Military Brats: Legacies of Life Inside the Fortress by Mary Edwards Wertsch
From the Introduction by Pat Conroy - "By writing this book, Mary Edwards Wertsch handed me a visa to an invisible city where I'm welcomed for the first time as a native son. Her book speaks in a language that is clear and stinging and instantly recognizable to me, yet it's a
language I was not even aware I spoke. She isolates the military brats of America as a new indigenous subculture with our own customs, rites of passage, forms of communication, and folkways. When I wrote The Great Santini I thought I'd lived a life like no other child in this country. I had no clue that with The Great Santini, I had accidentally broken into the heart of both the military brat's truth and cliché. With this book, Mary astonished me and introduced me to a secret family I did not know I had. But Mary takes the testimony of these children of the military experience and tells us what it means. With her brilliant analysis of these far-flung anonymous voices, she lets us know that we are brothers and sisters who belong to a hidden, unpraised country. To those of us without homes or hometowns, Mary Wertsch gives us, for the first time, a sense and spirit of place."
From the Introduction by Pat Conroy - "By writing this book, Mary Edwards Wertsch handed me a visa to an invisible city where I'm welcomed for the first time as a native son. Her book speaks in a language that is clear and stinging and instantly recognizable to me, yet it's a
language I was not even aware I spoke. She isolates the military brats of America as a new indigenous subculture with our own customs, rites of passage, forms of communication, and folkways. When I wrote The Great Santini I thought I'd lived a life like no other child in this country. I had no clue that with The Great Santini, I had accidentally broken into the heart of both the military brat's truth and cliché. With this book, Mary astonished me and introduced me to a secret family I did not know I had. But Mary takes the testimony of these children of the military experience and tells us what it means. With her brilliant analysis of these far-flung anonymous voices, she lets us know that we are brothers and sisters who belong to a hidden, unpraised country. To those of us without homes or hometowns, Mary Wertsch gives us, for the first time, a sense and spirit of place." 