.Missing mom: Woman serving in Iraq pines for her children
There are eight time zones between Camp Taqqadum, Iraq, and the beige-and-brick duplex in Jonestown.
When Spc. Amy Torres finishes her workday, packing bandages and medicine for troop convoys, her children back home are well into their morning at day care and kindergarten.
So she waits till weekends for the calls that connect her -- hunched over the phone for privacy, at a gray counter lined with phones and soldiers -- to her children.
The void a deployed soldier leaves in a young family -- and her efforts to keep her children yoked to her from afar -- emerge in an overseas phone interview, e-mails and visits to Jonestown over the course of three months.
For now, the bonds are weekend phone calls, homemade videos, DVD slide-shows, video e-mail and rows of photos on the children's bedroom wall, the "Mommy Wall."
December figures show almost a third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are parents of children under 18.
Those soldiers seek each other out, sharing the latest photos from home and the pain of separation, Amy says. "Us parents of young children worry our kids will forget us."
Amy -- 24-year-old single mother of Destiny, 3, and Blaise, 6 -- was 17 when she joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. She was called to active duty in December 2004, from a civilian job making military identification tags at Fort Indiantown Gap.
Except for a few days home at Christmas, she's been in Iraq 11 months, with the medical unit of the 228th Forward Support Battalion.
While Amy worked with teams recovering dead and injured soldiers in Ramadi, then moved to troop supply in Taqqadum, Destiny met and mastered the tricycle, then graduated to a bike with training wheels. Blaise wore his first T-ball uniform and learned to read.
Amy hopes to be home sometime this summer. "I feel I'm going to have a lot of making up to do," she says.
Meanwhile, the children live with Amy's mother Jo Ann Salazar and her fiance Mike Wevodau -- both of them Guard members, Gap employees and veterans of the war in Afghanistan. "Land of the Free Because of the Brave," and "Freedom Isn't Free" say plastic ribbons festooning their front door.
The Phone Center at Taqqadam (the soldiers call it TQ) is in a low, concrete building about a five-minute walk in the desert heat from a building just like it where Amy lives now.
She says the phone connections lately haven't been that bad. Still, they can be a tough way to connect with little children.
Amy's calls find her kids grouchy sometimes, just up from a nap. Destiny -- for all her 3-year-old loquaciousness and her mother's yearning -- has been known to parrot "Loveyouseeyoulaterbye" and hand off the phone.
But one recent day, Blaise told Amy lots about his T-ball team and proudly read aloud a full sentence -- to prove he deserved a Batman video game he wanted.
She had no idea he could read so well. "I was bawling over here," she recalls. "He didn't hear it. I just said, 'Yes. You can have the video game.'"
Amy frets about the importance of a mother's involvement in her little boy's education: "I guess I haven't made a great start," she says. "My first kid goes to school for his first time and I'm here. ... I'm learning to accept that one."
Trying to share from afar her kids' interest in books, she sends home videotapes of herself reading aloud. One of her sergeants, a new father making his own tapes, lent her his copy of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."
As that tape begins, Amy holds the book so her children can see the cover. "Blaise and Destiny, go get the book," she says and then she waits a minute, looking solemnly into her camcorder, the walls of her barracks visible behind her. "Open to the first page, OK?"
Amy sent the children a DVD she made, too. It's a slide-show set to Nickleback's "Far Away."
"I have loved you all along and I miss you. Been far away for far too long," the song goes, as photos of Amy in uniform in the Iraqi desert and others of Blaise and Destiny in Pennsylvania flash on screen.
"I forgive you for being away for far too long ... I'm not leaving you anymore. Believe it."
Nana and Poppa:
Jo Ann, Michael and Amy are working out the logistics to give her and the children some transition time when Amy gets home. Maybe everybody will be at the townhouse for a while, before the kids and Amy go home to Tower City.
The children have changed so much.
Blaise has a new maturity, "like a little man," Amy says in wonderment. "Once I called and he told me to ask my boss if I could finish work and go home to be with him."
A 6-year-old should be asking his Mom when dinner will be ready, Amy says, not when she'll be back from the other side of the world. Her kids are "older than they should be," she says.
