Update: 2006-06-15

I received this email from BRATS director, Donna Musil, inviting us brats to a free screening on Sunday June 18, 2006.

Dear Friends of BRATS,
The new documentary film about growing up in a military family, "Brats Our Journey Home," will be screened in the Messiah Lutheran Church fellowship hall at 5701 Cameron Road in Austin on Sunday, June 18, 2006 at 3 p.m.
A seven-year work of passion by independent filmmaker Donna Musil, BRATS features narration and songs by Air Force Brat Kris Kristofferson, rare archival footage, photographs, and home movies from post-war Japan and Germany.
In the film, American military BRATS of all ethnicities share intimate memories about their interesting childhoods - growing up on military bases around the world, then struggling to fit into an America with which they have little in common, but for whom they sacrificed their youth.
Filmmaker Donna Musil will be at the screening to answer any questions you might have about the making of the film.
Admission is free. Please let any military brats you may know about the screening of this film.

Dateline: 2005-06-06

When I returned to Texas after teaching English in Japan for two years, I experienced reverse culture shock. More importantly, I realized, for the first time, that I was experiencing exactly the same kind of alienation and disorientation that I felt years earlier when we moved back to the states a few months before my 13th birthday. Then I had a difficult time adjusting to junior high school. I dismissed it as part of becoming a teenager and to the fact that I was the new kid.

Not only were my classmates all strangers to me, they were an odd kind of stranger, cliquish. I was shocked to learn that they had known each other since they were toddlers. They had actually gone through eight years of school together. All their shifting animosities and friendships had straight-jacketed them into roles. I felt sorry for the kids who started unpopular and remained unpopular their whole school lives. I thought the kids at this new school were unfriendly. They thought I was strange.

And so I was. I belonged to a special tribe, the military brat. In all my previous moves, I'd never suffered the stigma of "new". Everyone in my former schools was used to being new. You made friends fast. And you only had a couple of years before they were out of your life forever. And I loved it. I loved the chance to reinvent myself, to experience new places, and try out new ideas. To this day, I can't visit or read about a place without imagining what it would be like to live there.

The Hollywood cliche is that if you're not one of the popular kids in school, you spend all your time trying to be one. Attending my first "normal" school, I was outside regular school society, but I didn't feel like an outsider. Rather than feeling pushed to the edge of society, I created up my own. I still had a strong sense of belonging. I just didn't belong there with those kids. I placed myself outside their realm and beyond it. I felt like a visitor from another planet.

My best (and only) friend and I defined ourselves by making up our own language, our own system of writing, our own costumes and customs. In short, we created and lived in a world of our own, a world I carried with me even to college.

I still feel like a foreigner in my own country. Only moving back to Japan revealed the source of my alienation. Japan is such a surreal experience for the foreigner, I didn't have to make up other worlds to explain my differences. While everyone else was complaining about culture shock, I was enjoying the familiarity of it. No need to hide my differences because, on the surface, I was so obviously different.

As I've grown older, I've discovered that most of my friends had one of two things in common with me. Either they were brats, too (or if their Dads weren't in the military, they moved around a lot because of their Dad's job) or they were Catholic. These were the people I didn't have to explain things to. We shared the common understanding that springs from common roots.

Now Donna Musil has made a film BRATS: Our Journey Home to celebrate the whole lost tribe of military brats. I read the comments of the brats she interviewed and felt immediately at home.

Moving around as a kid may have contributed to a certain inconstancy in my character, a problem I have maintaining relationships past the 2-year mark, a restlessness I feel whenever I feel myself becoming entrenched in my habits. But I valued my upbringing so much, that I dragged my own kid off to Japan, just so he wouldn't have to say he's lived in one place all his life.

More BRAT Links

• Military Brats Online
• Tehran to Washington, DC 1970-1973 Hilary's and Kathy's letters from the front