Wind-Blown Worlds: Ordered to Go Home (1st Place)

The following essay is the first place winner of our 2025 Month of the Military Child Writing Contest. The theme was, "Home is Where the Orders Take Us." Congratulations to Gabbie P., a high school junior!

When you open your front door, what’s waiting for you? Is your door wide, or dark, or chipped with age? Do you feel the way the keys click in the lock like they do for only your house? Most importantly, are you home?

As military teens, our lives are ever-changing. We are picked up and dropped at a whim by the disembodied, bureaucratic military in the clouds whose spectral presence defines our lives. We pack up our world and restart it on command, always without choice. All our friends, our schools, our regular haunts quickly become little more than a vague but aching memory.

I still remember the ways my feet would pound the pavestones of Ely, England, while my family was stationed at RAF Mildenhall – careful, but quickly and with purpose. Long, meaningful strides, headed towards a home that would only vanish behind me.

I remember walking the colorful stalls of the little market on bright, sunny Saturdays, and chatting with my friends on the quad at my British school during lunch. In my Covid years, I found myself on base nearly every day, going to the post office with my mom and my brother just for something to do. I wandered the aisles of the BX endlessly, feeling right at home without realizing it.

But, as we’re all so acutely aware, it can’t last. The orders come, and with it the bitter goodbyes. Even if we just finally found our footing in school, or found friends to talk late at night with, the military calls. The departing flight always awaits. Our worlds start anew, regardless of our own tears or bitter tirades. Do I get to call it my home if I loved it, or did I just live there? Were those symphonic sunsets in Arizona never for me?

Home is wherever the orders send me; this is just how it is. It gets routine, but it never gets easier. I’ve cried on my last nights in TLF every time. Yet, I cannot conceive of a world where things are different. Settling down just feels too foreign to me. As much as leaving my home time and again wears down my soul, I often wonder what will become of me once I graduate college; when I can go anywhere I want, what will I do? Will I find a place and settle down, trying to put the restlessness out of my mind, or will it be the same cycle of every-three-years? Because for better or worse, I am a child of the military. I’m a dandelion in the wind – I’ve lived a dozen different lives, and I could never be anything except what the military has made me.

But home is the state of in-between, too. I’m still at home when I’m in an empty house I’ve known for all of five days, eating dinner from plates on the floor because Unaccompanied hasn’t arrived yet. When the stick furniture arrived for my last weeks in England, I was surprised at how quickly it came to feel normal, even comfortable, in my house.

This state of suspension is the greatest constant of our lives, and while it’s death by a thousand bleeding cuts, it’s also always there. It’s a comforting constant, but it cuts over and over like an abusive relationship. The orders don’t care. I carry my whole world behind me, every life I’ve lived and world I’ve seen. There’s a beauty in not being from anywhere: I am from the military. I am not like my civilian peers I so often feel out of place among – I am most comfortable on base, in the squadron break room and the cockpits of my dad’s C-130s. My father is two years retired, but I never let myself forget where I came from: nowhere. The Air Force is my home.

This is especially true in the military community, who is tight-knit to the end of the world. We slide in and out of each others’ lives, but we still remember them wherever we’re whisked away to. We’re all tossed around in the same black storm, but we’re still together.

This military community was a defining part of my young childhood; even at five years old, I could sense how close we were based on virtue of service. Wherever the orders whisk us away to, the scattered and far-flung military family is always there with open arms.

I remember the ringing laughs of my dad and his friends at First Friday as they swapped jokes and bantered, and my mother embracing an old friend who’d PCSed to Mildenhall, too. Playing hide-and-seek with the other children of the squadron in the auditorium was the highlight of my week at eight years old. The Air Force holds each other tight. Even saying, "Yeah, my dad’s in the military." rolls off my tongue like a habit; it’s the norm to me.

But living in the civilian world has also forced me to confront the sobering reality of becoming estranged. It’s been nearly three years since I’ve been on base, and my military ID is set to expire months after I graduate, only a year from now. Who will I be then? The military is a culture, but it’s also the only culture with a lifespan – you either retire and carve a new path in the civilian world, or you age out of it. After that, you’re perched right alongside the dusty shelf-trinkets and bleached photos of days gone by.

I stumbled upon the word druthers recently, and it rang a faded, distant bell – I knew it was something important, a big ceremonial choice my dad had to make, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was.

I’ve been going to civilian high school for the past three years, and it’s starting to show. I feel like my connection to the military is becoming hazier and more distant. It’s like losing touch with a culture – the military is the only thing I’ve ever had in that capacity, and every year it’s farther from reach. It’s forced me to consider the way I regard my military past now, at 17; it will always be a part of me, but is it what I am now? I want it to be, but people are constantly evolving. I have to figure out how to go with that. If there’s one thing I’m familiar with, it’s a new chapter of my life.

The military has been the single most formative experience of my entire life. It’s expanded my worldview to reaches far beyond my imagination, and strengthened my resilience to an extent most civilian kids don’t reach until adulthood. I’ve seen homes phase in and out, but I’ve taken a little from each as I go. I have a Union Jack on my wall, and old ceramic pots from New Mexico on my shelf. My greatest souvenirs are my memories; they remind me who I am and where I want to go.

Living so many places, being taken to so many homes by the orders, will open up countless opportunities to us. They will close doors behind us, ending chapters of our lives, but they’ll open up just as many news ones up ahead. So go and take a step. Turn the key and see what’s waiting for you.