A Blue Christmas at One Medic’s Home

Oscar Enrique de Sousa, how you are missed.

“Hi, Mom!” still rings in your mother’s ears. Your father sits quietly on the couch, staring out a window at your black Cavalier in the driveway; he can see you waxing it. Your 21-year-old sister, Mariana, longs for her most trusted confidant. Stefania, 14, tries to make everyone laugh the way you would if you were here. And Carlos Manuel, the 8-year-old who worships his big brother, removed your picture from the living room and put it next to his bed so he can talk to you every night. He prays for your return.

You’ve been gone since Aug. 13, the day the Peleliu pulled out of San Diego and sailed toward Kuwait for a standard six-month tour. This was your first foreign deployment as a Navy medical corpsman, and your first long separation from your close-knit immigrant family. Your father sobbed as the two of you embraced. Stefania and Carlos Manuel held each other as they cried. Mariana cried at home alone, unable to make the trip because she had just started college. Your heartsick mother wept but consoled herself with one thought: We are living in peaceful times.

That was then.

This is now.

Outside the De Sousa home in Norwalk, colorful Christmas lights wrap around tall candy canes and window ledges, and gold bells hang on the front door. Inside, the scent of pine fills the living room where a little brother and his sister have labored to create an elaborate Nativity scene. Gifts wrapped in shiny paper adorned with bows lie beneath the Christmas tree. There are presents for everyone, even Oscar Enrique.

The children wanted it this way. Patricia de Sousa, 41, did not.

She couldn’t bring herself to think happy Christmas thoughts while her 20-year-old son is fighting terrorists and those who support them. For her, these last four months have run together, just like the string of newscasts she obsesses over every day. The weeks are a blur, until hopeful Sunday mornings roll in with the anticipation of a son’s calls. So far, only four have come, and three were disconnected because of Patricia’s anguished inquiries into her son’s whereabouts. The military, this Colombian mother has learned, does not take broken hearts into account when protecting its secrets.

“[My husband] gets so upset,” she says in Spanish, wiping tears from her eyes. “He yells at me and says, ‘Oscar warned us not to ask questions!’ I don’t do it on purpose. I’m just so worried. I want to know where he is. Is he on the ship? Is he in the middle of the war? But as soon as I ask, the line goes dead. And now, it’s been a month.”

Actually, it’s been like this since Sept. 11. But the longing turned into pain on Oct. 7, when the U.S. war on terrorism began, and a mother’s heart knew her firstborn son was in the thick of it. Oscar Enrique, in fact, watched the missiles land on Afghanistan from his ship that night, and then, quickly, got to know war up close when he was deployed by helicopter during the first mission in, a new corpsman’s first test. In a phone call later, he told his mother: “If you could see this, if you could see this incredible poverty. People here are yellow. They look like walking cadavers.”

“Can you imagine what my son is doing, what he is seeing?” Patricia agonizes. “I don’t have any sense of pride in the fact that he’s in the military, fighting for this country. I was completely opposed to his going into the service. I didn’t believe they could live up to the promises they made him.”

She watches the president on television and wonders if there was another way out. News conferences from the Pentagon serve only to goad her: Does the military realize Oscar Enrique has lived in America only six years? Does anyone care about his sacrifice?

“I never get used to this feeling that he’s not here and is over there fighting this terrible war,” she says, tracing her son’s features in a photograph. “That’s why I didn’t want to decorate the house or think about Christmas. It’s not the same without him. But the girls told me it’s not right. He’s not dead. He’s coming back. You turn so selfish and dumb in times like this. Oscar Enrique is not the only one over there. I cannot bear to think of the mothers who have already lost sons. I just can’t.”

Her daughters, mature beyond their years, try to boost her spirits. Stefania, tall and athletic, has her brother’s smile and sentimentality. She teases her mother and jokes with her. Mariana, who plans to be a nun, relates more to her mother’s strong spiritual side. She reminds her what Oscar Enrique once wrote to her in a letter: “Mariana, smile at the world because it’s the only way you have of changing it.”

“I try to motivate my mom, to cheer her up because she’s always so sad,” Stefania says. “I told her we should decorate because life does go on. We wanted the house to look nice for Christmas, like it always does.”

The De Sousas could be the poster family for L.A.’s multiculturalism. They arrived in Los Angeles from Venezuela, where the children were born, in 1995 and settled in Pico Rivera. Joao de Sousa, 40, who had immigrated to that country from Portugal when he was 12, insisted that the family start anew in California after he was mugged seven times at gunpoint in Caracas. His wife of nearly 22 years loved her life in Venezuela, where she had arrived, also at age 12, when her family emigrated there from Colombia. The De Sousas owned a home and a supermarket, and the four children attended a posh Catholic school.

“It was so hard when we first got here,” Patricia says. “It was so cold. And I don’t mean the climate. I mean the people. People here keep to themselves. In Venezuela, people are more giving, more open. We were in Pico Rivera, and everything seemed so harsh. Even now that we have moved, I don’t know any of my neighbors. In Caracas, I was really involved in my community.”

Nobody felt the culture clash more than Mariana, who was 15, and Oscar Enrique, who was 14. Born nine months apart, the two grew up as if twins, sharing everything they owned and all of their secrets. In their new country, they landed in the same grade at El Rancho High School, one of the roughest and lowest-scoring schools in the state. “You cannot imagine what that was like, showing up at this school that was known to be one of the worst, and we didn’t know a word of English,” she says. “Thank God, I had my brother.”

