Having a feminist poet and a conservative enlisted soldier for parents made for weird headspace growing up. Surrounded by daily sounds of bugles playing Last Call and Reveille, standing for the national anthem before movies that were shown on base and being taught that the Confederacy was fighting for racist values and were traitors to the American flag – a child doesn’t know how to make sense of this. Particularly when offset by an informal home schooling akin to Howard Zinn’s work.
Military holidays like the Fourth of July didn’t actually result in my dad being off from work. His MOS was a musical one and the military loves having some fucking music at some ceremonies. There’s also an agency within the Army called the MWR which purports to provide recreation and morale for soldiers. They use the bank unit to do this which resulted in the very weird situation of my father playing “Holiday” in Iraq for members of the United States military. Not sure if you’ve ever heard the lyrics of that song but they include:
Can I get another Amen? (AMEN!)
There’s a flag wrapped around a score of men (HEY!)
A gag, a plastic bag on a monument
While potentially about to die for their country, soldiers were employed to sing about dying for their country. That’s how deep the brain washing is.
Memorial Day, though, is a particularly cruel holiday to make children of soldiers celebrate. On the surface, it is easy to gloss over the actual meaning of the holiday up until a certain age. It’s a day off for families to go to the beach, have a cookout, go to the movies, enjoy massive car buying deals, just generally patriotic things for patriotic families. Sometimes our extended family would come to our military issued residence and pay homage to, I guess, a soldier who might die for our country someday.
But if your mom is a critical thinker, or if you’re just curious yourself, you quickly discover that’s what you’re expected to celebrate. Your parent’s willingness to “make the ultimate sacrifice.” Military parents are sent whenever and wherever anyways and that’s hard enough to deal with as a child. It is inherently damaging to a child’s self esteem to be subjected to their parent being forced apart from them whatever the reason. Whether that is incarceration, death, divorce or deployment. For some reason, though, children whose parents are in jail aren’t offered the same sympathies I would have been were my dad nobly slaughtered in the name of.
Having that mental threat hanging over you at all times, that your parent might leave at any moment, is difficult to deal with. Growing older and understanding that this might also mean this sudden departure might be the last time you see them alive is cruel. The annual holiday tells families “We have already accepted your loved one’s life as collateral damage. We are fine with this.”
How can and does the human psyche, especially at such a young age, protect itself from the heightened threat of danger to someone who is supposed to be a part of your life forever? Of all the funding and medical research that is done to attempt to repair the damage that military services does to soldiers, almost none of it goes to repairing their families, particularly the children who had no say in our parents’ career choices.
There is something unique to the trauma of being raised by military personnel. There is nothing quite like watching planes hit skyscrapers located within your borders for the first time at age 15 while hearing the intercom call for officer’s kids because their parents are already being deployed. There is nothing quite like pleading with your father on Christmas Eve to stop being so cold because he is leaving for South Korea in a week, to make the most of the last days together instead of anesthetizing himself.
Seeing these experiences glorified as a patriotic sacrifice is the most generously funded gaslighting experience one might have in this country.
I write about these experiences not to generate sympathy for parents who are or have been in the military. I write about these experiences because the traumatization of their children has been entirely erased when we talk about “supporting the troops.” Nobody talks about how his trauma bleeds over onto his family and instead of breaking one person you have broken five. I write about these experiences to indict the military industrial complex for what it is: a force hat destroys human life and human potential for everyone touched by it.
Happy Dead Soldier Day!
Queer Pandemic 