When Mom Is Over There
A Family Learns to Stay the Course and Prays for a Safe Return From Iraq

By Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 8, 2006

I am driving a hulking Expedition with a yellow ribbon on the bumper that says "Support Our Troops." In the grocery store parking lot, a man nods at me. I'm walking to the shopping carts when it hits me. He thinks I'm a kindred spirit in a country that is losing its nerve. I should turn back and tell him that the truck isn't mine, to clear up his misconception, but I don't.

For one week I find myself pulled into the war effort. I am in Florida to help my brother juggle single parenthood while his wife is serving in Iraq. Jim lives in a cul-de-sac community outside Tampa where the garage doors flip up every night at 6 and swallow incoming cars. His girls are 10 and 9. We spend the week eating Cocoa Pebbles and watching "The Incredibles." We hold dance parties in a bedroom where the stuffed animals are giving way to dreamy teen idol posters. We go to the mall and to the dentist. One night while I make dinner, the girls ride bikes outside in the waning winter dusk. It is a relief to be away from Washington, where politicians in marble hallways proclaim righteousness though they have never carried a canteen. Here in this linoleum kitchen, there is just a crayon calendar on the refrigerator marking the days until Mama comes home.

The yellow ribbon on the truck is the most outward sign of where this family stands on the war. And, of course, the quiet absence of Master Sgt. Angela Hull from the house.

In a breathless choreography of necessity, my brother cooks, cleans, folds mountains of laundry, carpools, grocery-shops, works full time as a technical writer for a defense contractor and tries to distract his daughters with amusing weekend activities like Celebration Station. He is trying to distract himself as much as the girls. "Worrying is not productive," he says. Normally, I would tease him about such a statement. I would make a case for worry and why it's only human. But I don't dare now. I am too in awe of his composure. One morning I go into his bedroom closet to get the laundry and I'm greeted by the scent of Angela's perfume, still on her clothes. I touch her blouses. How does he do it?

Angela is chief controller of the air-traffic control tower at Kirkuk Regional Air Base in northern Iraq. She did not graduate from the Air Force Academy or come from a long line of military heroes. Angela was 22 and working at the Stouffer's frozen-food factory in her home town of Gaffney, S.C., in 1987 when she rebelled against the smallness of her life and joined the Air Force. She advanced the slow, hard way, from refueling aircraft at 30,000 feet to learning air-traffic control to commanding towers. In Kirkuk, she supervises 10 controllers in the base tower while serving as first sergeant to a squadron of 48.

Angela never uses the macho language of war or the slogans favored by those who took us there. She works 16 hours a day, six days a week and sleeps in a pod. In a photo she sent home, I can see her office and a chalkboard where someone in her unit has written, "Sgt. Hull, take a day off!" She earns $54,000 a year.

I don't know where Angela stands on the war because we never talk about it. I remember once when Jim, Angela and the girls came to visit me in Washington not long after the United States invaded Iraq. It was a cold spring weekend, wet and gray, but we were excited tourists. We walked down to the White House to take pictures. Crossing through Lafayette Square, we came upon an antiwar protest. There were people shouting and jabbing signs in the air, and one of the sticks hit my niece, frightening her. I was furious at the protester, at the carelessness of his selfish passion. My brother, who is 6 feet 6 inches tall, wanted to slug the guy. Angela -- calm and strong Angela -- simply rounded us up and moved us along.

* * *

Jim says it's good to keep a routine. The week of my visit, the holiday lights blink in the darkened Florida balm. Palm fronds brush against the plastic snowmen and wise men propped up in the cool night grass. At the kitchen table, my nieces dream up Christmas lists to e-mail to their mother, as if she will trudge out into the sands of Iraq and find a Wal-Mart.

Jourdan is 10 and long-legged. My brother seems not to notice that she is wearing cocktail outfits to school. Jourdan is spending hours in front of the mirror, hypnotized by her own reflection as Hilary Duff and Kelly Clarkson channel messages to her at ear-shattering decibels.

In the bedroom next door, childhood still reigns supreme. Chrislyn is barely 9 and a devout fan of SpongeBob and teddy bears that she names Zack and Champ. Chrislyn is as earnest and innocent as Jourdan is sophisticated and enterprising.

