Inside and Outside

Here’s another interesting fact about military bases, such as the ones I grew up on:  they’re a finite size and enclosed.  That gives them something in common with a ghetto.

I’ve already described how my family could buy most of what they needed “on base.”  We could buy food, other products, and entertainment on base, much of it within walking distance.

From the age of six to the age of fifteen—with a year and a half or so gap—I lived on air force bases, although my father was a civilian.

When I was a teenager living on base—this was in Japan—I would take long walks every day after school.  Some of these walks would take me along the southwest boundaries of the base.  I would look at the fence that ran around the base and think about how I was inside the base and the area on the other side of the fence was outside.  There wasn’t really anything to see; most of that area was dense tree and shrubbery.

It wasn’t that I particularly thought of the “outside” as being somehow threatening compared to the “inside.”  Or that I thought the people “inside” were better than the people “outside.”  I just was aware of the division.  Perhaps if I had been older, and actually a member of the military, I would have thought so.

One gets used to how one is raised.  When I lived with the military (but still a civilian) in Germany, it felt very odd at first.  Although my family lived with the U.S. Army, in our own “American” area, we were not sealed off by a fence.  My mother and I never did learn why that was.  The “campus” where I spent my first two years of college—in Munich, Germany—had once been a German military establishment—a caserne—but had been taken over by the U. S. after World War II.  It could have easily been sealed off (and probably once was).  At home with my parents in Nuremberg, it felt odd to not be “protected” by a fence around our American area.  In Munich it didn’t feel so odd—being a college campus, it seemed set off anyway.

I think I have carried this notion of being “sealed off” with me since my childhood.  One of the results of being separated is that you can easily ignore what is “outside” the base perimeter.  However, if you become aware of this tendency, you can overcome it—although you then become aware of how the people around you limit themselves.  

Perhaps that is what happened to me.