A Glimpse in Time

Memories abroad, of a time long passed.

Thirty years ago, my family moved to Germany. We had been living in Washington State, on Fort Lewis near Tacoma, and my father was deployed to Katterbach Kaserne in Bavaria, just outside of a city called Ansbach.

The deployment originally was meant to be three years, as was the norm with overseas deployments in the Army at the time. By the end of that first year, we had already gotten a second three year term locked in, and we returned to the United States after six years abroad.

That was a very formative time in my life, one that has shaped a lot of who I am now and how I see the world. In some ways, it was a typical “Army brat” upbringing…but there were plenty of ways in which it was not.

I’m just one man reflecting on it 30 years later, but there's a lot that the normal people don't really get. So, let's talk about that for a bit.

In an overseas deployment, the service member is sort of the focal point in most familial units. To use my own experience as an example, I would normally be known as “Sergeant Honaker’s son”, to put it bluntly. Your identity is contingent on who your “sponsor” is, and you're normally defined in those terms.

While that's more of a thing that comes into play outside of school, it does come into play. The military tends to have very rigid policies over different ranks and “branches” interacting; officers keep with officers, enlisted servicemembers keep with other enlisted folks, and heaven forbid if a general gets involved. The idea is to mitigate insubordination, but it has an effect of creating a sort of “caste” system. I recall not being invited to a birthday party because the celebeant’s father was an officer and my father was enlisted, and his mother was especially keen on that point.

For me, though, things were a bit different.

My father was the service member, but my mother worked at the elementary school as an aide. In particular, as a library aide, she was much loved; I have memories of hearing kids calling out “Mrs. Honaker!” excitedly when we were out and about, even on vacations to Italy. She was visible and active in the school community and in the military community as a whole, to where she actually had an identity as “Mrs. Honaker”, not just as “Sgt. Honaker's wife”.

I don't think he would admit it, but I feel like that makes ght have irked my father. For nearly every other family, the service member was the defining locus, but she was the one that defined our family.

Admittedly, my brother and I were also known; in particular, my Spelling Bee exploits got me known. Being a twin, being “smart”, and having a couple of prominent successes raised my profile.

The armed forces are given towards transience, and while there is some stability, there also is a tendency to get moved around on a seeming whim. Out of the 6 years of elementary school, 0 classmates from first grade, besides my brother, were there at the end of sixth grade. At most, three years was the longest someone else was there for, outside of teachers and faculty members.

It's hard to keep friendships in the wake of thw flux and constant shifts I do still have a couple friends I keep in touch with, but it's definitely far more sparse that way as a consequence of when we were there (e-mail was just becoming a thing), but there are definitely few childhood friends I still have contact with.

The moves on my side and from others made it hard to keep those friendships, and I think college was the first time where ai maintained those bonds. I was thankfully more stable than most families, moving only 4 times before I turned 18.

There were a lot of lessons I took away from my youth, and a lot of those experiences color my creative outputs to this day. I have learned that military wives are broadly terrible, among other things but that's a story for another day.

I think my upbringing really left an impact on how I see things and approach a lot of interactions. As it did for many, but there are definitely aspects unique to me that I try to disseminate.