[I thought this was a good story. If anybody knows the squadron, let me know. Wally]

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Boys to Men: It can be a brief journey from playing fields to battle front
By Linda Brinson
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Sunday, September 16, 2007

The message was from Iraq, and we had missed the call.

“Hey, how you doing? It’s me. I was just calling to let you guys know that I’m here and everything’s OK. The food is great. But they don’t have bread. (Small laugh here.) But other than that everything’s great,” he said.

That was one of our boys. Oh, he’s not one of our natural-born sons, but he’s a son of our heart.

Some people who see Emmanuel might jump to the knee-jerk conclusion that he’s an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He’s not. He’s a legal immigrant from Guatemala. And now he’s a U.S. Marine, fighting for us all in Iraq.

Emmanuel entered our lives when he was in grade school, when the man he thinks of as his dad brought him, his mother and his older sister here. His “dad,” having lived and worked in this country for 20-some years, had become a citizen. That status had enabled him to reunite with the widow and children of his late brother, and bring them to the United States in hopes of a better life.

Their new home was across the road from ours. My husband helped get the children into a public school with an ESL program. Emmanuel began coming over to play with our son Sam, who was a few years younger.

For months, he’d barely talk, especially not in front of my husband and me. We figured the boys communicated in some universal boy language. We suspected that Emmanuel understood English, and that he could speak it better than he let on.

The two boys explored our woods and played at the creek. They spent hours with BB guns “hunting” wild turkeys in our pasture. (The turkeys were never in any danger.) When our border collie decided they were being unruly, he would herd them as if they were a couple of sheep, and they would delightedly escape up a tree. They traipsed back and forth across the road, as likely to spend the night at one house as the other. We never knew whether Emmanuel might show up for supper at our house, or Sam might eat over at Emmanuel’s. Sometimes they both did both. Sam tried things at Emmanuel’s that he wouldn’t have touched at home, and Emmanuel loved my homemade bread.

Their schools and teams sometimes took them in different directions, but five falls ago, when Emmanuel was a junior and Sam was a freshman, they came together on the soccer team at South Stokes High School. That June, they had stayed up together night after night to watch the World Cup telecasts from South Korea and Japan, and they were primed for the season.

Those two years when Emmanuel and Sam were both playing soccer at South, my car became a rolling locker room. I’d bring them, and often another boy who lived nearby, home from away games all over Northwest North Carolina. As the invisible mom/driver, I learned a lot listening to the boys in the back.

When school was canceled by a snowstorm in the winter of Emmanuel’s senior year, the two friends built a snow fort on Emmanuel’s side of the road and loaded it with snowball ammunition to throw at vehicles that might venture past. I often think of that as one of the last times they were both just carefree boys.

Emmanuel proved to be outstanding in auto mechanics. He also scored high on an aptitude test given by the military, and he signed up for Marine Corps JROTC his senior year. The Marine recruiters were very interested in him.

In September after he graduated from high school in 2004, he was off to boot camp.

When he next came to our house, in December, he was handsome and grown-up looking. He brought us a picture of himself in dress uniform, which we placed on the piano alongside those of our own children. Having distinguished himself in boot camp, he was about to become a helicopter mechanic.

Except for training missions here and there, he’s been stationed in Atlanta. Last Christmas, when our son was home from college, he and Emmanuel managed to spend some time together. I was amused and a little nostalgic to see them walking side by side. When they started high school, they looked like Mutt and Jeff, with the tall, lanky Emmanuel towering over Sam. Now Sam had at least a couple of inches on Emmanuel, who had muscled up and looked like a man.

On that vacation, Emmanuel, now a corporal, told Sam that he thought his unit would be heading for Iraq late in the summer. We haven’t seen much of him since then. Just before Labor Day, he showed up at our house. We hugged. “Hello - and goodbye,” he said. “I’m going back to Atlanta tomorrow and leaving for Iraq on Tuesday.” I gave him a whole loaf of his favorite bread, along with my love.

And now he’s in Iraq. We missed the phone call but communicated by e-mail. It’s hot, and sand storms disrupt the Internet connection, he said. But everything’s great, and he’s doing just fine.

God bless him, and God bless all the rest of our sons and daughters who are at war in our name.

I’m going to have to figure out how to ship homemade bread to Iraq.
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• Linda Brinson is the Journal’s editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.

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