WASHINGTON, DC -- The term "military brat" may be derogatory to some people, but not to Mary Edwards Wertsch and thousands of her closest "brat" friends and acquaintances around the world.

Webster defines "brat" as "a child, especially an impudent, unruly child; scornful or playful term." But that definition doesn’t define "military brats." Wertsch said military brats have such values as idealism, antiracism, loyalty, patriotism, and honesty.

Not only that, she said, "The vast majority of us really like to be called military brats. We look upon it as an affectionate term with humor built into it.

"It connotes a kind of spunkiness, and spunkiness is what’s going to get you through," said Wertsch, 50, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. "So don’t be afraid to use the term ’military brat.’ It has various elements of truth in it, about our experiences, and we should be proud of it."

Distinctive Subculture

The military is more than a lifestyle, it’s a culture with its own norms and values, said Wertsch, executive director of Missourians Against Handgun Violence. She calls it a "fortress" with a capital "F," which suggests a togetherness within and a separation from civilian America.

The military’s demand for readiness sets it and its people apart from civilian America, she said. The author calls the "all-powerful military mission" the "unseen member of the family."

"The military mission calls all the shots -- tells the family where and when it’s going to move, what the conditions are going to be and whether the father or mother is going away and for how long," she said.

The military is not a democracy or an ’anything goes’ environment, which also sets it apart from civilian America. The military works on the principle of authority because that’s the way things need to be, she said.

The military mentality supports the authoritarian lifestyle, and so kids growing up in it negotiate two different worlds, she said.

"When you’re dealing with military kids, you may be dealing with someone who comes out of a very militarized family who has to cope with a very loose civilian context in a civilian school," she said.

She said she discovered some other fascinating things while researching the lives of military brats now ages 20 to 60.

Key to Identity

"The biggest thing overall is that the commonalities of our rearing are so powerful," Wertsch said. "It’s an identity that supersedes almost all others. It cuts across lines of gender, race, and class. It shapes us our entire lives through. You don’t stop being a military brat when your parents retire from service life. Retirement is also part of the story."

For example, she said, from that rearing, military brats carry an attitude that’s not just non-racist, but anti-racist. She recommends that military brats of all colors work against racism in military and civilian communities.

"This is a very strong value we carry and we can do much good with it," Wertsch said.

The life of military brats is a "mixed bag," she noted. In some ways they’re worldly and sophisticated, which civilians might label as "sturdiness."

"Military brats can also be very hard for other people to figure out," Wertsch said. "That’s because that kind of worldliness makes people think that we have a higher level of maturity than we sometimes do."

Military brats move around so much that they may not learn some of the hard lessons about dealing with folks, said Wertsch, who today lives in St. Louis in her 43rd house with her professor husband and their two sons.

"If you have an enemy in one place, you may not have to resolve things because you get transferred away," she said. "You may not know how to be a friend over the long term. That creates an immaturity that underlies that outer layer of sophistication and seeming older than your years."

She called coping with loss is the most difficult thing about being a military brat. Military brats are always in a state of either grieving or denial.

Further, Wertsch said, military brats and civilians have different views on the importance of education.

"I don’t think military brats are consciously aware of that," she said. The way education plays out is, a military brat goes into a school in the middle of the year and needs to make friends and have a social identity in a hurry, she said.

"So military brats tend to be either a super achiever in school, which gets the attention of their peers and teachers, or they go the opposite direction and join the out groups. There is very little middle ground," Wertsch said. "Fortunately, I believe most military brats fall into the super-achievers category. They come in aiming to succeed. They’ve developed very high expectations for themselves."

Military values are what Wertsch treasures most from her own experience. "Military values are the things that separate us most from the civilian world," she said. "Idealism -- military brats tend to be very idealistic people. We’ve been raised in an environment where you do things for principle, to support an ideal."

Source: American Forces Press Service via Veterans News and Information Service