Within six months, Oscar Enrique-whose favorite saying is “Out of lemons, make lemonade”-was the first member of his family to be fluent in English. He enrolled himself in the ROTC program, to prepare himself for a military career after graduation. When he completes his eight years in the service, Oscar Enrique plans to become a pediatrician.

“He’s very centered and very aware,” Mariana says. “My parents waited six years before they had Stefania, so for a long time, it was just him and me. I really miss having him around. But he sends me beautiful e-mails.”

Joao’s American dream has materialized in his three-bedroom house in Norwalk and the many accomplishments of his children. Carlos Manuel is on his way to being named student of the year at Dolland Elementary School, where he is in the third grade. Stefania, a ninth-grader at John H. Glenn High, is a cross-country star and soccer player who strives to be a teacher. The two oldest children graduated from high school two years ago and have high aspirations. The proud father never looked back on his decision to start again--until his son went to war.

“When he decided to go into the Navy, I told him I wanted to see him come back with a lot of stars,” he says. “I told him I want him to be at least a general. But I don’t think I was thinking anything like this then.

“My father made the decision to send me to Venezuela so I would not be enlisted in my country’s army when I turned 16. I was able to avoid going to war, but my son was not. I would trade places with him in a heartbeat.”

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and Patricia is kneeling, rosary in hand, at St. Linus Catholic Church in Norwalk, waiting for the morning Mass to begin. It’s been nearly a month since she’s heard her son’s voice, and the anxiety is overwhelming. But praying and listening to the gospel every morning sustain her. It doesn’t matter that the Mass is in English; a priest gave her the readings in Spanish so she can follow. When the priest invites the 36 parishioners in attendance to verbalize their petitions, Patricia does not hesitate to pray for the safety of all the young men who are at war in Afghanistan.

Today’s homily is about angels, the messengers God sends us to help us cope with life. After Mass, Patricia explains her special relationship with Oscar Enrique.

“He’s the one who is most like me,” she says. “We’re strong, and we’re open, and we love to live life. We both idealize the world. Out of everyone in my house, Oscar Enrique is the one who most cares about me, who pays the most attention to me. He’s always there to make me laugh, wanting me to dance with him, kissing me and hugging me. But he’s actually closer to his father. They have a very strong bond.”

Joao copes with his son’s absence by taking the Cavalier out for a spin and keeping it clean. Sometimes, like the night Mariana found him watering plants in the dark, the lonesome father just cries. “This emptiness is unbearable,” he says almost in a whisper.

But, perhaps, no member of the family is more affected than little Carlos Manuel. He recalls crying only once: the day he broke down in a bathroom stall when a classmate drew a picture of fallen American soldiers next to dead Taliban soldiers.

His teacher noticed other poignant expressions of his loss. After Sept. 11, students were asked to draw pictures that conveyed their feelings. All of them drew airplanes crashing into towers, crumbling buildings or huge explosions. But for Carlos Manuel, terrorism was personal. He drew a ship at sea with the figure of his brother aboard, the last image of him he holds in his memory.

“I think about him a lot,” Carlos Manuel says. “I talk to him at night. Sometimes I write about him.”

His school journal is filled with the ramblings of a typical third-grader interspersed with stories about his big brother, including descriptions of recent, vivid dreams in which his brother has returned from war in mystical ways. Even his letter to Santa begins with this plea: “Dear Santa Claus, I ask that you tell God to give peace to the world and for that war to end and the poor children to have food and for the poor children to have presents on Christmas.”

“Inside Carlos Manuel, there is the biggest empty space of all,” says his mother. “He just hasn’t expressed it at home.”

Since Oscar Enrique left, his sisters have lived for the musings in his e-mails--jokes, inspirational thoughts and routine stories--any sign that he is safe and whole that they can share with their mother. On Sept. 13, when Oscar Enrique sent a photograph of himself from Darwin, Australia, it served only to remind his mother of his shaved head. “I don’t like that,” she said. “That’s not how I remember him. That’s not my son.”

But on Nov. 11, a new photograph invigorated her. There he was on his ship, singing Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” to the crew on karaoke night. The medic looked thinner, but his thick, shiny black hair was growing back. And he was smiling. “That’s Oscar Enrique,” Patricia said then.

In fact, singing pop songs is one way Oscar Enrique tries to distract himself from the war that surrounds him, he explained in a Dec. 20 e-mail to the Los Angeles Times. Playing bingo, running, getting some fresh air, playing sports or watching games on tape-delay aboard the ship are others. But nothing, he wrote, beats reading the hundreds of e-mails from strangers all over the U.S. who wish them well.

“Even the Christmas decorations we hung inside the ship are not helping anymore,” he wrote. “They just serve to make us aware of how alone we are on these special days of sharing with family and loved ones. What does help is the many letters from the children. We’ve posted those all over the ship. While it is true that we suffer, this is the price we voluntarily pay for freedom and the security of those we love in the United States I’d rather suffer one season but ensure peace for the upcoming ones.”

Oscar Enrique de Sousa, the last time you called your family, you had bad news. Your tour had been extended until, at least, March. If the stress and loneliness become overbearing, it might help you to gaze out toward the sea. A month ago, your family stood on the Redondo Beach Pier trying to be as close to you as possible. Your father instructed your mother and siblings to close their eyes and leave heartfelt messages to you in the rough and tumble of the waves. He figured it was the best way to reach a seaman.

As you take in the ocean, close your eyes and feel your family’s pulse. But remember, too, the words your mother penned in a letter: “Smile all the time because you don’t know which port will bring you love.”