Army brat (link test)

[Human readers can ignore this post. I'm just testing a linking concept and this post is meant for web bots. Incidentally, I am an Army brat. My dad retired after twenty years of service. It wasn't so bad. I even lived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for two years, but the worst thing about it back then were the sand flies – we called them "teeth". Mostly what I remember was hanging out at the beach, even on my birthday which is in December. In any case, bots read on.]

Army Brat from War Search

A "military brat" (and various brat derivatives) is a term for a person whose parent or parents have served full-time in the armed forces during the person's childhood. In conventional usage, the word "brat" used alone may be derogatory; in a military context, however, it is neither a subjective nor a judgmental term for most, and it is a term in which many in the military community are comfortable with.

Although the term "military brat" is used in other English-speaking countries, only the United States has studied its military brats as an identifiable demographic. This group is shaped by frequent moves, absence of a parent, authoritarian family dynamics, strong patriarchal authority, the threat of parental loss in war, and the militarization of the family unit. While non-military families share many of these same attributes, military culture is unique due to the tightly knit communities that perceive these traits as normal. Although they did not choose to belong to it, military culture can have long-term impacts - both positive and negative - on brats.

As adults, military brats can share many of the same positive and negative traits developed from their mobile childhoods. Having had the opportunity to live around the world, military brats can have a breadth of experiences unmatched by most teenagers. Regardless of race, religion, nationality, or gender, brats might identify more with other highly mobile children than with non-mobile ones. A few can struggle to develop and maintain deep, lasting relationships, and can feel like outsiders to U.S. civilian culture, but most assimilate quickly and well as they have to do so with each move.