"I'm tired of being scared," she adds one recent day -- a bad one for reasons she can't tell a reporter.
Still, she says she has never questioned her decision to join the Guard. "I love the military and my kids both. ... I just try to make sure it doesn't affect the kids too much," she says.
"When I'm with my kids I try to always make it a great and memorable moment and that's what they will hold til I get home."
Amy "would be a lot worse off" without the military, says Jo Ann. Then she tells a story: When Amy's house burned down in 2003, "in Afghanistan we collected $5,000 for her and at Fort Indiantown Gap, they raised more. ... In the Guard, you have family."
Jo Ann calls Amy "my buddy." They worked together at Red Lobster and the Gap. They're racquet ball partners.
Jo Ann remembers urging Amy to sign up: "She wasn't working. Typical teenager, doesn't know what to do. I said, 'Why don't you join the service?'"
At the recruitment office, "I was telling the guy I was a former Marine ... All of a sudden I was signed up with her," says Jo Ann.
Through her own deployment in Afghanistan, Jo Ann rejoiced that Amy was still at home. Then when Amy's call came, Jo Ann feared for her daughter -- and felt daunted by the prospect of assuming her role at home.
Jo Ann and Michael were a fairly new couple at the time. Fans of NASCAR and Civil War battlefields, they suddenly became "Nana" and "Poppa" on 24-hour duty.
"I'm, like, oh my God. All of a sudden little wee ones again," Jo Ann, 47, says with a rueful laugh. "A new relationship and then we're grandparents watching the kids.
"It was such an adjustment. But no less than we should be doing. And thank God for Michael. He has more patience than I do."
Waiting for the baby corn:
When Amy moved from Danbury, Conn. to Lebanon County as a teenager -- a city girl who'd never seen the country -- she was enchanted by the cornfields in the spring. The "baby corn" was so cute, she thought.
Since she left for Iraq last June, with a year's deployment likely, Jo Ann's mantra for the children has been this: When the baby corn comes back, Mommy is coming home.
Destiny and Blaise noticed the farmers in the fields two months ago and figured baby corn had come.
So when Amy called on March 18, Destiny sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and Blaise recited the Pledge of Allegiance and then they both told her with great excitement that it was time for her to come home.
"I was so happy and so proud at that moment to see -- or hear -- how much they are growing up. It hurt so bad at the same time," Amy says.
"I would give up everything I own to have 15 minutes with them and to be able to touch them and hold them."
The soldier yearns for her mother, too. Sometimes "when I call her I get aggravated. I don't mean to be grouchy," Amy says. "I want her. Just calling her is not enough for me."
The two women spent much time plotting how to please each other today, Mother's Day. Amy scoured the Internet for a special digital frame, for photos of herself and her brother.
Jo Ann bought a silver ID bracelet and had it inscribed, "No. One Deployed Mom." She mailed two boxes of microwaveable food and Amy's favorite juice, too -- and wasn't able to resist adding a bag of Hershey's Morsels, though she knows they'll likely melt.
As Jo Ann recounts those Mother's Day surprises one recent evening, the ritual of bedtime is getting underway at the Salazar-Wevadau household.
Destiny absorbs the fact she's getting her hair washed tonight and promises not to cry. "Blaise is a man" who can shower on his own, announces Jo Ann, and off he goes.
Eventually Jo Ann reads a bedtime story. Blaise tosses a Nerf ball. Jo Ann and Mike duly admire Destiny's hair. There are kisses all around and Jo Ann announces lights out.
Destiny wonders, though, if she mightn't leave the TV on 10 minutes. She pouts up at her grandmother from the lower bunk. "Mommy would leave it on," she says.
"Mommy would leave it on," Jo Ann repeats with a sigh -- and she relents. "Just 10 more minutes," she says.
Patriot News
When Spc. Amy Torres finishes her workday, packing bandages and medicine for troop convoys, her children back home are well into their morning at day care and kindergarten.
So she waits till weekends for the calls that connect her -- hunched over the phone for privacy, at a gray counter lined with phones and soldiers -- to her children.
