Army Brat: with a father in the military, the question was never where we were from but where we were going next.(WHERE I'M FROM)

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-DEC-05

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FOR VARIOUS GOOD REASONS, I've always hated the question "Where are you from?" My first two replies are usually "Everywhere," which is clearly false, and then "Nowhere," which has some truth to it. A third answer, the one I always end up giving, is "Well, I was born at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina," which doesn't really tell you where I'm from, since I lived there only three months. Then I'll say, "My dad was in the Army." But that doesn't work either. How can you be from a large, land-based fighting force?

I'm not the only one with this problem. Many military brats--children of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard--are also rendered dumb by a simple question. Our fathers, in the infinite wisdom of their Armed Forces masters, were transferred from post to post (or, in the Navy and Air Force, base to base), sometimes after three years, sometimes after three months. We brats learned long ago not to think too much about where we were from. The important question was, Where are we going next?

My father, Robert Hall, was an Army doctor, born in Spring Ranch, Nebraska, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he dreamed of being an orchestra conductor. He joined the Army out of Harvard Good War and then seven years later in the Forgotten War (Korea, remember?). Afterward, he met and married my mother, Jane Carroll, who had been born and raised in Oswego, New York, and had gone to Cornell University. Dad was a lieutenant colonel when I was born, in 1957, at Fort Bragg, where he was jumping out of airplanes as the corps surgeon with the 18th Airborne. Then came Pensacola, Chapel Hill (where my sister Sue was born), England ... and, for the next thirteen years, posts in Germany, Georgia (sister Betsy), Virginia (brother Tom), Texas, and, while my dad was in Vietnam, Hawaii (sister Jenny). By 1972, when we landed for our second stint at San Antonio's Fort Sam Houston, just in time for my sophomore year of high school, I had lived in fourteen houses and gone to eight schools. I'd caught fish off our front-yard dock from the Chesapeake Bay, and I'd fled from an actual German shepherd in Darmstadt, Germany. I'd played in the red clay of Georgia and the black sand of Punalu'u Beach. I'd been to the top of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, and I'd seen the Grand Canyon four times on our numerous cress-country drives in a giant unair-conditioned Plymouth station wagon. But I wasn't from anywhere.

Like many of my fellow Army brats, I put down roots in the first place I settled as an adult, Austin. Years later, I found myself making a living as a journalist. A Texas writer. I read the classic Goodbye to a River and underlined the passage in which John Graves writes that if a man "wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do...

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