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Frances Richey knows she is one of the fortunate ones.
"I lived with the constant fear that my son would never come home," says Richey, 57, a poet in New York. "So I wrote all the time. I convinced myself if I wrote, he would come back to me." After a decade of military service and two tours of duty in Iraq as a Green Beret, Ben Richey, 33, did return to his mother. He is about to start a new life as a graduate student in business at the University of California-Berkeley. And she will return with a newfound peace of mind to teaching yoga and writing. But what will always remain of those anguished years is her book The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War (Viking, $21.95). The collection of poems that make up this memoir follows the author as she comes to terms with her son's very deliberate choice to fight (he attended West Point), strives to understand his world (she steeps herself in Green Beret lore and jargon) and, ultimately, accepts the unavoidable pain that comes with embracing the unknowable. In "Packing," she stares at her son's things and recalls a more grim assemblage of military gear: They call the name out three times "Ben couldn't tell me about his missions. That meant that I had this big, blank screen on which to project my thoughts and emotions," the single mother of one says. "I guess to put it simply, I wrote because I didn't want to turn away while Ben was putting his life on the line."
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