War Stories

The kids in Deborah Ellis’s book Off to War (Groundwood, 2008) talk about what it’s like to have a parent—in some cases both—deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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.

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.

Do you have any lasting impressions?

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. 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 to make that seem to them like a possibility.