LOMETA, Texas — The United States was not yet at war when Emm Matous barely agreed to host this going-away party for her son.
Since serving in Iraq, even small crowds bothered her, which was why she lived on a middle-of-nowhere ranch with a chore list that included shooting rattlesnakes. The combat veteran, 41, also dreaded crying in front of anyone, especially her baby boy, who was still her baby boy, despite being 18 years old, 6-foot-5, and newly married.
Emm figured, though, she could hold it together for Justin the day before he left for basic training. “At least he’s joining up at peacetime,” she’d thought. But now American bombs were exploding across Iran, and the president she’d voted for was refusing to rule out troops on the ground, and a guest was stepping through her black double doors with a case of Mountain Dew.
He greeted Justin with the question that agonized her.
“You ready?”
Everyone seemed to have an opinion on President Trump thrusting the country into another conflict without a clear end. It’s righteous. It’s wrong. We trust him. He betrayed us. The commentary was nonstop, overwhelming, all over her Facebook feed and the YouTube videos looping on Justin’s bedroom television. Most of those talking heads had never trudged through a 116-degree desert, Emm guessed. Not like she had. Not like her husband had. And most of them don’t have to worry about their kid getting shipped off to battle. Fifteen years after returning from a so-called forever war, Emm was still recovering. Yet unlike the cable pundits and TikTok streamers, words didn’t come so easily for her.
As cars pulled into her gravel driveway, she was still processing that a leader who’d campaigned on ending wars had suddenly started a new one. Her instinct was to trust Trump’s military advisers, but she didn’t understand the logic of strikes that blackened Tehran’s skyline and undoubtedly endangered civilians. She’d applauded the downfall of the Ayatollah but yearned to hear an exit strategy
Emm wasn’t sure what to say about any of this to Justin. Sharing her biggest lesson from Baghdad — the one she knew wasn’t covered in any field manual — would almost certainly choke her up.
So she kept it simple. “Now remember, it’s ‘yes, drill sergeant,’ ” she offered as Justin and his friends started gathering around her marine blue kitchen island. “Not ‘yes, sir.’ ”
***
When the recruiters began calling during the winter of his senior year, what popped into Emm’s head was: You’re not getting my kid.
Not that she’d ever say that to Justin. And who was she to say it? Both she and his father, Mark, enlisted when they were teenagers. They’d hung a poster of a kneeling soldier in their living room. They flew an Army flag on their front lawn.
“We’re so proud of you,” her husband, ever the softie, was always telling Justin.
It was Mark who’d insisted on throwing him a cookout. The invitations went out a week before Operation Epic Fury commenced, and an Iranian counterstrike killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait.
“He volun-told me to socialize,” Emm joked as her husband added chuck roast to their slow cooker. The plan was to serve birria tacos, Justin’s favorite meal, and not mention hostilities abroad unless the teenager brought them up. He wasn’t bringing much of anything up, though, as he vanished into his bedroom.
“He’s piled up in there with his friends,” Emm noted.
“I think it’s starting to hit him,” Mark said, tearing the tender meat apart in his gloved hands.
The couple supported the first weekend of attacks, which the White House described as “devastating hits to eliminate the threat of the Iranian regime once and for all.” In that regard, they were out of step with polls that showed a majority of Americans disapproving of the Pentagon’s show of force in Iran. Households with past and present service members, however, were more likely to condone the initial strikes, a Washington Post poll found, though only a third thought the campaign should continue, and most expressed concern it could escalate into a “full-scale war.”
Maybe the president had thwarted a threat to the homeland, Emm and Mark theorized. Yet the longer Operation Epic Fury dragged on, the more Emm felt Trump had gone back on his word. She had backed him in part because he’d vowed to extract Americans from the dangers she once faced — the dangers her son might face.
“I hope this ends, like, tomorrow,” she said, and Mark agreed. “No more forever wars,” he said.
Emm was a 17-year-old high school senior in a tiny east Texas town when she glimpsed a broadcast of the World Trade Center on fire. She remembers freezing in front of the library’s roller-cart TV as the second plane hit the South Tower. Soon after, she resolved to join the military. It felt like a calling, a way to help, a worthy sacrifice.
She met her husband in the Army, and they deployed together when Justin was 3, leaving the toddler with family. She and Mark would stay up until 3 a.m. to call him. They tried to keep their voices cheerful when explosions shook the building. Emm prayed she’d make it home to his chubby cheeks.
Now Justin had reemerged, and she gazed upon the mind-blowingly grown man slumped over her kitchen table. All week, he’d been fighting a respiratory bug. He hadn’t touched the chocolate chip cookies she’d laid out.
“When did he take his meds?” Emm asked his 19-year-old wife, Laney.
“He can take it again at 3:30,” she replied.
“Yeah, I know,” Justin butted in. “Trust me.”
Emm knew he could take care of himself, even if she couldn’t stop herself from occasional bursts of mothering.
