The Warrior Returns

Motherhood is defined by life and love; war is shadowed by death and loss. Mothers take care; soldiers face danger. The two seem antithetical, as Frances Richey knows well. Fran is a yoga teacher who writes poetry and is opposed to the war in Iraq. Her son, Ben, is a West Point graduate and Green Beret who served two tours there.

The bridge across the chasm that grew between them is made of words, a heart-rending collection of Fran's poetry titled "The Warrior." On its cover is a very old photo of her only child, a flaxen-haired toddler in a striped shirt who appears to be waving goodbye. The picture is testimony to the fact that no mother ever sends an adult into battle. She sends her baby. If she is lucky, her baby comes back home.

He will leave again.
Again, I ' ll be broken, a relic
of that young woman I was when
I stood over his bassinet and
hoped his rash would heal
if I changed to cloth.

Ben convinced his mother that he needed to serve his country, even if it was in a way that was not easy for her to understand. But she was unconvinced about this war. "This is a terrible administration," she says on the phone, "but most of the soldiers are really noble people and they're being wasted and that's wrong. But I stopped arguing with Ben about it after he came back the first time because he was in so much pain. Politics was not important. Healing the relationship was the important thing. I think he understood it better by reading the poems because poetry communicates in a different way."

He left it out
of sight, as if recalling
my refusal,
when he was a boy,
to buy him one.
The only evidence
it existed, a small
brown square of paper,
slightly buckled,
three holes shot
through at the heart,
lying on the table
by his will.

For Fran the poems were not political, except to the extent that all politics is personal. Sometimes everyone forgets that war is not a shout but a whisper: a folded flag, an empty bedroom, a woman who has lost that part of her life that made her feel most alive. "To that mother, the surge is not going well," says Fran Richey.