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BRATS: Our Journey Home A Donna Musil Film Featuring Narration and Music by Kris Kristofferson
BRATS: Our Journey Home
BRATS: Our Journey Home
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BRATS: Our Journey Home
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"Brats: Our Journey Home"
Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Average Reader Rating: 5/5

Review
Novelist Pat Conroy, whose father was a career officer in the Marine Corps, once wrote "Military brats, my lost tribe, spent their entire youth in service to this country, and no one even knew we were there." Children raised by parents who were longtime members of America's armed services, "military brats," often led a life very different from that of most kids their age -- they moved frequently, sometimes lived and were schooled on military bases, grew up in the distant shadow of war or history-making events, were subjected to an authoritarian discipline that was the antithesis of a carefree childhood, and often felt as if they were raised in a single-parent family while either father or mother was away on assignment. The emotional trials of growing up as a military brat and the little-explored bonds of those who shared this upbringing are examined in the documentary Brats: Our Journey Home, written and directed by Donna Musil, herself an Army brat whose father was a military judge. Brats includes interviews with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Mary Edwards Wertsch, Dr. George H. Junne, Michelle Green, and Marc Curtis; the film is narrated by and features songs from Kris Kristofferson, who like the aforementioned interview subjects was the child of a parent in the service.

Readers' Reviews

Outstanding! Reveals hidden subculture
I am a former military brat and I would give this documentary six stars if they were available. This film reveals a huge and hidden American subculture, one that almost borders on being a distinct ethnicity-- the career and often multi-generational military family.

The military brat experience is an all-encompassing and in some ways radically different subculture that comprises more than 10 million current and former American military children. Most of these children grew up moving constantly, lived overseas during formative years, have complex multi-national identities and a majority speak more than one language. Deeply and intimately afftected by war, paradoxically raised in the most patriotic of American institutions and yet international, mobile, 'outsiders' to the civilian American world by nature, children of career military familes have lived challenging and yet enriching lives. This film gives the first deep and close non-fiction look at an enormous but largely heretofore invisible American subculture.

I am talking about all this in this third person, but I am a former military brat and at last this is a film about how I grew up. I am so glad I watched this film. Invisible no more!
-- Phil Murray, sean7phil

BRATS: Our Journey Home
BRATS: Our Journey Home
The first documentary about growing up military.