Deborah Ellis tends to write about families separated by things beyond their control-- war, poverty, prison. “When I heard about the tours of service being extended beyond what families were expecting and the National Guard folks being called up, I began to wonder what that meant to the kids. And that was the first interview question I started with, ‘What does this mean to you?’”
More than one million American and Canadian military personnel have taken part in the wars in Afganistan and Iraq and according to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, 1.2 million young people in the U.S. have at least one parent in the armed forces. Deborah Ellis, an award-winning author noted for her courage in writing fiction about the plight of children in developing countries now serves North American military children with her collection of interviews, Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children (Groundwood Books, $15.95, 9 and up). The book releases in September.
“I interviewed two to three times as many children as those in the book. I wanted to put in every interview because I remembered what great kids they were. Luckily, I have cold-blooded editors who made decisions based on having as many experiences as possible reflected in the book.” The book took her a year and a half to complete and contains interviews with forty-one children from Canada and the US, aged 6 to 17, nine of whom are from Fort Bragg.
The breadth of Ellis’ book is apparent not just in locales and ages, but in differing branches and ranks represented as well as backgrounds and opinions. There’s a Pagan family who is anti-war and another whose family has served in the military for generations. Some are National Guard families who live off-base and away from supportive community, others get involved in base activities and organizations. The emotional responses run the gamut from children who feel estranged from a transformed returning parent, to those who find their soldier parents don’t sweat the small stuff after being overseas. For Ellis, the book was an education in not seeing the military as a group, but as a collection of many individuals with differing ways of interpreting their experiences. “No matter what your opinion is about the war, or politics, these are phenomenal people.”
One common theme was the children’s loneliness. “In a lot of cases, when parents came home things were different, but because their mom or dad wouldn’t talk, they felt lonely and left out. They feared bringing up subjects that would remind their parents of bad experiences. They took on a lot of responsibility for looking after parents and maintaining the silence.”
Ellis begins each chapter begins with a short introduction, explaining issues like friendly fire, post traumatic stress disorder, fallen heroes, and deserters . Then she wisely fades into the background and allows the children tell their stories. She presents these in script form and it reads like pure, unadulterated truth, just the kind of books children of military families need. Ellis notes that the families who have received the book are pleased with their children’s reflections, surprised they knew so much.
As you read the stories you can’t help noticing similarities and trends. The many children whose families have divorced, miss spending holidays and birthdays together, hide their feelings, and fear for their parent’s wellbeing. But above all the individual voices and perspectives shine. Like the thirteen-year-old who wonders “with so many service men and women coming back from Iraq, spooked by those sounds, you’d think people back home here would have a heart and cancel all the fireworks.” The seventeen-year-old boy whose father suffers from PTSD and snaps at certain sounds and sights and is confused about why the military keeps sending him overseas. The thirteen-year-old girl who cries in the school bathroom when she can’t keep her mind off the danger her father’s in. The six-year-old who says “I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up because they have guns and I like shooting bad guys. The hard part would be dying.” An eight-year-old who says “I could be laughing and singing and right at the moment he could be getting shot, or bombed.”
In January, Ellis will publish a partner book called “Voices of War”, a collection of interviews with Iraqi children, who now refugees in Jordan. The most startling thing to Ellis in all her interviewing has been that the children had never given any thought to what the world would look like without war. “It’s our fault that we’ve never presented a world without war as something that might one day be possible, something they could think of, or imagine. We’ve got to change that!”
Ellis was most impressed with the children’s coping strategies. “I worked with adult women with severe mental illness for sixteen years and a lot of them didn’t seem to have carried those skills to adulthood. It’s something that the kids innately knew. Sometimes as adults we forget what it’s like to be happy and all our activities are geared to perpetuating unhappiness. When you’re a kid, you want to be happy, so they did things to make themselves happy. Below find advice offered by Ellis’ interviewees.