Fun House Mirrors
It occurs to me that a good place to start in considering brat culture might be to think about how we've been portrayed in movies, on TV, and in books and other media. What are your thoughts on this, brother and sister brats? Let's start with TV and film, toss out a few titles and register our own evaluations of how well or poorly they portrayed us.
Let's see....
Anybody remember the TV show from the early 80s, Call to Glory? It was about an Air Force family, in which the plots usually involved growing pains of one innocuous sort or another, and everyone in the family became the wiser for it.
How about the film, An Officer and a Gentleman? That starred Richard Gere, who played the part of a military son who'd run out of options and was desperately trying to make it in the Marine Corps. (Is that a correct synopsis? Haven't seen it in some time.)
The most important film about us ever, in my opinion, was The Great Santini, adapted from Pat Conroy's wonderful novel. I loved it, was deeply moved by it, and because of it wrote my book Military Brats. It resonated with me, all right. But what did you think of it?
There are many more.... Add to the titles! Tell us what you thought of them! Did you recognize yourself in them, or laugh yourself sick? Did they get it right, or did they have no clue?
I am a Brat from the people depicted in "From Here to Eternity".They were my parents, step-parents, and visited my house until I Left and joined the Military(1958). I met them there again. I got out because those people were leaving and the same values were not there any more. In some ways, that was for the better, but not for me. So I became a misfit as a Civilian.
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Patrick, this is really intriguing. For those of us who haven't seen "From Here to Eternity" in a long while, can you refresh our memories? And were you speaking metaphorically, telling us you are from the people depicted in that movie as a way of saying that you were born to a military family of the WWII generation? My father fought in the Pacific in WWII (Saipan and Tinian)...and I'd really like to read more about your memories of the people you knew. When did you first see "From Here to Etermity," by the way? How many times do you think you've seen it? And what do you think the movie got exactly right...or not?
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Mary:
BTW, The Great Santini is a favorite.
Patrick
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Mary:
Actually, I read the book before I saw the movie. The movie did a good job, but combined some of the characters. My uncle was in the AAF at Hickum Field when the war broke out. My aunt was pregnant at the time. She went back to San Antonio and never left again. My uncle played sports all of the time up until then. He was a crew chief on a B-17 at the time. He would report the the plane every morning, put the crew to work and then go do the sport of the time. They sure had to grow up in a hurry. My dad followed in his footsteps and joined the Army to get away from the farm in Oklahoma. He did a couple of hitches there and came back home for a while. He got with my mom when she was 16, I was born when she was 17. We grew up together. When I was an adult, I visited him back in OK and went to the farm that the family was share cropping(the house was gone) and showed me field he was ploughing when he decided to join the Army. He was behind six mules or horses. The field was so large, that on the the first day, he just got one furrow done around it. Following behind those mules looking at their a----, he decided that being in the Army was better.
After I was born(they were married by then, I am one of the few people that graduated from highschool twice) in 1940, they were back on the farm. My mother all 5'21/2" of did not like the farm life with the Flanagan Clan. Like many Okies of the time, we moved to California.
How was that for a start? Got to get back to work.
Patrick
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"From Here to Eternity"
Mary:
The one that I am talking about was based on novel by James Jones. The movie was made, I think in 1953, starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Cliff, and others. It was a story about pre WWII Army life just before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. If you get the chance, rent the DVD from Netflix or somebody. The book is really much better.
Patrick
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I'll look for it! Thanks, Patrick.
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Mary,I think The Great Santini is the one for most of us-first and still the best. Knowing his backround, reading the rest of his books is a personal experience there are...moments, phrases, feelings that resonate with me. I wonder how many were unconscious...
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Donna, you wondered how many of his dead-on phrases, scenes, and so on well up from his unconscious.... I can't speak for him, but what I believe is that when a writer is in the groove, it DOES come up from the unconscious and is translated onto the page through that writer's gifts with language. I think every writer tries and tries for those moments where the ideas and the language come unbidden and in a rush from some elusive place within--but the thing about iit s that there is no foolproof way to make them happen. Pat is very, very good at finding that groove where the unconscious opens up and sends its treasures--and my guess is that he accomplishes it in part by choosing a subject that will go deep inside him and knock on those closed doors, and by being determined to open those doors to what ever's behind them, no matter what. That takes incredible courage. We brats are very, very fortunate that Pat Conroy, one of our own, has the talent, the courage, and the will to put it down on paper. As you know, he wrote the introduction to my book, and I was very fortunate to have a number of conversations with him as I was writing Military Brats. At one point, as I was struggling with the acute emotional pain of writing a particular chapter--it was one of the chapters on Sons of Warriors, and I was remembering my own family history--he said to me, "Mary, that's a good thing. When it is that painful, you know you have entered the Room of the Creator." I knew he was right, and I did not ask him to explain. Would he have capitalized the first letters of those two words, as I just did in quoting him? I don't know. The phrase struck me as both metaphorical and mystical. I have capitalized the words not to force a religious meaning onto them, but to underscore the mystical feeling I sensed in them.
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Mary, you've said a great deal about this which has caused me to open up some lock sealed foot lockers in my memory bank. My brother passed on in '05, and one of the last lengthy discussions he and I had was regarding our dad while we where stationed at Wichita Falls, TX. [Geez, note the language "WE" were stationed. It affects me more than I know.]
I was about four years old and I remember vividly that my mom was sick and had to go to the hospital, and she was there for almost three months. I never truly understood what happened, or why she was there, just that I was so scared. Hospitals to a four year old are scary places with people in various stages of medical distress, and I didn't like seeing mom there at all.
What I didn't learn until the conversation with my brother is that my mother had experienced a nervous breakdown due to repeated spur of the moment TDY assignments for my dad during which he both couldn't talk about, or contact her while gone. He came home from one of them with a gift for me which escapes me now, but according to my brother had illustrated to my mom that he'd been somewhere pretty risky, and she collapsed.
He went on a TDY in early '61 providing photographic analysis at McDill for the assault at the Bay of Pigs, and my mother absolutely melted down when he got home. This one I do remember because she threatened him that if he went off on another one of these that she'd take my brother and I and move to Colorado to be near her mother, and he could visit us when he wasn't off getting himself killed. It was a nasty, ugly scene and it was the first time I ever remember them raising their voices to each other. I think it my dad's case his anger was helped by a good amount of alcohol.
One year later my dad retired, one week prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis. While he was waiting for his papers to clear, so we could leave the post he was told his retirement was on a 30 day "temporary" hold, and he was once again ordered to McDill. In less than a week, my mom, brother and I were in Colorado, at Grandma's. Three weeks later Dad came back to the base, closed up our quarters, cleared the post and retired.
I guess this is much more rambling than I wanted to do, except to say that the only movie I've ever seen which came close was "Great Santini".
I can think of many movies and TV shows which weren't even in the region. "Call to Glory" immediately springs to mind as idiotic, imagine an AF officer marching with Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial in '63? Regardlesss of the moral right of his actions it would have meant the end of his career, given the times. And don't even get me started on "Major Dad" because it just makes my teeth hurt from gritting them.
You didn't know I was this wordy, did you?
Thanks again, dear friend, for helping me walk down the path long dormant and dusty in my mind.
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