““Brats does most everything you’d want a good documentary to do — it informs us about a corner of the culture we’ve overlooked, lays out the good, the bad and the unhappy about this lifestyle and changes the way we look at these people and the world their country makes them and needs them to live in differently.” (4-stars)”
— Roger Moore - Orlando Sentinel
““Your film moved me a great deal when I saw it and how could it fail to move a brat. I still am shocked that I moved 23 times by the time I got to Beaufort when I was 15 years old. You did all of us a great service with your film and I think it will be a great help to military brats who are growing up today… Great love and congratulations.””
— Pat Conroy, Author, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides
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BRATS: Our Journey Home

90 Min
2006
A Donna Musil Film

U.S. military brats share intimate memories about their unique childhoods - growing up on military bases around the world, then struggling to fit into an American lifestyle with which they have little in common. Narrated and featuring songs by Kris Kristofferson. Interviews include the late General Norman Schwarzkopf, authors Mary Edwards Wertsch and Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, and brats of all ages, races, and branches of service.

““... every time I watch this movie I cry because I know someone in this world knows how I feel.””
— Melissa Hill, Military Brat

THE story

It's hard to imagine a military brat's childhood. Moving from base to base around the world, they are at home everywhere - and nowhere. There are 2 million children being raised in the military today. An estimated 15 million Americans are former BRATS. They include singers Pink and Wiz Khalifa, authors Pat Conroy and Suzanne Collins (of the "Hunger Games"), basketball star Shaquille O'Neal and Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III, actors Julianne Moore and Neil Patrick Harris, and many more.

BRATS is the first cinematic glimpse into a global subculture whose journey to adulthood is a high-octane mixture of incredible excitement and enormous pain. It’s not about the U.S. military. It’s about their children, who grow up in a paradox that is idealistic and authoritarian, privileged and perilous, supportive and stifling - all at the same time. Their passports say "United States," but they're really citizens of the world.

““No other documentary better depicts the social and psychological impact on children and adolescents at the intersection of two powerful social institutions—the military and the family.””
— Dr. Morten G. Ender, Sociology Program Director, United States Military Academy, West Point

Singer/songwriter and Air Force brat Kris Kristofferson leads us through the heart of their experiences, sharing intimate memories with fellow brats, including author Mary Edwards Wertsch, whose ground-breaking book, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, was one of the seminal inspirations for the film. Their stories reveal the peculiar landscape of their childhood, the culture that binds them together, and the power it exerts over their adult lives.

A seven-year work of passion by independent filmmaker Donna Musil, BRATS features rare archival footage, home movies and private photographs from post-war Japan, Germany, and Vietnam.

““...a powerful glimpse of life ‘inside the fortress.’ It is a must see for Brats and will be surprisingly popular with non-Brats...””
— Mike Brown, School Library Journal