Dear Lorna,

Each of your compassionate and personal letters (which I have not responded to because I have not written anyone since my son got to Iraq), and your enlightened photos of Iraqi women and children both fill and sear my heart. These people are, as you say, not the enemy. I need to add though that Marines should not have also become the enemy. Most Marines are openhearted teenagers from communities with few jobs, who arrived in Iraq ready to risk their lives to help another country create democracy. Insurgents, trying to protect their world from global corporations, have goals that many in the US share. Yet when insurgents and soldiers, caught up in ardor and group-think, clash, it produces what an embed calls "sights too horrible to describe, courage too great to express." One might add, "slaughter too senseless to be borne."

Your photos put me in my grown child's eyes. Dan—a Navy medical corpsman attached to the Marines—is saving lives in the midst of that carnage. His voice on the phone, bounced off satellites and Honolulu, though transmitting perfectly, sounds so different. I need for you to please find him.

Armed with a hospital pack, he's one of the "docs" darting in under fire, carrying a stretcher, crouching by the injured. Dan, gruff and compassionate, is a sandy-haired, square-jawed man in his late thirties with a straight back, articulate hands, and sparkling eyes. When his reserve unit was activated and deployed to Iraq, my spirit gasped and quit breathing. I oppose this war but I respect him. Going into the full fury of battle without an assault rifle, as Dan does, takes guts. Kneeling, his hands full of bandages, a medical corpsman is an easy target. So are the wounded. In Vietnam, one corpsman, himself wounded four times, crawled over a ridge to the other wounded, snatched a gun from a dying hand, and held off attackers for days. All five Navy Medals of Honor in the Korean War went to corpsmen. These people put their lives where their medicine is.

I'm not even accustomed to worrying about Dan. When he was only 14 months old he followed some  planks up a tree and wriggled out on a limb. Realizing that I'd better get used to it, I told him to jump into my arms. Fearless and agile, he did. When he was five, I had a car accident and specialists told me I would never walk again. Dan said, "You can do it, Mommy. Lean on me." I walked, without leaning, his belief a crucial source of strength. In our yellow Volkswagen square-back, which he named Charley Car, Dan was my companion of a thousand roads, constantly pulling people out of fixes. Grown, he kept on traveling on motorcycles, planes, and boats, and then joined the military, laughing that since I was at ease with the foibles of youth, he had no other way to rebel. In a peacetime Navy, Dan sailed oceans, led villagers out of lava flows, and swung back home after two years, a red bandanna around his head, white teeth flashing in his mahogany face, looking like a happy pirate.

When the first Gulf War broke out, Dan was on an aircraft carrier in a fluorescent orange jacket, waving planes in, part of a dot marked USS Abraham Lincoln on CNN's map. Obsessed by that dot, I channel-surfed, afraid the dot would blow up, and hoping it would leave the area—half-believing that if I stared long enough, I would be able see him. When his siblings and I needed help, Dan left his beloved Navy for five years and came home, kayaking to stay sane. He then became a wilderness rescuer and urban EMT, joining the Naval Reserve as a medical corpsman attached to a Marine battalion.

During the last 20 years, Dan usually has been hundreds or even thousands of miles away. He rarely wrote or called and neither did I because he seemed always to be standing beside me. He still seems to be right here, but now I live for his calls.

The first time Dan phoned from Iraq he evoked relaxation and laughter with every syllable. He was worrying about me, for God's sake, concerned that I would be plumbing my sources for details and therefore be worried, turning to me not for consolation but to lend strength. Not about to let him down, I bantered softly in return. But all I, the great wordsmith, could say was, "I love you." And "Healing in the midst of war is an amazing thing. God bless you."

Deliriously happy to have spoken to him, I twirled around the room hugging air. Then I suddenly heard what he had not said. Sobbing uncontrollably, I knew beyond question that something big was about to erupt, that he believed many would die, and that he was calling to put the fresh, loving sound of his voice in my ears, just in case.

Fallujah exploded the next night.

Lorna, there is so much confused emotion in me. True, only two percent of Americans wounded in Iraq die, though many live with no arms or legs. Shot at by snipers and rocket-propelled grenades in a maze of booby-trapped unfamiliar streets and rooms, the fighters with whom Dan travels move in a thunder of artillery, exhilarated, hyper-alert (because even dead bodies explode), with hair-trigger guns in their hands. Dan is healing killers—highly skilled butchers—who are nonetheless just teenage kids from communities where joining the military provides the only chance to have a future. They need to get home to their families, but when freshly wounded, most get sent—or choose to go—back to the lines. Jittery and calmly enraged, having just seen a close buddy die, troops react to survive. Dan is also bandaging insurgents who are too weak to move and maybe nobody comes to pick them up in time. Once treated by the corpsmen, some perhaps die alone and aching with thirst, or they may remain lethal, disguised by clean bandages, and blow up the next round of troops. So troops fearing a trap may shoot insurgents who are too weak to move. Dan is bandaging both his friends and the people who shot them; he is bandaging shot-up Iraqis and moving forward with the group that is shooting them. He's increasingly afraid of helping pregnant women because women suicide bombers pretend to be in labor, then kill the one American who forgot he was a soldier long enough to reach out with compassion.

