Here we hope to provide connection to resources including documentaries, YouTube Videos, Books, Articles, and other Materials which will help either gain insight into the culture and lifestyle of military-connected families and communities or to have tools for supporting those families.
This Award Winning Documentary by Donna Musil is a must see !
This book by Ruth Van Reken and Michael V. Pollock is required reading for all Internationally Mobile Military Connected Families!
In Columbus that terrible autumn, someone had to do the right thing since the Army wasn’t organized to do it. For the families of the casualties of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry that someone was my wife, Julia Compton Moore, daughter of an Army colonel, wife of a future Army general, and mother of five small children, including two sons who would follow me to West Point and the Army.
Insightful book from a 9 year old Davidson Whetstone and his Green Beret father! In the first nine years of his life Davidson has moved 9 times, attended 3 schools, and his father has been deployed 9 times.
The Death of Santini
When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning count down to my inevitable death. I’ve come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can’t run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.
The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn’t sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one – and can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be found brother. My personal tragedy lies with my sister, Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored…
I’ve got to try and make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain one final time. Then I’ll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I’ll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I’ll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.
— From the memoir
https://patconroy.com/the-death-of-santini/
When I was living in Chicago in 1980, a couple of friends stopped by one night and asked me to go to a movie. The decision to drop what I was doing and go along turned out to be one of the most fateful ones I’ve ever made.
The movie was The Great Santini, made from Pat Conroy’s novel about a Marine Corps pilot and his family, and the overall effect on me was like being struck by a thunderbolt. Whole scenes, whole sections of dialogue could have been lifted right from my childhood.
Not that there weren’t important differences; for starters my father had been in the Army, not the Marine Corps, and he was not a pilot. There were plenty of other differences, too. But the movie nonetheless was a revelation: It spoke to me in my own idiom, out of my own military experience—something I had yearned for without realizing it. For the first time in my life I saw that my brother and I were not, as we’d thought, rootless; we were the offspring of a lifestyle that is unique, intense, demanding, steeped in characteristic rules and values—and a lifestyle that literally millions of children have shared.
It took me several hours to calm down. What a revelation to suddenly understand that one is not alone! To all at once be given the gift of perspective on one’s experience, and shown the ways to both cry and laugh about it!
Wertsch, M. E. (2006). Military brats: Legacies of childhood inside the fortress. St. Louis, MO: Brightwell Publishing.
Published on Feb 24, 2017
OJ Hall shares his experiences as an “Army Brat,” someone who grows up with a parent or parents in the military. This often means moving constantly, and OJ Hall was no exception. Before he was 18 he had lived in California, Saudi Arabia, Maryland, Colorado, Rhode Island, Virginia, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Alaska. In this inspiring talk, OJ Hall explains how his experience showed him the importance of pursuing deep relationships and investing in family.