Off to War

By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 11/5/2008 2:15:00 PM

In Deborah Ellis’s Off to War: Voices of Soldiers' Children (Groundwood, 2008), the kids of American and Canadian soldiers talk openly about what it’s like to have a mom or dad—and in some cases both—deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ellis’s follow-up book Voices of War (Groundwood), which contains interviews with Iraqi children now living in Jordan as refugees, is due out in January.

What struck you most about the kids you interviewed?
A lot of the kids I talked to seemed really, really lonely. Things had changed with their parent and nobody would talk to them about what was going on. And they didn’t want to bring it up just in case it made their parent more sad. Sometimes the parent would come back really angry and uptight and not want to spend any time with their kids any more. So they wouldn’t see this parent for 16 to18 months, and then the parent would come back, and they still wouldn’t have their parent. Other parents came back changed for the better. They used to be crabby and nitpicky, and they came back so grateful to be with their families, and little things didn’t bother them any more.

Was there a common thread in the stories you heard? 
It certainly differed between the full-time army and the reserves. The kids from the National Guard families were really thrown for a loop. They hadn’t expected their parent to go to war. It wasn’t on their radar. A lot of them just didn’t know how to deal with it. And a lot of the families around them didn’t know how to deal with it. Often, they would be the only kid in their school or even the only kid in their town going through that experience, and they didn’t have anybody else to talk to. Kids with parents in the military fulltime and whose parents came home—they seemed fine. But when talking to them, they would start to cry remembering the time that they’d last seen their parents.

Did age play any role in how well they handled the separation?
The older kids took on a lot more of the burden for caring for the family, but they all kind of missed their parent really, really deeply.

Were any of these kids, their friends, or even parents antiwar? 
The military is not a monolithic organization. It’s full of a wide variety of people with a wide variety of opinions and backgrounds. Some of the kids I interviewed, their parents were very active in the antiwar movement, Veterans Against the War and so on. Some of the kids had been at antiwar protests and had spoken at rallies, and of course, some of the kids approached it from a very different perspective, believing that the protesters were in fact traitors to the country. So there were both of those opinions. Some kids talked about classmates who knew they were military kids, and some said kids assumed that if their parent was in the military that they just wanted to go and kill people. They didn’t have a realistic sense of what was going on over there or what the military was all about.

How did you find the roughly 20 kids in your book?
In Canada, I approached the military, military organizations, and groups that work with military kids. Then to get to Fort Bragg (in North Carolina), I had to get permission from the army public relations office in New York City. I interviewed probably three times as many kids who’ve actually ended up in the book.

Did substance abuse become a problem?
If I interviewed kids alone without a parent present, they would tell me things about alcohol abuse and things like that relating to their parents. But I couldn’t put that into the interview because that would be harmful to them down the road. They also told me stuff like the escalation of tensions and the effects of that.

How can school librarians help these kids? 
The kids were really curious about where their parent was. And some schools took the approach of “Let’s just not talk about Afghanistan. Let’s make it a place where kids don’t have to deal with it.” And other communities took the approach of “Let’s talk about it a lot. Let’s get to know the people over there.” And they did displays and all sorts of things. I found that the kids were really hungry for information, so libraries can put on displays about Iraq, Iraqi culture, society, and history, as well as Afghanistan.

What audience does your book target?
I was initially only targeting myself because I wanted to find out how these kids were managing. I think the publisher had in mind that it could be for military kids to read and glean through for information about how they could manage to get through what they’re going through. Hopefully, the adults who work with these kids can read it and get a sense of how they can be more useful when it comes to what these kids are experiencing. And for kids who are not part of that world, it gives an interesting perspective of a different way to look at what’s going on when they see it in the news.

Did any of the interviews leave a lasting impression?
The thing that made me saddest about doing this book is I would ask the kids if they could imagine a world without war, and I’d say 95 percent of them hadn’t even thought of it. They just assumed that war is a natural part of our lives. It hadn’t even really entered their minds that there could be an alternative. And while this isn’t a scientific sample by any means, if there is any truth at all to this theory that these kids haven’t had their imagination opened up enough to be able to think about a world without war, then we adults have a lot of work to do in order to make that seem to them like a possibility that they could start to work on.