Sgt. Francis D. Sommer in Afghanistan, c. 2007. (Photo: Jon Demlar)
September 24, 2003.
“Are you someplace safe?”
“I’m in Iraq, Mom. There is no place safe.”
Even through the static, the echo, the satellite transmission into space and back again, from Mesopotamia all the way to Kansas, we could hear him rolling his eyes.
He was 20 years old, barely not a teenager.
He was supposed to go to Afghanistan. His company in the 10th Mountain Division had been training for Afghanistan for almost a year. My wife Heather and I still naively clung to the notion, in the early months of 2003, that Afghanistan might be safer. Or at least, maybe there was still a good reason for going there.
Our lives changed forever when Francis enlisted in 2002. Suddenly, we found ourselves in an immersion course in “Remedial Army.” The Army was new to us. Military life was new. Both my father and Heather’s served their tours in World War II before we were born, and then they were done. I had a student deferment during Vietnam.
A year out of high school, Francis had dim prospects. He’d gotten in trouble over a minor drug charge: an ounce of marijuana, two kids in a car smoking up, a squad car’s headlights suddenly flaming through the rear window. He was working as a cashier at a hardware store, ducking high school friends who’d show up at his register and ask what his plans were (because if you’re working here you must have plans for something better).
But he didn’t.
One day he came home with a sheaf of brochures, and within weeks, we were signing papers at the kitchen table with an Army staff sergeant in a stiff Class A uniform and a vaguely mid-Southern accent — the ubiquitous accent of the Army, we later discovered, no matter where you came from.
This was the slow-motion aftershock of 9/11, rumbling beneath our feet and releasing clouds of patriotism, nationalism and jingoism into the air. Francis wrote to us from Fort Benning about a pro-football player who’d just shown up to start training: a…