My son, the soldier
Jony, Mary
cvM,ua:trarte s::x LAST W O R D •i1LA;YQ}i~J$Lf; It H MY SON, THE SOLDIER Mary jony I am the mother of a twentyone-year-old Army Ranger, who, since August of last year, has been twice...
...How do we talk (when all has been reduced to the trivial and the banal), knowing full well that this might be the last conversation we ever have with our son...
...For me, the world has both shrunk and expanded: shrunk to one man, one boy I want alive above all else...
...VALERRY Commonweal 39 July 16, 2004...
...With this war, I have suddenly ceased to have anything in common with my friends, neighbors, and colleagues...
...We have also been cautioned to have no contact with the press or media, for the safety of the unit...
...expanded to those nations, those regions under almost constant conflict...
...I can't talk knowledgeably about the war from my son's perspective, as my husband and I know nothing about his actual experiences...
...My son too bears witness, for each Ranger wears a metal wristband engraved with the name of a fellow Ranger killed in action...
...But every night with great tenderness, I purposefully watch PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for those final, silent moments when the newly dead finally surface with names, ages, hometowns, and youthfully fierce faces...
...One day, such a photo could very well be the last glimpse, the last visible record of my own son's existence...
...The name my son inherited is that of a young soldier killed only six weeks before my son himself joined the battalion...
...Even as my moral universe has been conscripted, held hostage, I have one final illusion, that of keeping my son alive...
...Suddenly, this was a new America with censorship and monitoring, as if we had somehow become, if only psychologically, what the UN terms "IDPs," internally displaced persons, cut off, internally dislocated from our norms and sense of identity, both as individuals and as Americans...
...The media seems awash in self-serving interest, as does the "peace movement," so I read and listen daily to everything with suspicion...
...Shortly after the Madrid train bombings, our son called home to wish my husband happy birthday...
...My husband and I never know exactly where he is or what he does...
...With such a huge time difference between the Middle East and where we live, I wake every morning with gratitude...
...While we watch Iraq and Afghanistan and the West Bank and Gaza, I do not forget the awful litany of conflicts of the past few years: Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Congo, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia, Angola, Algeria, Kosovo, Chechnya, Bosnia, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, and El Salvador...
...One day, he simply doesn't answer his cell phone, and within a week we get an official letter stating that nothing can be said about his exact location, or how long he will be gone...
...For us there was no official notification of any injury or death...
...I try to bear witness in my own minuscule way in front of my TV screen...
...But I also approach the morning news-paper in our driveway with dread, knowing full well that when I read the paper I will learn that some other mother, some other family, has been notified by a casualty assistance officer of news no one should ever hear...
...When our son is deployed, there is little warning...
...The night has been kind...
...It H MY SON, THE SOLDIER Mary jony I am the mother of a twentyone-year-old Army Ranger, who, since August of last year, has been twice sent to Iraq and once to Afghanistan...
...I have become ferociously, almost obsessively nonpartisan, as I trust no one's rhetoric or spin—either Republican or Democrat—on anything...
...For now, we are lucky...
...Above all, I have lost all my illusions, but one...
...What mother would ever turn away...
...None of their sons, daughters, or spouses serve in the military...
...And I could not, cannot turn away from those hauntingly beautiful Air Force photographs of the flag-draped coffins on the C-140 transport planes that caused such a media furor when they surfaced...
...When my husband innocently re-marked that Al Qaeda was suspected in the bombings, the phone went dead...
...Mary Jony is a pseudonym...
...I am like the ancient Greek Diogenes, living on the margins, carrying my lantern in the deep, deep darkness, desperately looking for honesty in a world gone mad...
...The casualties inexorably mount...
...He simply cannot tell us anything, so communication is stilted and one-sided...
...I write these words anonymously for my son's sake and for his "band of brothers," as their deployments are classified...
Vol. 131 • July 2004 • No. 13
