Township parents proud yet nervous as son serves

Twin Rivers resident Isreal Vargas is serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

By: Scott Morgan
   EAST WINDSOR — Wednesday morning, Mercedes Vargas saw her son’s face on television. It was early and she’d not been watching all that closely. But there he was, loading a truck, enveloped in the dusty backdrop of an Iraqi town, live on Channel 5.
   It was just a glimpse from a panning news camera, but it was her first live glimpse of Israel — Izzy — since he’d shipped out with the 101st Airborne back in February. And Mercedes Vargas handled it the way any mother catching a glimpse of her healthy son in wartime would.
   She squealed.
   "It’s Izzy, it’s Izzy!"
   The words were loud enough to wake her husband, David, who’d been sleeping as his wife dressed for work, and sharp enough to jangle the nerves of a father who sweats out the ringing of the telephone every time he hears of bad news from the front.
   But fear was a short lived thing for Mr. Vargas.
   "When I saw him, I was just so happy," he said. "His head was mostly shaved, but he looked pretty good. He looked healthy."
   The moment was a long time coming. Day to day, the life of this couple from Danbury Court in Twin Rivers has been a jittery cocktail of nerves and news and hope. Packages to Izzy go unacknowledged; e-mails from the other Airborne parents in "the loop" are encouraging, but random; the infrequent words from Izzy offer relief, but say little more than that he’s somewhere in the southern half of Iraq.
   And all the while, there are updates. The television newscasts. The Internet updates. The radios and newspapers filling in the blanks.
   "It’s kind of stressful," Mrs. Vargas said. Her husband added, "It’s just a scary feeling. But it’s hard not to watch (the news) when you know your son is there."
   But there are moments of comfort, and Wednesday, it turned out, had its share of them for the Vargases. On top of that momentary flash on Channel 5, the Vargases received a letter from Izzy later on that day. It said he wanted his parents to send him Kool-Aid and junk food. It said he had a heap of photographs he couldn’t send home because the X-ray machine that scans all outbound mail would destroy whatever was on the film. It said he reads his Bible every day. And it ended with these words: "I love you. Don’t worry about me because I’m a great warrior — yeah, right."
   It didn’t matter to Mr. Vargas that the letter already was several weeks old. It mattered that he’d heard from his son. And it mattered that, so far as it seemed, Izzy had not been emotionally scarred by the visage of war.
   At least not yet.
   Though worry for their son is never ending, there also is comfort to be drawn from knowing the type of person Israel Vargas is. He’s a smart kid, Mrs. Vargas said. A tough kid. A kid who, just last November, was forced to recover from an auto accident that scarred his face and tangled his bones and kept him from going to Afghanistan with his unit.
   And there is comfort in knowing that Izzy is in the middle of the action he craves.
   "Izzy loves action," Mrs. Vargas said. "He’s always wanted to see action." Seeing action, he would tell her, would prepare him for a life in uniform outside the U.S. Army. The one as a policeman that Mrs. Vargas said he plans to pursue when he comes home.
   Still, the war — and Izzy’s role within it — are far from over, which means, in turn, that the day-to-day jitters over "all the little things" will have to go on with it. And though it is "a little easier" on the Vargases to know the heavy warfare phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom is largely over, the fear remains over the random acts of combat — the pockets of rebels still loyal to Saddam Hussein, the snipers who continue to disrupt the quiet, the suicide vests and the threats of ambush that loom over every soldier in the fray.
   "(The war is) not over for everybody," Mrs. Vargas said. "I’m worried he’ll get (too) at ease and think everything is fine."
   The Vargases don’t know when they’ll see their son again, nor when they’ll see their other son, Spencer Brown, who is stationed with the U.S. Army in South Korea. With one son in combat and the other in a place that might soon enough be the focus of U.S. military ire, the worry is double for David and Mercedes Vargas, but Mrs. Vargas knows at least one thing — that when she sees Izzy again, she will "hug him, kiss him, cry with him." And punch him in the arm because that’s just what they do together.
   For now, Mr. Vargas will continue to pray and continue to scan the news for anything that shows him Izzy is still all right. Meanwhile, Mrs. Vargas will continue to reconcile her faith (she’s a Jehovah’s Witness, meaning she is not in favor of the war), her fear and her pride for her son.
   And to the question of whether she is more afraid or proud of Israel, she said: "I think I’ve got a good balance on that one. I’m proud of him, but I’m still scared for him."