The void a deployed soldier leaves in a young family -- and her efforts to keep her children yoked to her from afar -- emerge in an overseas phone interview, e-mails and visits to Jonestown over the course of three months.
For now, the bonds are weekend phone calls, homemade videos, DVD slide-shows, video e-mail and rows of photos on the children's bedroom wall, the "Mommy Wall."
December figures show almost a third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are parents of children under 18.
Those soldiers seek each other out, sharing the latest photos from home and the pain of separation, Amy says. "Us parents of young children worry our kids will forget us."
Amy -- 24-year-old single mother of Destiny, 3, and Blaise, 6 -- was 17 when she joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. She was called to active duty in December 2004, from a civilian job making military identification tags at Fort Indiantown Gap.
Except for a few days home at Christmas, she's been in Iraq 11 months, with the medical unit of the 228th Forward Support Battalion.
While Amy worked with teams recovering dead and injured soldiers in Ramadi, then moved to troop supply in Taqqadum, Destiny met and mastered the tricycle, then graduated to a bike with training wheels. Blaise wore his first T-ball uniform and learned to read.
Amy hopes to be home sometime this summer. "I feel I'm going to have a lot of making up to do," she says.
Meanwhile, the children live with Amy's mother Jo Ann Salazar and her fiance Mike Wevodau -- both of them Guard members, Gap employees and veterans of the war in Afghanistan. "Land of the Free Because of the Brave," and "Freedom Isn't Free" say plastic ribbons festooning their front door.
The Phone Center at Taqqadam (the soldiers call it TQ) is in a low, concrete building about a five-minute walk in the desert heat from a building just like it where Amy lives now.
She says the phone connections lately haven't been that bad. Still, they can be a tough way to connect with little children.
Amy's calls find her kids grouchy sometimes, just up from a nap. Destiny -- for all her 3-year-old loquaciousness and her mother's yearning -- has been known to parrot "Loveyouseeyoulaterbye" and hand off the phone.
But one recent day, Blaise told Amy lots about his T-ball team and proudly read aloud a full sentence -- to prove he deserved a Batman video game he wanted.
She had no idea he could read so well. "I was bawling over here," she recalls. "He didn't hear it. I just said, 'Yes. You can have the video game.'"
Amy frets about the importance of a mother's involvement in her little boy's education: "I guess I haven't made a great start," she says. "My first kid goes to school for his first time and I'm here. ... I'm learning to accept that one."
Trying to share from afar her kids' interest in books, she sends home videotapes of herself reading aloud. One of her sergeants, a new father making his own tapes, lent her his copy of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are."
As that tape begins, Amy holds the book so her children can see the cover. "Blaise and Destiny, go get the book," she says and then she waits a minute, looking solemnly into her camcorder, the walls of her barracks visible behind her. "Open to the first page, OK?"
Amy sent the children a DVD she made, too. It's a slide-show set to Nickleback's "Far Away."
"I have loved you all along and I miss you. Been far away for far too long," the song goes, as photos of Amy in uniform in the Iraqi desert and others of Blaise and Destiny in Pennsylvania flash on screen.
"I forgive you for being away for far too long ... I'm not leaving you anymore. Believe it."
Nana and Poppa:
Jo Ann, Michael and Amy are working out the logistics to give her and the children some transition time when Amy gets home. Maybe everybody will be at the townhouse for a while, before the kids and Amy go home to Tower City.
The children have changed so much.
Blaise has a new maturity, "like a little man," Amy says in wonderment. "Once I called and he told me to ask my boss if I could finish work and go home to be with him."
A 6-year-old should be asking his Mom when dinner will be ready, Amy says, not when she'll be back from the other side of the world. Her kids are "older than they should be," she says.
"I'm tired of being scared," she adds one recent day -- a bad one for reasons she can't tell a reporter.
Still, she says she has never questioned her decision to join the Guard. "I love the military and my kids both. ... I just try to make sure it doesn't affect the kids too much," she says.
"When I'm with my kids I try to always make it a great and memorable moment and that's what they will hold til I get home."
