Reading that book [Military Brats] was like unlocking a door... after searching for the key for quite a while. I recommend it, too, whenever I come across another brat.

* * *

Coincidentally, re: growing up in a RWA background (not all military families fit that bill, but enough do)...

Guess who else grew up in a (Catholic) military family? David Addington.

After my last post, I googled him for some reason while reading Sidney Blumenthal's take on the Mukasey nomination, and how any AG will ultimately have to answer to Addington.

There it was on wikipedia:

Addington is the son of Eleanore and Jerry Addington, a retired brigadier general and West Point graduate.

And the source material came from a profile by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, and included the following:

Addington has been a hawk on national defense since he was a teen-ager. Leonard Napolitano, an engineer who was one of Addington’s close childhood friends, and whose political leanings are more like those of his sister, Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, joked, “I don’t think that in high school David was a believer in the divine right of kings.” But, he said, Addington was “always conservative.”

The Addingtons were a traditional Catholic military family. They moved frequently; David’s father, Jerry, an electrical engineer in the Army, was assigned to a variety of posts, including Saudi Arabia and Washington, D.C., where he worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a teen-ager, Addington told a friend that he hoped to live in Washington himself when he grew up. Jerry Addington, a 1940 graduate of West Point who won a Bronze Star during the Second World War, also served in Korea and at the North American Air Defense Command, in Colorado; he reached the rank of brigadier general before he retired, in 1970, when David was thirteen. David attended public high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his father began a second career, teaching middle-school math. His mother, Eleanore, was a housewife; the family lived in a ranch house in a middle-class subdivision. She still lives there; Jerry died in 1994. “We are an extremely close family,” one of Addington’s three older sisters, Linda, recalled recently. “Discipline was very important for us, and faith was very important. It was about being ethical—the right thing to do whether anyone else does it or not. I see that in Dave.” She was reluctant to say more. “Dave is most deliberate about his privacy,” she added. [Emphases mine]

There's more.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703fa_fact1?currentPage=3

I think this is important because, even with out the outward signs of PTSD in a family, (many/most?) children raised in the military really do not grow up the same way that civilian children do. Some do thrive and go on to lead wonderful lives, and perhaps with careers in public service (Elizabeth Edwards, e.g.). Others fail to thrive, and at worst lead miserable lives, or just make other people's lives miserable. Throw in the PTSD... and it's truly life-challenging. Given the numbers who will be returning from Iraq, where the conditions and injuries have in some ways been far worse than in previous wars... who cannot shudder to think of the impact on all of those families?

(We can all be grateful that I was not in a powerful position as an adult while shedding those remnants from my own childhood. ;~)

I meant to add that combining Catholic and military in a single family unit (at least in those days, I'm slightly older than Addington) is RWA to the 2nd power.

[Don't mean to offend any practicing Catholics, but that is how it often works in military families. You have two spheres, not just one, in which your parents are not the final authority on life and death matters, or even on the small stuff.]

"it's really not fashionable"

Garry, that's a GOP talking point (or meme) about liberals and/or Democrats. When you repeat terms like that, we can't help but react... with hackles up.

Isn't it ironic that the GOP... with its celebrity candidates and office holders, not to mention their preoccupation with how a candidate "looks," insists on smearing the Democratic Party as being more shallow in its values?

Have you responded to Pedinska yet? If so, I must have missed it.

You are entitled to your opinions, which over the course of over 1,700 letters here have garnered exactly 7 stars and are filled with examples of factual errors, you are in no position to comment without exposing yourself as a rank hypocrite.

I used to get my fair share of red stars (under a different screen name), but that ceased when most of my commenting continued primarily on Glenn's blog, and not as much on the rest of Salon.

There's a reason for that. The commenters here expressed a more or less unified opinion some time ago asking the moderators not to award stars because the ones they were awarding didn't make any sense in the overall scheme. Some went to trolls, even. The conversation here does not read in the same way that the letters do on other Salon columns where they are more like stand-alone LTEs, except when trolling and/or flaming take over. The commenters here really care more about the quality of the discourse, and far less about who does or does not get red stars. We set our own standards. You can take that argument about the value of Paul D's comments elsewhere. Or about the value of any of the other regulars here, for that matter.

I should have just waited. You were more succinct.