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Re: Hope Continues for Mother of Army MIA

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 23, 2003

"Hope and fear keep watch

Mother of last GI knows son is still out there

By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff, 4/23/2003

OS FRESNOS, Texas - For the mother of the remaining soldier identified as missing in action from Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is how an evening unfolds in a white stucco duplex on the outskirts of a small town bounded by sugar cane and cotton fields.

The television is on. The sound is muted.

The screen shows Peter Jennings, his head cocked and lips moving. A picture flashes of a leader in Saddam Hussein's regime who has just been captured by American forces.

San Juanita Anguiano stares at the image. Sleep has been nearly impossible for the 45-year-old teacher's aide, giving her eyes a distant quality of looking but not seeing.

''They're busy catching these people,'' Anguiano says. ''But they can't find my son.''

Sergeant Edward Anguiano, a 24-year-old ambushed in a convoy near Nasiriyah one month ago, is the only US Army soldier whose whereabouts are unknown. The Air Force also lists as missing a crew member of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle whose name has not been released.

The other soldiers in Anguiano's fateful convoy have been accounted for. In the March 23 ambush that led to their capture, nine of his fellow soldiers were killed, and five were injured. Four were rescued that day. Another, Private First Class Jessica Lynch, was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by US special forces and is now safe in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Five more were liberated north of Baghdad, and they returned to the United States Saturday in a frenzy of celebration and news coverage.

Now it is just Edward Anguiano, who bought Martha Stewart patio furniture for his mother's kitchen and joined the Army four years ago. He bet the military would take him farther than his previous attempts to get out of Los Fresnos, having previously traveled as far as Arkansas, where he worked in a chicken processing plant for two months, before an injury forced his return.

Anguiano worked his way up to a truck mechanic and was assigned to the Third Combat Support Batallion, based at Fort Stewart, Ga.

Major Steve Stover, an Army spokesman, said the five freed POWs who were also in the convoy are being questioned intensively about Anguiano's disappearance, in an effort to elicit information that could lead to his return.

''I understand where she is coming from,'' Stover said. ''We don't want to leave anyone behind, and they are making every effort to find him.''

As the US focus in Iraq turns to rebuilding roads and schools, the war is still raging for a mother in this south Texas town of 4,500, where the military or the nearby University of Texas at Brownsville, known here as Harvard by the Border, are the favored routes that the ambitious take up and out.

She has heard no word from the military for nearly two weeks, when an officer called to tell her that the five soldiers from the convoy had been found, including Edgar Hernandez from nearby Mission. Saturday night, she flicked on the television and saw the former POWs arriving at Fort Bliss, where hundreds thronged to glimpse the four men and one woman falling into the embrace of loved ones.

''I felt happy for them and their parents, and I thanked God that they had come home,'' San Juanita Anguiano said. But the vicarious joy left when she turned off the television. ''I just want so much to feel like them,'' she said in an interview Monday.

She worries that with just one soldier missing now, the military's attention has been diverted.

''They only care about what's happening in Baghdad, about the money in the bank and the museums and looking for the Iraqis,'' she said, her voice tremulous with what sounds more like fear than rage. ''That's more important than looking for one soldier, one mechanic soldier.''

Anguiano was one of two military men from Los Fresnos deployed overseas for the war, according to local officials. Word of the ambushed convoy sent a chill through the community, which had hoisted red, white, and blue ribbons outside the bank turned city hall and the taquerias. Yellow ribbons were added, and a fund-raising drive for the family was launched by a former constable.

''It's the uncertainty that bothers people,'' said Mayor Tom Jones of Los Fresnos. ''No one wants to come out and say what they think might have happened.''

At the Anguiano apartment, where San Juanita lives with her two daughters, 16 and 19, days are a blur of routine. ''I go to work at 8. I come home and make dinner. I watch my novelas, and then I have time to pray for my son,'' said Anguiano, who frequently lapses into the Spanish she grew up speaking with her Mexican-American family.

Anguiano prays before a Madre de Guadalupe candle flickering in front of a photograph of her son smiling confidently. He is blond with sea-green eyes, like his father, a Vietnam veteran.

Growing up in public housing, Edward Anguiano was an avid skateboarder and basketball player. He graduated from high school and then made his brief trip to Arkansas. When he returned, he took the entrance test for the military, but failed. He enrolled in a local community college and, after a year of study, took the military test again. This time, he passed and enlisted. He was 20.

Anguiano believed that the military promised passage to elegant European countries, like Germany, his mother said.

Recalled a friend, Jonathan Delgado, ''One day he just showed up at the basketball courts and said, `I'm not going to be around here anymore.'''

On Jan. 27, his unit departed for Kuwait. His mother heard from him once more, on a March morning four days before he disappeared.

''It was a real fast conversation, only three minutes,'' she said. ''I was asleep when he called. He said he was going to Iraq.''

Six days after the convoy took a wrong turn, an Army officer sat on the blue pinstriped couch that her son had bought with his military pay. The officer said Edward was missing.

''I felt like I had been in a car accident,'' she said. ''It was like seeing my windshield breaking in front of me.''

For a week, she stayed home from work, depressed and distracted by rumors of severed tongues and torture chambers. Even now, sleep is difficult.

She tries not to watch the news on Spanish-language television, which she says is more graphic than broadcasts in English. She tries to think of his return, when she will make him beans and flour tortillas, topped with yellow cheese, her specialty and his favorite.

Yet her mind still wanders to thoughts that her four-week nightmare will have no ending.

''I think of my son, all alone in the desert, no food, no water, in a country he doesn't know,'' she said, her thoughts trailing off. ''I know I'm not, but I feel like I am the only mother in the world with a missing son.''

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. "