Off to War by Deborah Ellis Page A

deal anymore. Anyway, he doesn’t yell as much.
    I know he felt pretty sad because of his guys who got killed. They were his friends, but even if they weren’t really close friends, you all want to look out for each other in a war. Evenif you don’t know the person who gets killed beside you, it’s still hard.
    Mentally, there is a lot of stress on some soldiers. They’ve been hurt, or even if they weren’t hurt physically, their minds have been hurt from being shot at and bombed. It’s really affected them, and then they go home and it affects their families. They all need help to get through it.
    I don’t think I’ll join the military. I just don’t want to be part of a war. I would stand up for my country, but I hope there’s a way to do that without being part of the military. My ambition is to become a teacher.
    My advice is to try not to focus on the bad things. Keep your mind on the good things. You’ll get through it easier.

Darby, 12
    The role of the US Special Forces is to put people secretly behind enemy lines, to gain an advantage over the opposition. Special Forces groups include the Rangers, Psychological Warfare Operations, Civil Affairs, Special Operations Aviation, the 82nd Airborne, and others. Formalized during World War II, they are branches of the service that conduct secret military operations around the world. Many of these Special Forces train in Fort Bragg. Their work is celebrated in the JFK Special Warfare Museum on the post.
    Darby is the youngest child in a military family, and she was even named after a colonel. Based in Fort Bragg, her father is a major who works in the area of military intelligence, which means she can never really know what he’s doing. He has been deployed to Iraq five times
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    My father is in Iraq again. I have a photo of him here, with a smile on his face. Mom says this was the last glimpse she had of him before he left. That was three months ago. This time is going to be his longest deployment ever, for fifteen months.
    I’m holding up pretty good. I try not to think about it, really. We get a call from him pretty much every day. He’s an F2, a senior military intelligence officer for the Headquarters Company of the 1st Brigade Combat Team.
    When he phones we don’t talk about his work, because that’s secret, so we talk about what’s been going on here, how school is going, what sports I might join, how he liked the last care package, how our pets are doing. We have a Spanish terrier named Colonel and a cat named Major. We call him Major Brat Cat. And we have a Russian hamster named Hagrid. I don’t know how he’s different from a regular hamster, except maybe in the looks he gives us. He has a very evil look.
    I have a twenty-six-year-old sister named Jessica, a twenty-five-year-old sister named Martha, and a twenty-three-year-old brother named Ricky.
    Dad’s deployments are really close together. He was with the National Security Agency in Fort Mead, Maryland, so his earlier deployments were shorter because they couldn’t spare him for very long. He was name-requested for the job he has now in Iraq. He does a lot of briefings, and a general liked him and asked him to go back to Iraq. But he had to go right away, and he had only just gotten home.
    Dad told my mother about it by sitting her down and giving her a piece of chocolate cake and a cup of hot tea. As soon as he put the cake in front of her she knew something was up. We were all set to move to a base in Germany — Darmstadt — but we came here instead. I didn’t really want to go to Germany anyway. We’d already lived there, in Heidelberg, from the time I was three until I was seven. I’d lived in Fort Bragg, too, but not since I was a baby. We moved to Fort Mead after Germany and stayed there for five years. We’d just moved here and bought a house — our first house — and Dad was in it for