The Longest Wait : A Mother in Sylmar Worries for the Safety of an Only Son and Prays for Peace in the Gulf

Before the sun came up Tuesday, Martha Gallegos was praying for peace. She knelt inher Sylmar home and asked God to protect her son, an 18-year-old tank crewman in the Persian Gulf. Then she turned on the TV news to see if her prayers were having any effect.

At the moment, it seemed they were not. Iraqi women were shouting and shaking their fists and promising to wage a holy war against the United States.

“I saw all these ladies in Baghdad saying they were going to carry machine-guns . . . They’re so brainwashed it’s crazy,” she said. “They’re terrorists; they don’t care how many American lives they take with them.”

Like many San Fernando Valley residents with relatives in the gulf, Gallegos spent Tuesday in agonized waiting as the United Nations deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait crept closer.

They fidgeted and wept at work. They argued with friends over the merits of war. They glued themselves to radios and TV sets. They attended church prayer services.

But mostly, they worried.

“I’m very scared because he’s my only son,” Gallegos said of her son, Guadalupe, who is attached to the Army’s 2nd Armored Division. In a phone call, she said, he told her he was stationed on the Kuwait border. “It’s really hard because my son and I are very close.”

Try as she might, Gallegos could not keep from crying on and off throughout the day at her job. She works as a personnel assistant for a Pacoima fruit-processing firm.

“I have a very, very kind boss, who has been very patient with me,” she said. “But it’s very hard to go to work every day and . . . keep inside your fears.”

By coincidence, Tuesday was also Gallegos’ 38th birthday. Fellow workers brought her presents and tried to reassure and distract her, but she could not keep herself from thinking of the U.N. deadline or the danger her boy faces.

Gallegos said her son signed up for the Army shortly before he graduated from Sylmar High School last summer.

“The reason he went in was for the educational benefits. Then a month later, all this started happening,” she said, referring to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

She said her husband, a telephone company messenger, acts as if he is not afraid for their son, but she knows differently.

“He just doesn’t want to be scared in front of me, because then I get more worried,” she said, adding that worry aggravates her lupus ailment. “He just tells me everything is going to be all right.”

Gallegos said although she believes the United States is rushing toward war too fast, she respects her son’s decision to fight in the gulf, if he is ordered to.

She and her husband only learned that their son’s unit--the Army’s famed “Hell on Wheels” division--was being transferred to Saudi Arabia from Germany after seeing a report on the nightly news.

But after talking awhile, Gallegos’ anger at those she feels are shoving the country into war got the better of her.

“Sometimes I get so angry,” she said, her words coming faster. “I feel President Bush is being trigger-happy, instead of being more patient.”

“Not one of the congressmen has kids over there, and yet they’re making big decisions for other people’s kids to fight.”

After work, Gallegos joined her husband, four sisters and their two mothers at a Catholic church in Granada Hills, where she prayed for peace again.

Hundreds of others were there, doing the same.

One of Guadalupe’s grandmothers, Esther Dominguez, said the rest of the family had been praying most of the day. Another of her grandsons, she said, is an Army infantryman, and was recently transferred to Germany. She said she wasn’t sure if he would also be sent to the gulf.

“To tell the truth, I feel like I’m just dreaming, and I’m going to wake up and he’s going to be here. I keep seeing his face and other soldiers’ too.”

As the 9 p.m. PST deadline for the Iraqi pullout passed, Gallegos and her sisters were back home at the kitchen table, looking at pictures of Guadalupe’s graduation from an Army training school in October.

“I had a dream that he called and said he was back in Germany and safe,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

In the living room, her husband watched the TV news. The announcer said the gulf situation was tense.

The screen flashed an image of a young soldier, standing up in a tank.

Martha Gallegos could only shake her head.

Staff writer Amy Louise Kazmin contributed to this story