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Great post. I can relate to about 80% of those observations. Dad was career Air Force. I was born in Bittburg West Germany. Lived in most of the states East of the Mississippi along with Canada and Okinawa. He retired when I was sixteen, I graduated from High School at seventeen. I don't regret it one bit.

...have to explain that being born in Germany does not make you German.
...every room you've ever had was stark white and you couldn't put nail holes in the walls.

LOL

Ahh, "fly guys" as we used to call you guys whenever when would drive on to an AFB.

Our family celebrated my nephew's graduation from AF boot camp about 1.5 months ago; Lackland AFB. The legacy of our military family continues; e.g. we now have had family members in all of the branches of our Armed Forces.

During "our" tours in Germany we lived in Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Hanau, Mainz and two of my brothers were born in Germany (Heidelberg and Wiesbaden).

Two weeks ago my brother (the one born in Heidelberg) and I had a business trip to Seattle and Vancouver (BC) to meet with clients. We rented a car for the drive between WA and BC, and as we were crossing back across the border the US Custom Officer looked at my brother's passport a saw P.O.B. Heidelberg, Germany the first words out of the officers mouth was..."military brat, right". It turns out that he had also a Army Brat and had lived in Heidelberg as a kid. With a wink and nod he waved us through.

I still remember as a kid getting this treatment at border crossings when we lived in Europe; we traveled to almost all of the country's in western Europe during our tours there. We'd pull up to the border checkpoints in our American car with "military" plates, Dad would hold up our blue passports to the windshield and we'd get waved through.