Brat is the first in a series of at least four novels about U.S. military brats.
The novels depict the unique life that all military brats experience—a life unknown to typical American kids. Military brats are members of an ancient but little known tribe. The average brat moves 9-12 times before they graduate from high school. One or both parents can be absent for weeks or years, depending on their deployment. Brats grow up in a paradoxical world that is idealistic and authoritarian, privileged and perilous, supportive and stifling – all at the same time. Their lives are lived out in the world’s most dangerous hot-spots.
The first book Brat: Kids of Warriors centers on eleven-year-old Jack McMasters, a reluctant hero who arrives in post-war Germany when his dad gets stationed with 4thArmored division on the free side of the Iron Curtain. It’s 1957 and Jack soaks up war stories he overhears about WW II. Longing to make his father proud and become the worthy kid of a warrior, he struggles to adapt to this new culture. Jack musters a small band of brats and together they create their own grand adventures on and off the base. But the play turns serious when they accidentally come across a Communist spy, one they can’t prove exists. Jack realizing he must somehow convince the adults there is indeed a spy who represents a real threat to the 4th Armored Division. As the story concludes the 3,000 enemy tanks routinely pointed at them from the other side of the Iron Curtain seem anything but routine.
In the second book, Jack and the other brats, still with 4thArmored division in Germany, must use the military strategies they have picked up from their parents’ stories to help avoid another war.
The third book takes place in North Carolina with the 82nd Airborne Division during the Bay of Pigs and the Berlin Wall going up.
And for books three and four . . . well stay tuned.
I am a military brat—and I say that with great pride.