When Angela received her orders for Iraq last spring, my brother boiled down the situation this way: "There are bad people over there trying to hurt Americans and Iraqis," he said. "Mommy has special gear that keeps her safe." The girls were accustomed to Angela leaving for short stints but they knew this was different. In the way that children often seize on a grain of sand, they fixated on Angela's living quarters. "Will you sleep in a hard tent?" Chrislyn asked, her blue eyes clouded by worry. Angela promised that she would be sleeping in a very hard tent. On the morning of her departure, the girls went to school and Angela went to Iraq.

Routines. We wake at 6 each morning, eat our breakfast and get ready for school. Usually my brother drops the kids on his way to work but now I do it, watching the girls' colorful backpacks disappear in the sea of others. I ride around town in the truck with the yellow ribbon on the bumper. Jim says to check out the YMCA, a sprawling new facility for the sprawling new communities devouring the pastures. A woman on a stair climber is reading a book titled "What Would Jesus Eat?" We discuss Biblical dining habits and then I tell her that I'm from Washington. "State or D.C.?" she asks. A look of pity crosses her face. Quickly, I volunteer that I'm visiting my brother, whose wife is in Iraq. This wins her back.

All week, strange moments of charade occur. A neighbor across the street is waxing his car when he sees me coming out of the house. "Welcome home," he says, waving his cloth in the air. He has mistaken me for Angela. I'm just the sister, I say. I wonder if Angela's homecoming will be like this -- a friendly neighbor welcoming her back as if she's been away at a conference.

Her absence is banal and profound. She maintains a phantom presence over her motherless house. E-mails and digital photos zip back and forth. In one of the photos, Angela notices a lump on Jourdan's forehead. She and my brother discuss the lump, and it's decided that Jourdan needs to see a pediatrician.

On the morning of the appointment, my brother gulps down cereal while CNN reports that 10 Marines were killed outside Fallujah, blown up by a homemade explosive. Jim curses and says the insurgents are picking away at us with bombs set off with 25-cent oven timers. He lets the dog out. Pop-Tarts are toasting in the toaster. The first Hilary Duff song of the day is playing in a bedroom. I look at the TV, relieved not to hear the word Kirkuk.

Of all the postings Angela could have received, Kirkuk was among the least dangerous, but lately things have gotten testier. ("Sportier," as Angela says.) The 101st Airborne Assault Division arrived at the base in October and has been deftly thwarting rocket attacks ever since. For safety reasons, Angela has yet to venture off base. Explosions rumble the furniture in her office. I wonder what worries her most today -- the explosions or a small, shiny lump on the forehead of her 10-year-old.

I take Jourdan to the pediatrician's office. She sits on crinkly white paper in an exam room. A nurse practitioner named Miss Yvonne looks at the lump. Using a rubber hammer, she checks Jourdan's reflexes and then turns on a penlight and tells Jourdan to follow the beam with her eyes. "Tell me about these headaches you've been having," Miss Yvonne says.

"I think they're because I don't drink enough water, and I am growing at a really fast rate," Jourdan answers. Miss Yvonne finishes her exam. She doesn't think there is anything to worry about. The minute I'm outside the office, I call my brother at work, and I can hear him typing an e-mail to Angela as we speak.

It's mid-morning and we are late for school. We decide to stop at a convenience store on U.S. 301. We are not sticking to the routine. We go inside and peruse glossy teen magazines and the selection of snack cakes. The packaging is in Spanish because of all the Mexicans and Guatemalans who pick strawberries and tomatoes in the fields nearby. I share the sociology lesson with my niece. "Oh," she replies, feigning interest. She picks up a double-pack of coconut creme-filled snowballs. Next, a big Coke, her eyes wandering to meet mine as she reaches inside the cooler. Her mom's at war. What the hell.

School is an L-shaped set of flat buildings shaded by oaks. The office is in front. Jourdan and I stand there in the bright fluorescence with our sugar-crusted mouths. "See you at 3:30," I say.

* * *

My brother is three years younger than me. He watches NASCAR and trades barbecue tips with someone on the Internet named Jurassic Pork. He washes the truck and cuts the grass on Saturday afternoons. Order is very important, which is funny, because as a boy he was gangly and calamitous, with an uncombed thicket of blond hair. Once he slipped from a boardwalk into a swamp full of alligators. Another time, he lit the gas stove and, whoosh, he had two charred haystacks for eyebrows.

We grew up in rural central Florida, when flocks of white birds would fill the sky as they left the backs of cattle that stood in soggy pastures. Our father worked in citrus. He couldn't keep a job. After our mother decided to leave with us, I remember being so broke that we ate meat only once a week -- Sunday -- but what Jim remembers is how delicious Sunday dinners were, and that would be the difference between us our entire lives.

