Living the cliche II

One of the first days I was at the unit, one of the stranger females (and they were all strange let me tell you) looked at me closely and leaned in to impart some wisdom she had gained from a previous unit: "You know, I was told that you just meet the same people over and over again in each band you go to...and it is SO true! You are just like this girl I knew at Stewart." And she turned away without even looking for a response from me with a satisfied look on her face that she had now found my slot and that I could now be essentially ignored. It might have been paranoia on my part, but I had the feeling that her casual intimacy when talking to me after that was simply because she imagined she was literally talking to someone else. Someone I might as well have been in her opinion. Isolated, this would only be the description of a rather misled individual, but as a systemic flaw, it is rather frightening.

Tom and I were forced to move on base for some time in the middle of my service period, and so we were exposed to the subculture of military children. We were just driving into the garage with our first load when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a veritable swarm of little people. Barely waiting for me to open the door, the first wave was on me: "You moving in? How many kids you got? Not any?!" And then, with only a brief reawakening of interest when they saw the cats, they left and only returned in the following months when their schools were doing fundraisers. I watched these children after that first day however, and was disturbed to see the fluidity of relationships and near panic to establish immediate cliques and bonds. Certainly, every child looks for the comfort of friends, but these little ones in the midst of the war machine depended on assimilating similar friends and patterns to whatever ones they had known at the previous post. It is the rule that each soldier is moved to a different station every one to three years, so the children have so little time to outline their comfort zone and the friendships that define it.