Military kids ought to be born clutching a silver bullet. I’m not thinking of the kind of bullet they’d need in a werewolf encounter. I’m thinking more of the kind of “silver bullet” Navy detailers used to offer to any sailor who accepted one of the notoriously miserable, bloodletting, hard-fill jobs.

The way those programs went, if the sailor did well, he could use the silver bullet to get a great job, a specific location, an exclusive kind of training, or a restricted major at the postgraduate school the next time he came up for orders.
 
It was a one-shot deal, a payback. It was an acknowledgement that you’d gone more than the distance for the greater good.
 
The more military kids I know, the more I think that military kids deserve that, too. The longer they hold the title of military brat, the more they go the distance, the more of an effect military life has on them — for better AND worse. Maybe giving them some kind of silver bullet to use one time along the way would even things out.
 
I sure wish our daughter Kelsey had that bullet right now. At our sophomore’s third high school, she learned that she would lose a full point in her GPA. Because the school doesn’t offer the language she took for three semesters, Kelsey will have to take two years of a different language to meet the graduation requirement. Her counselor suggested Farsi. She will also have to take Health for the third time because sexual reproduction in Louisiana and Ohio is carried out far differently than it is in California.

At least, that is the only reason I can think of for taking Health three times.
 
The kid could really use that silver bullet. Lots of kids could. What I think is really compelling about it is that every military kid seems to need that bullet for his own particular reason. Ask them. Military kids will tell you about football tryouts held three days before they moved in. A school that didn’t offer a school newspaper the year they lived there because the advisor was in the middle of a nasty divorce. Deadlines for certain upper-level programs that didn’t allow kids to transfer in. Sports that started freshman year in one district and in the seventh grade in another; an ill-timed deployment that wrecked havoc with their chemistry grade, their geometry grade, their Farsi grade and their love lives — or lack thereof.
 
I guess we could brush these things off as kid stuff--minor inconveniences in a military life, the price you pay for having a parent who serves their country. But we’d be ignoring how these minor inconveniences are exactly the kind of thing that make breaking into adult life unnecessarily harder for military kids.
 
It seems to affect teens whether they are trying to go to college or to set themselves up for a job that will pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. Employers at the better paying jobs and training programs, for example, are looking for recommendations from local folks who have known the applicant a long time. Hard to get when you’ve moved nine times.

Admissions officers at colleges look for the highest grades in the most difficult programs — like AP classes, honors classes and International Baccalaureate programs. Will they really look at three or four high schools to see if these classes were offered? Will they wonder why anyone took a health class three times?
 
Colleges say that these trials and tribulations could be accounted for in an entrance essay or a recommendation letter. Yet how does a kid do that without sounding like a whiner? I’m a professional writer and I can’t make it sound like anything but whining. Witness this column.
 
If military children had that silver bullet, they wouldn’t have to whine. They could study their situation, decide that it’s time to use that bullet, voila, no need to take Farsi after all or poof, that chemistry grade is vaporized.
 
I don’t know if my silver bullet plan will be put into action any time soon. It took Virginia legislators nearly a decade to approve in-state tuition for military dependents. Good on ‘em for that.
 
But let’s agree without Legislation that military life does affect our teenagers. Let’s look at these young people and know without being told that they have done their time. They’ve served their country too. Let’s hand them all a silver bullet. Let’s give a kid a break when they try out for sports after a move. Let’s add a little check when we see multiple schools on a college application from cities like Norfolk, Va. and San Diego and Jacksonville, Fla. and Great Lakes, Mich. Let’s take the time to review and maybe even ADOPT the best practices that the Military Child Education Coalition has developed for military kids.
 
These kids aren’t looking for a permanent free ride. But they could sure use a one-shot deal, a payback, and acknowledgement of going the distance for the greater good.