Off to War by Deborah Ellis Page B

four weeks and one day before he left.
    We bought a house because there wasn’t anything available on post when we moved here. You put your name on a waiting list, but we were pressed for time because we knew that as soon as we got here Dad would be deployed. So we bought a house. We’re hoping to be here at least three years. Dad wants us to be here until I graduate from high school, but with the army, well, we can only hope.
    Dad’s been in the military sixteen and a half years. He says he joined at college because they’d pay him to stay fit. And he thought it looked cool. And he always wanted to be an Airborne Ranger. Before military intelligence, he was an infantry — a ground-pounder. He’s a walking advertisement for GI Joe. He really loves it.
    Daddy wants me to do any career I want to do. Just because he likes the military, he knows it’s not for everyone, and he wants me to find things that I want to do, and not just join up because he likes it. I think I’d like to be a veterinarian or a doctor.
    The army is in Iraq to give us freedom and to let us live our lives in peace, and to protect America from anything bad that could happen. Freedom means to live in harmony with others, not be bad people, not to hurt anyone, and be a good person to other people who need help.
    The military is special in being able to bring those qualities out in a person because they sacrifice their lives for the United States of America to make sure all the people in America live in peace.
    I’m a pretty good student. I’m the top one in language arts. I just found out today, and I got a pencil with a smiley face on it as a reward! I also enjoy PE, art and social studies. Right now we’re learning about latitude and longitude — that’s very interesting — and the 3A’s, which is Africa, Asia and Australia.
    This is my first year back in the public school system after being home-schooled for three years. The schools at Fort Meadwere awful. Fort Mead is just outside Baltimore and Washington, DC. Even though Fort Mead is a closed installation, particularly after 9/11, the Fort Mead schools are last resorts for kids that were kicked out of other schools, so we got a lot of kids who didn’t want to be there, and they let everyone know. Mom worked there for a year as a lunch monitor, and got all shocked by what she saw, so my parents decided to home-school me. Mom was trying to finish up college at the same time, so we studied together, and it worked out perfect. She’d make sure that I’d get up in the morning and get my work done, and every Friday I went to a community center to do computers and PE. I met up with a lot of my friends there because they were home-schooled, too.
    One of the good things about being a military kid is you get to travel. I don’t get carsick or anything. I’ve skied in the Swiss Alps, I’ve been to the Mediterranean, I’ve been to lots of places.
    I went to Camp Darby in Italy for ten days. It’s a US military installation with a campground and a beach. I’ve been to Poland to go pottery shopping, and to the Czech Republic, where Daddy bought a teapot and we kept going around and around this big traffic circle because he couldn’t get into the right lane. Daddy was hungry and he gets grouchy when he’s hungry. We needed to get food into him so he’d be human again. He was like, “I’m an officer in the United States military and I need to get out of this circle!” It was pretty funny.
    Sometimes the soldiers he works with will call Mom and say, “Ma’am, he’s in a bad mood,” and she’ll go, “Give me five minutes, I’ll bring him some chow.” Then he’ll eat and be all cheerful again. And the soldiers will whisper, “Thank you, ma’am.”
    Dad calls Mom “Headquarters Six,” so that when his aides say, “Headquarters Six is on the line,