A Son’s First Week of Combat Deployment
Suzanne Simons
War is an absolute failure of imagination.
~Adrienne Rich
Night #2
A ragged blanket of a 5,000
troop build-up, airstrikes, TBI
casualties cover me like patchwork.
Night #3
A phone call startles me awake.
A familiar voice tries to comfort
both of us. Hey Mom, I’m in Baghdad, waiting
for my assignment. Soldiers are here
from all over – Australia, England,
Poland. As if my son is at summer camp.
I don’t know what to say. How are you
inadequate. He asks for phone numbers –
his dad’s, grandmother’s. Not his brother’s.
Morning #4
Gnawing on what I wished I’d said:
Call your bother – he needs
to hear from you. No way to reach
my son on the one-way line from Baghdad.
Night #4
I feel too exposed in my master bedroom
with doors to the outside, windows like mirrors,
a ceiling reaching to heaven. So I move
back to the old, modest bedroom where my sons
were conceived between snug walls, bird songs,
and stars like I saw over Babylon.
Night #5
I send an e-mail to a few close friends.
Less triggering than face-to-face
repeating news of my son and the few details
I know. I resist making military language
commonplace. Instead, he’s been sent to,
stationed in, had a change of address.
I say to my friends don’t tell me
about troop movements
or ask me how I’m doing. I’ll let you
know when I feel like talking.
Night #6
My son was born with an itch for excitement.
He knew to pull back from danger
just in time, like when he toddled full-speed
out to the edge of a broken dock in the dark,
halting right before the bone-breaking drop-off
to the sea. In our faith community,
while the adults sat quietly in a prayer circle,
this wild child and a buddy ran around whooping
and hollering. There was no stopping them. That friend
had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. Last fall, my son
graduated from Airborne School. So thrilled,
he called me, talked at length of jumping
out of airplanes into utter darkness, how afraid he was
the first time. Which is how I feel now.
Night #7
There is a difference between worry and prayer.
On a good night, I hold my sons, all soldiers,
civilians, Iraqi, Iranian, American, all sides
in prayers for peace. On nights when I feel the air crackle
or am assaulted by a teaser for the 11 o’clock news
on the latest missiles and casualties, I burn
drops of cedar oil, inhale deeply, practice relaxing
my eyelids, unclenching my jaw that will be tight
again by morning. Faith and fear cannot
co-exist, but they do lie side-by-side,
wrestling to take turns on who will stand
vigilant all these tense nights.
Suzanne Simons is professor emerita at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington where she taught poetry, Middle East studies and journalism to students including active-duty military, veterans, and their dependents. As a result of 9/11 and her time in the Arab Middle East, Iran and Turkey, Suzanne shifted her writing from award-winning journalism to noteworthy poetry, earning a mid-life MFA from Sierra Nevada College. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, and Western Friend: Quaker Plain Speech and Spirit in the West.
Suzanne’s oldest son is a veteran who served as an MP in the Marine Corps and later as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army. His deployment to Iraq in 2020 when the U.S. and Iran were at the brink of war was the basis for “A Son’s First Week of Combat Deployment.”
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