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I peeked into the sunny bedroom at the end of the hall, and for a moment it seemed as if the past two years had never happened. As if my son, Roman, had never left home at 18 to join the Army. As if he'd never been deployed for 15 long months in Iraq. Because when I glanced over at the desk in the corner, there he was again in bluejeans and a T shirt, hunched in front of his computer, a bottle of Dr Pepper near his right hand, yesterday's socks scattered on the floor. But in place of his old high-school backpack, a weathered green duffel bag now leaned against the wall.
In the baggage-claim area at the airport earlier in the week, I had tried to lift that bag and couldn't budge it. Roman quickly stepped over and scooped it up with one hand.
This wasn't the first time he'd been back for a visit since his deployment to Iraq. Six months earlier his dad and I had welcomed him home from the war with a big party. This time the hand-painted banner we'd tacked to the garage door was taped above the sofa in the family room.
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"Hey, Mom," Roman said catching a glimpse of me at the bedroom door. "Come here. Check this out."
He wanted to show me the small computer he had bought, packed and sent here from Germany. That's where the First Armored, the division he'd served with in Iraq, is based, and where he'd lived the past six months. The new orders he'd received in Baumholder a few weeks earlier were sending him now to the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Ky. That would be his next stop as soon as the 10-day leave he was on was over.
Roman's infantry unit with the First Armored had the distinction of serving the longest deployment of any division in Iraq. And now, according to a recent Pentagon announcement, soldiers from the 101st Airborne "will make up a significant part of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2005."
We didn't talk much about the likelihood of his return to the war. Instead we chatted that day about his computer. Its speed. Its size. Its amazing graphics.
"And what are those?" I asked, pointing to two on-screen icons labeled iraq I and iraq II.
"Pictures I took with my digital camera when I was over there," he said.
"Can I see them?"
With a couple of mouse clicks, the digital slide show he created began, and its images were seared in my memory:
Hovering helicopters in silhouette against a blood-red sky.
Acres of confiscated mortar shells, AK-47s, rifles.
Humvees with no doors.
Buildings with no walls.
The head of a child's doll lying in the dust, its plastic face blistered, its tiny ears singed.
The back seat of an empty car, mottled with stains the color of terra cotta tile.
A spider hole, half-hidden by brambles. "The hole Saddam didn't crawl out of," my son said with a wry grin.
The only other times he smiled were at pictures of his buddies in Bravo Company. Before each of those photos faded into the next, he'd hurry to name every one of his comrades, even though from most distances, with their Army haircuts and their desert khakis, they all looked alike to me. "That's Ramirez. Stanfel. Davis. Sgt. Hurd," he said, touching the screen with the tip of his finger. As if I would remember all their names. As if he could ever forget.
Off in the distance in one of those group shots, I couldn't help but notice black smoke coiling into an impossibly blue sky.
"Were there any places over there that you'd walk through the streets and say, 'Nice neighborhood'? You know, like here?" I asked.
"No. Not really," he said, shaking his head. "Not anymore." Just then a tight close-up of a big, bright-yellow sunflower filled the screen and, just as quickly, disappeared.
"Wait. Go back," I said. And when he did, I added, "Where'd that come from?"
"The flower? I took that picture one morning after the warehouse we'd been holed up in had taken a lot of enemy fire. It seemed so weird to come out and see something so pretty still standing in the middle of... well, in the middle of all that." On the screen, more snapshots from that dusty corner of hell continued.
Now he's gone again. Roman left a few days later on another plane heading east, but the improbable beauty of that sunflower has stayed with me. It's with me still. Through whatever lies ahead for this soldier of ours now with the 101st Airborne, I will hold on to the stubborn hope embodied by that bloom, embodied, too, by the young man who, after one particularly long night at his post in Iraq, put down his gun to point a camera at its petals.
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