Unlike her, Justin could lower himself into the family’s porcelain bathtub without grimacing. His back did not throb from driving oil tankers in Iraq over endless potholes. He did not have anxiety from scanning for bombs in the roadside trash and thinking: I’ll be the one who goes boom. He still had his thyroid, which had never been exposed to base chemicals in a way that Emm’s doctor said had likely destroyed hers. He didn’t mind crowds.
“We just don’t want you to accidentally overdose on Dayquil.” she teased him.
***
Sure, Emm was flitting from guest to guest, all smiles in a fancy blue jumpsuit, but she couldn’t fool Justin. There she was, checking the guacamole for the 85th time. There she was, fiddling with a decorative wooden mallard.
His mother was intentionally keeping it surface-level, he suspected, because she hated to cry in front of him. She preferred to weep alone, he knew, usually with her “crying movie,” which was P.S. I Love You.
“She’s being strong,” he said, “or trying to be.”
His dad, his aunt, his mom’s friends, even his buddy wearing a hoodie that said “I <3 My Cougar Girlfriend” — they were all quicker to emote.
“Are you excited or nervous?” Emm’s hairdresser pal asked him with a note of concern.
“Excited,” Justin said.
And he was. His parents had never advised him against joining the military, but they hadn’t nudged him that way, either. So Justin understood why his mother seemed a bit disoriented when he told her a few months ago that he was scrapping his plan to go into welding in favor of becoming a combat medic. A trained lifeguard, he’d stopped at the scene of a car crash on his 17th birthday and administered CPR to an unconscious driver. “Only you,” Emm had said when he was late for cake. Justin figured he’d inherited some of that calm under pressure from her.
The military, to him, dangled purpose and stability. The YouTube videos he’d seen of drone strikes in Iran hadn’t stirred any regret. Justin predicted that good things and bad things would come from that war. All he could do was follow orders. And for now, maybe take a nap. He was starting to feel sick again.
***
“Where’s Justin?” his aunt was asking.
“We should give him a minute,” Emm replied, glancing at her son’s closed door.
The birria tacos were almost ready, and the adults — those over 35, anyway — were watching Mark sprinkle on shredded chihuahua cheese. They’d been waiting for the man of the hour, idly chatting about how it had rained but not enough (“worse things can happen to Texas than muddy roads”), Emm’s growing menagerie (including a cow named Jake from Steak Farm) and the rising price of gas.
“It was $2.29,” said Justin’s aunt, Dorothy Rodriguez. “All of a sudden, it shot up to $3.19.”
“It shot up as soon as we bombed Iran,” asserted Jyles Evans, a family friend who’d brought the Mountain Dew.
“I have nothing to say,” Rodriguez replied with an eyeroll that indicated she did.
“We’re always bombing something,” Evans said.
That was his take after five deployments to Iraq. The combat veteran, 42, explained that the experience had jaded him.
“Twenty-one years of my life, and they didn’t give two shits,” he said, meaning the Iraqis.
George W. Bush argued his war would make the Middle East more stable, but that didn’t happen as far as Evans could tell. Now a police officer, he’d much rather focus on their rural patch of central Texas. “Serving Americans in America,” he said.
Silently, Emm disagreed. She vividly remembered the value of helping strangers in faraway places. There’s an Iraqi man who shows up in her flashbacks. He taught her the biggest lesson of her time in Baghdad — the one she wanted to tell Justin about, if only she could get through the story without losing it.
A fuel supply specialist, she’d been working in 2011 on an oil farm. Sometimes, she’d see Iraqis on base, but they mostly kept their distance. People didn’t trust each other. The Americans burned their uniforms when they left, she recalled, so an enemy couldn’t gain access as an impersonator.
One particularly hot day, a father pulled right up to her in a truck with three little kids in the back.
“Please,” she recalls him asking, with broken English. “Could we have some water?”
The kids reminded her of Justin. She handed him three cases of water.
The takeaway she wanted to express to Justin — perhaps tonight, perhaps in the emotionally safer package of a text message: “We are all human — whether you’re on this side or on that side.”
Now the sun was setting, and the first round of tacos were starting to cool in an aluminum tray, and Justin’s aunt decided they’d waited long enough to bid their almost-soldier a proper farewell. Rodriguez went to fetch him. He entered the party with a weak smile.
“Here,” Rodriguez said, pulling out a chair. “Sit.”
She instructed Emm, Mark and Laney to stand behind him. Everyone hushed.
“Look at your mom and dad, and the support they give you,” Rodriguez said, “and I just want you to know that you are loved tremendously.”
Justin nodded.
“Be strong,” she continued. “Don’t falter. Don’t falter.”
At that, Mark needed a minute. He beelined for the guest room. Emm stayed behind Justin with a hand on his shoulder. If her brown eyes were watering, she wouldn’t admit it. They glistened under the glow of her chandelier.
“Come home to me safely,” Rodriguez said, wrapping up. “Come home to your mom and dad.”
Emm looked down. She said nothing.
The post An Iraq veteran voted for peace. Her teen starts basic training at wartime. appeared first on Washington Post.
