Change is Normal: Part 1, by Timothy Trainer

There are no water slides, no rock-climbing walls, no putt-putt golf and not even a pool. The amenities found on today’s massive cruise ships for thousands of people on vacation were completely absent. Movies, yes, movies were offered, but not in the staterooms because there were no televisions in the staterooms.

A movie is scheduled for the evening. It will be shown outside, but not at a drive-in theater. We’ll find a spot up on deck of a ship that is ferrying military families from Japan to Seattle, Washington. When the time comes, the crew members project the movie onto some large white sheet (an extra-large version of a bed sheet) high enough for everyone to see. The wind causes the sheet to snap back and forth like a sail with the rhythm of the ship dancing on the water.

After two weeks and thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, we still have thousands of miles to travel. By car, we begin the journey cross-country. Too young to know where we are and having just arrived in the United States, we spend a night sleeping in the car as it is parked inside of a garage because the car needs repair. This was in the “old” days. It’s May 1959 and everything is an adventure.

Born abroad and living abroad surrounded by people who spoke a different language, English was the foreign language to my ears. As a family, we’re nomadic. We move a lot because of my father’s “job”. He’s a career soldier. The children of career military members are usually referred to as army “brats, or navy “brats”, etc. It’s not an insult. We’re a subset of people in the population.

Every place we live is temporary. Every school we attend is temporary and that means that we have friends for short periods of time. In our environment, our friends drop into the neighborhood and school from different places. It’s possible that the new kid arriving mid-semester on a Wednesday might’ve just come from Germany or Japan or Italy. It’s also possible that they just moved from Texas, California, Missouri, Kentucky or one of the Carolinas.

Growing up military from the 1950s to the very early 1970s, living on a military installation meant we were immersed in a world of diverse people. The word diversity wasn’t used back then and yet our world was as diverse as any could get. This was still the post-World War II and the Korean War period. Because of where so many soldiers were posted around the world, our army neighborhood had moms who were German, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Latino and other nationalities and we heard these various languages spoken. Adding to the diversity of mothers were the soldiers themselves: white, black, Asian, Latino. The mixing bowl effect was evident in the children who roamed the school corridors or played in the neighborhood.

(Underscoring the mixing bowl effect, I had the pleasure at a business dinner of meeting two other army brats in the early 2000s. The three of us reflected this strange brat community as we realized that the three of us had Japanese mothers, but our fathers were white, black and Latino.)

As time goes by, what becomes clear is that what happens thousands of miles away in another country can have a direct impact on a military family. Soldiers, sailors and airmen may be needed somewhere and in the “old” days of the 1960s, that meant any prolonged transfer of a father meant packing up and moving while he was deployed. Upon his return, there was no guarantee of returning to the military installation where we were posted previously.

The military brat life was one that provided periods of being a “normal” kid and periods when there is constant worry about things that occur half a world away that will cause another move, disruption and restarting. For some of us, it makes us want to understand the world better, see more of the world and wonder if there’s any way to engage the world to touch others and improve the world.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in this essay series.

Author and Attorney Timothy Trainer in Washington, DC www.TimothyTrainer.com. Photo by AnnaGibbs.com

About the Timothy Trainer: Writing books is a passion for attorney Timothy Trainer, who for more than three decades focused on intellectual property issues in his day job. He has worked in government agencies and in the private sector and his assignments have taken him to 60 countries around the world.

Tim found time to pen a few non-fiction tomes, including his first book, Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights; the 15th edition was published in 2022. Thomson Reuters’ Aspatore Books published Tim’s next title in 2015, Potato Chips to Computer Chips: The War on Fake Stuff. 

Fiction was a genre he always wanted to try. In 2019, Pendulum Over the Pacific, was released by Joshua Tree Publishing. “This political intrigue story is set in Tokyo and Washington, D.C., and centers on trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the late 1980s,” Tim explains.

In 2023, his first series hit bookstores: The China Connection.

In 2025, he published the sequel, The China Factor, which ranked #63 on the Amazon Asian Literature list in May.

Learn about Tim’s work and books: timothytrainer.com