Amy "would be a lot worse off" without the military, says Jo Ann. Then she tells a story: When Amy's house burned down in 2003, "in Afghanistan we collected $5,000 for her and at Fort Indiantown Gap, they raised more. ... In the Guard, you have family."
Jo Ann calls Amy "my buddy." They worked together at Red Lobster and the Gap. They're racquet ball partners.
Jo Ann remembers urging Amy to sign up: "She wasn't working. Typical teenager, doesn't know what to do. I said, 'Why don't you join the service?'"
At the recruitment office, "I was telling the guy I was a former Marine ... All of a sudden I was signed up with her," says Jo Ann.
Through her own deployment in Afghanistan, Jo Ann rejoiced that Amy was still at home. Then when Amy's call came, Jo Ann feared for her daughter -- and felt daunted by the prospect of assuming her role at home.
Jo Ann and Michael were a fairly new couple at the time. Fans of NASCAR and Civil War battlefields, they suddenly became "Nana" and "Poppa" on 24-hour duty.
"I'm, like, oh my God. All of a sudden little wee ones again," Jo Ann, 47, says with a rueful laugh. "A new relationship and then we're grandparents watching the kids.
"It was such an adjustment. But no less than we should be doing. And thank God for Michael. He has more patience than I do."
Waiting for the baby corn:
When Amy moved from Danbury, Conn. to Lebanon County as a teenager -- a city girl who'd never seen the country -- she was enchanted by the cornfields in the spring. The "baby corn" was so cute, she thought.
Since she left for Iraq last June, with a year's deployment likely, Jo Ann's mantra for the children has been this: When the baby corn comes back, Mommy is coming home.
Destiny and Blaise noticed the farmers in the fields two months ago and figured baby corn had come.
So when Amy called on March 18, Destiny sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and Blaise recited the Pledge of Allegiance and then they both told her with great excitement that it was time for her to come home.
"I was so happy and so proud at that moment to see -- or hear -- how much they are growing up. It hurt so bad at the same time," Amy says.
"I would give up everything I own to have 15 minutes with them and to be able to touch them and hold them."
The soldier yearns for her mother, too. Sometimes "when I call her I get aggravated. I don't mean to be grouchy," Amy says. "I want her. Just calling her is not enough for me."
The two women spent much time plotting how to please each other today, Mother's Day. Amy scoured the Internet for a special digital frame, for photos of herself and her brother.
Jo Ann bought a silver ID bracelet and had it inscribed, "No. One Deployed Mom." She mailed two boxes of microwaveable food and Amy's favorite juice, too -- and wasn't able to resist adding a bag of Hershey's Morsels, though she knows they'll likely melt.
As Jo Ann recounts those Mother's Day surprises one recent evening, the ritual of bedtime is getting underway at the Salazar-Wevadau household.
Destiny absorbs the fact she's getting her hair washed tonight and promises not to cry. "Blaise is a man" who can shower on his own, announces Jo Ann, and off he goes.
Eventually Jo Ann reads a bedtime story. Blaise tosses a Nerf ball. Jo Ann and Mike duly admire Destiny's hair. There are kisses all around and Jo Ann announces lights out.
Destiny wonders, though, if she mightn't leave the TV on 10 minutes. She pouts up at her grandmother from the lower bunk. "Mommy would leave it on," she says.
"Mommy would leave it on," Jo Ann repeats with a sigh -- and she relents. "Just 10 more minutes," she says.
Patriot News
posted by madtom at 12:36 PM
2 Comments:
Hey this is Amy Torres the one the article was about. It hurt to see my article used in such a negative way. I worked so hard out there and for everyone home to have a better life for someone to put it on a page like this it bothers me. I can appreciate the neg feelings towards the war, but I am very proud of what i did out there and how many soldiers and marines i sent home alive. I hope everyone can learn to appreciate what we do....we do it for you. I as a soldier love my country and everyone in it.
Hello Amy,
I'm not sure, but we appreciate your service here, not sure how we misused your story, but I am sure it was not our intention. Maybe your getting the wrong impression of our site. I hope that you take a look around and not judge us before you get a chance to know a little more about this site.
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