Soldiers face non-Iraqi Muslim fundamentalists out to kill infidels—some genuine freedom fighters, some joy riders looking for any excuse for jihad. And soldiers also face a deliberately radicalized, diverse indigenous foe: Saddam-lovers scheming to re-take power; Sunnis afraid of a majority Shi'ite rule; nationalists trying to expel global corporations; and poor people caught up in the wave. Many insurgents though are Iraqi civilians who pick up a gun because their families were killed or they were left homeless by club-footed Washington politics, and all use guerrilla tactics in which street clothes have become a uniform. With no way to distinguish resistance fighters repelling a foreign invasion from civilians, soldiers avoid fleeing Iraqi families, and even open fire. Insurgents are pleased because that inflames the public.

Dan won't come back the same. I just want him to come back at all. I have prayed that he would never get cornered and have to kill, and knowing Dan's resourcefulness, have trusted that if he were cornered he'd grab a gun and shoot fast and accurately enough to kill. But in subsequent calls, his voice has taken on the clipped, friendly but disconnected sound of an emergency room staffer when, say, a school bus has burned and lives depend on his ability not to shake. In Dan's voice, I hear total trauma encapsulated, a mind so other-directed that it does not notice its own wounds.A month into it, my son, who had never killed and had gone to Iraq to save lives, told me, "I have blood on my hands."

Ah, Dan.

Lightning fast and judicious in an emergency, Dan would not have shot without reason or if he had an alternative. In truth, I fiercely hope he never misses. For teenage Marines though, what happens to the mind as the sport of hunting armed humans becomes routine? Dan says—hard cynicism and weary pain playing in his voice—"It's modern warfare, Mom. We have barracks. Guys go put in a good workday killing, and then take a shower and go watch a movie." On the insurgent side, people slowly saw somebody's head off or blow up toddlers in a market, carefully arranging the bombing and beheading around their daily prayer schedule.

The tides of insanity are rising.

An image floats into my mind, a Life photo from the mid-1960s of a tiny, furry lemur with huge black eyes, in Madagascar. During a flood, the lemur had climbed the highest hill in the area. The water kept rising. She climbed the summit's tallest tree. The waters rose. Tightening her legs around the tree's crowning branch, she stiffened her spine and extended her arms above her head. As water rose over her face, she willed herself to remain rigidly upright, eyes open, arms straight up. She drowned. After the flood receded, a photographer in a helicopter spotted her with her legs anchoring her erect body at the top of the tree. Her lifeless, outstretched, strong paws held to the clearing blue skies her living cub.

The lemur embodies a universal prayer, a parent's gift and demand to the world: "I give you the Future, raised with love and courage as high as I can take it. Treasure and protect it."

Instead, it's Vietnam, 1965, déjà vu all over again, with fanatic overtone. Skipping away, expecting extra virgins at his funeral, Bin Laden looks for another hornet's nest to poke. Answering jihad with crusade, Christian fundamentalists blow on the Middle Eastern coals, hoping avoidable inferno will look enough like Armageddon to beckon Christ. Opposing the global corporate political control of our country and our world, I am an activist, an American revolutionary. (Dan, who detests "couch potato liberals," has never confused his mom with a potato or a couch.) I am appalled though by the growing number of stateside leftists who view all guerrillas and terrorists as being on the side of the people, welcoming world war as a path to post-nuclear utopia.

If I were into arguing with true believers—which I'm not—I might ask: "Is it not blasphemy to try to force the hand of God with manufactured Armageddons?" Or: "Isn't a manipulated God an oxymoron?" Or: "Why would candle-dipped collectives (not corporate totalitarian dictatorship) characterize a shattered world?" And what ring of hell is reserved for the people who twist the world into war by mis-thinking this way?

Organized religion has the same relationship to divinity as a blocked pipe has to water. Whether parents envision the Goddess, Allah, Jehovah, or the Great Chewing Gum, though, there are few atheists with kids in foxholes. Worldwide, we pray for our children to survive. Down in the center of me, all international relations, right and wrong, ideological distinctions, questions of justice and mercy, freedom and safety, boil down to this: "Please, please let him live."

Dan has been in Iraq since late summer. I have been outpouring letters and packages. He has received ab-so-lute-ly nothing from me. Dan apparently has no access to a computer. The only contact he has is the 10 minutes every two weeks he is allowed on the phone. Trying to call his dad and me for five minutes each, he often misses one or both of us. That cut-off alone could kill some of our guys. They need to know, to have constant concrete evidence, that we care.

Dearest Lorna, please find my son. Tell him.
My soul goes with you every step of the way.

—Gail