the Nazis executed less fortunate prisoners. We chatter, unsure if this is a drill. Then we sit. Sit looking down at our school, waiting. The little kids play duck-duck-goose. Whispers of bomb threats infiltrate our ranks. Teachers pace our lines. Lesson plans flap in the sharp February winds. Day after day after day. Every time, trucks arrive. Every time, guys wearing padded suits and Death Star helmets hop out with their dogs and sweep through the school. We sit. We watch. The spring-new grass on the hill flattens under our assault.
During Science we learn threat levels, “just in case,” our parents say. They catch a high school kid calling in bomb threats. Everyone’s relieved when he’s shipped back to the States to stay with his grandparents until his father finishes this tour of duty.
But the threats keep coming. The fire alarm keeps ringing. We grow used to it. Most of us quit doing our schoolwork. We keep climbing the slope, following the same muddy path every time. We get bored. Joe pushes his best friend while they’re joking around one day, and Eric falls down the hill, breaking his leg. Their friendship and Eric’s promising soccer future die there.
In April, a bomb explodes on the dancefloor of the La Belle Discotheque, a West Berlin nightclub popular with U.S. soldiers. Hundreds are injured. Two of the three people killed are Americans.
Our first school dance, Joe asks Amy. So, I steal Amy’s best friend, Beth. I agree to go steady with Richard Z., but he’s round and blond and uninteresting, and I dump him two days later. The dance goes okay. Our cafeteria is covered in streamers and the only slow song they play is Bryan Adams’ “Heaven”. Joe and Amy dance.
The United States responds to the nightclub bombing by conducting air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi. Reagan is hailed as a leader, and we all learn the limits of loyalty when the French refuse us airspace. The Libyans report we killed thirty-seven people and injured a bunch more. Word at school is we killed one of Qadhafi’s kids, and he’s vowed to kill one of us. Our parents assure us that’s probably not true. We try not to think about it.
Mom makes me run for Student Council President and I give a speech to a gym full of everyone I know. It’s exhilarating and I win. Beth and I switch placement tests for next year, I do both Language Arts tests and she does both Math tests, so we get all our classes together for eighth grade. I start a diary: “Only four more days ‘til I’m a teenager!”
The next day no alarm sounds but the teachers line us up anyway. We know the drill: we climb, we sit, we watch. The trucks roll in. The guys get out with their dogs. But this time they’re wearing billowing plastic suits that cover them head to toe and carrying machines that click with static. Today we are oddly still, seven hundred kids quiet enough to hear the birds chirping. Chernobyl drifts towards us. We just sit on this hill and wait.
Berlin is hazy by sunset. I have my sleepover anyway. Some girls can’t come because we don’t live on post, behind gates. I ask my mom how gates would protect us from radiation. She tells me people are afraid. I’m not sure I understand, but my friends start arriving and we thread jelly bracelets onto our arms like Madonna.
We wake up the next morning to urgent knocks on the door. There’s a suspicious package in an unknown car parked just outside the apartment. My friends and I filter out to the playground and sit around in our Garfield pajamas with the rest of the neighborhood, waiting for the Military Police and the German bomb squad. Turns out, it was just a Hausfrau’s laundry in a paper bag.
Later that day, after my friends have gone, I’m pretty sure I have radiation poisoning. But when I tell Mom, she gives me the catastrophic news—I’m a woman now.
“Military children grow up in unique and ever-changing circumstances—not as civilians, but not as soldiers either. This piece arose from my exploration of that middle ground.” —Jennifer Eden Rogers
Jennifer Eden Rogers worked in the community mental health system for many years and currently writes content for mental health websites. She is working on Do No Harm, a memoir about growing up dealing with her mother’s chronic health problems, both physical and psychological, and how that impacted the treatment of her own unusual seizure disorder. Through this lens, Jennifer explores the almost blanket authority granted to medical professionals and parents, particularly over girls/women, and how she eventually developed an “authority of self.” She lives in northwest Arkansas with her husband and two wire-haired dachshunds. This is her first prose publication.