Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD - What is the most common thing moms do? Take care of their kids?

That’s what Susan Galleymore was doing when I met her. The uncommon thing was that she’d traveled halfway around the world, to Iraq, to take care of her son. Nick is a U.S. Army Ranger, an occupation generally regarded as pretty rugged, or at least not likely to include a mother’s personal touch.

A project manager from California, this South African native may have missed her calling as a psychologist. Years ago, she developed a serious interest in what’s now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because of her brothers’ service in the South African Army, and from encounters with South African Zionists after the Six-day War. She mentioned PTSD, and with a mother’s steely resolve, vowed, “I’m not going to lose my son to that.”

Over many glasses of tea at a Central Baghdad caf�, Galleymore described her anxiousness for her son, and her project, called “Motherspeak,” relating the anxieties of mothers on all sides of the Iraq war.