At 19, he joined the Air Force and saw the world, and now he is back beneath the dripping Spanish moss that shrouded our childhoods. His house is in a subdivision near the Alafia River in eastern Hillsborough County. The river is tannic and winding and beautiful but surrounded by subdivisions that keep hatching and expanding, beige on beige. One day I'm returning home with the girls and I pull into what I believe is our driveway. My nieces inform me that their house is in fact three doors down. "Do these houses all look alike?" I ask.

"Our light is different," my younger niece says.

My brother loves the stability and sameness of these communities, a clue that he has not forgotten everything from our childhood. In Oklahoma they lived on Altus Air Force Base in a windswept brick ranch house with brown carpet, and every night an anemic bugle would sound taps over loudspeakers. During a bad plains drought, my brother torched his and a neighbor's lawns during a barbecue mishap. Three Halloweens ago in Virginia, in a neighborhood of Special Forces, Navy and Air Force members, I remember all the children flying around the cul-de-sac in vampire and Shrek costumes as their dads prepared for the invasion of Iraq. The night was starry and perfect, for these children.

Now, Angela is there. Patience, President Bush says on the news, patience. Stay the course. His twin daughters are about the same age that Angela was when she was working at the Stouffer's frozen-food factory and decided to enlist because good jobs were scarce in Gaffney, S.C. Now, Angela is high in a tower over the northern desert of Iraq, watching the red trails of rockets flare off in the distance. Patience, Angela, patience.

It is nearly bedtime. My brother turns off the TV. The sliding glass door is open and he pulls it closed, the small click of a lock echoing between us. One last time for the night, he goes to the computer to see if there is any news from Angela.

* * *

"Hey, baby," my brother shouts into the phone on my last Saturday afternoon. Knowing it's their mother, the girls come running.

"Mama," Chrislyn says, "I got a new bear."

Jourdan shares with her mother a dark tale from "Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul." It has come to Angela's attention, through more digital photos, that Jourdan is wearing blue eye shadow to school, and a mother-daughter conversation follows.

My brother gets back on the line, and the kids start arguing. He cups his hand over the phone and yells at them sharply, drawing a rebuke from Angela.

"Dammit, Ang," Jim says, "I'm here with them 24-7 and you're in the peace and quiet."

We have to laugh at that one.

We decide to take a walk on the nature trail around the subdivision. Frogs grunt from the sludge of the creek, like kettledrums sounding off from the depths of the soupy algae. Jim tells the girls to stay on the paved trail. I whisper to him, "When we were kids, we played hopscotch over rattlesnake nests."

The sky is obscured by palms and oaks; it feels as if we are alone in Florida's last forest, until we hear the rush of the nearby interstate, cleverly hidden by landscaping. The girls race ahead. I have told them to bring their swimming suits. The subdivision has a pool, and though it is unheated, the gate is unlocked. We change into our suits. No one is saying the obvious, that the water is cold and that Angela would never allow this. But Angela is not here. We leap into the pool, cannonballs and jackknives. With chattering teeth, we make a pact never to tell Angela we went swimming in December.

We are warm and dry by the time we eat dinner. The girls sit at the kitchen table to write letters to their mother. Chrislyn picks up a pencil and stares out the window. A dreamer and sensitive soul, like her father when he was a boy. She looks down at her blank paper and begins. Dear Mom : If you read this carefully, you might actually hear my voice.

Since the war began I have read the U.S. casualty lists published in newspapers. When the photos of the dead are published in newspapers, I study the faces that are laid out like yearbook photos filling the pages of an endless year. Every picture has its own story but no future. The brim of an olive cap shields the impish eyes of a young Marine, now gone. Why do the names of their home towns seem so poetic? Mineral Bluff, Ga. Spooner, Wis. Angelina, Tex. Mechanicsville, Iowa. Zanesville, Ohio. Evening Shade, Ark. Valentine, Neb. When I see these photos, I imagine the knock on the door.

My brother never reads these lists. He never looks at the photos. Seeking out memorials is for those of us who live around the edges. Instead, Jim stands over his girls as they say their bedtime prayers, the same singsong prayers they have repeated since they could talk, about grandmas, papas, Todd their cat and baby Jesus, with one new addendum to their pajama pleadings. "Please keep Mama safe."