For POW’s Mom, a Life of Worry Unabated

Anecita Hudson knows too well that sometimes men leave home and never come back.

One day 12 years ago, her husband rode off to work on his motorcycle and plowed into a school bus. He lived long enough to tell her that a sunbeam had gotten in his eyes, and just like that, Hudson was a widow with two young sons.

The older son grew up to be a lot like his father, with the same round eyes and bushy eyebrows, the same knack for fixing broken things and the same love for the sound of bowling pins clacking at the end of a perfect roll.

Like his father, the son joined the military, and like his father, 23-year-old Spc. Joseph Hudson one day left home and may never return. He is a prisoner of war in Iraq.

Anecita Hudson wears the knowledge on her face, the mask of a widow, the countenance of a mother steeling herself for an unbearable loss. Life has been little more than “CNN and crying and praying,” and the whole ordeal has made her tired. Numb.

She has spent most of the last three weeks in a cramped living room, prowled by five cats, in front of a 19-inch television that has not been turned off since she saw her son’s face on a ragged Iraqi film clip. Other members of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company who were captured March 23 appeared on the clip too, but she saw only Joseph.

“He looked scared,” she says without any intonation.

Almost inaudibly, she pleads for someone to “rescue my baby.”

All of the words from the “TV people” have started to sound the same to her, and she no longer hangs on every new development like she did in those first days. It was too hard for her to hear the talking heads speak so easily about life and death. It made her stomach hurt.

On this day, she watches blankly as allied troops sweep through Baghdad. She stares expressionless as important-looking men in suits declare Saddam Hussein’s government finished. The words seem to skim right off her dark brown skin into the room’s thick air. Sometimes it gets so thick, she has to get out.

It’s karaoke night at the Palm Side tavern, and Hudson decides she’s going to go. With her eyes still turned toward the TV, she calls up one of her friends.

“Angela, pick up the phone,” she says. “We’re going out tonight. Call me back.”

*

The last three weeks and the wear and tear of an itinerant life show on Hudson’s face. A 51-year-old Philippine immigrant, she’s traveled a long, zigzagging distance from her subtropical native village to this high-desert town in southern New Mexico.

Her husband was an Air Force lifer who was constantly transferred. After he died in Florida, a grieving Hudson and her two boys moved in with an old family friend and Air Force retiree, Charles Johnson. She’s been with Johnson ever since. The couple, and Hudson’s younger son, Anthony, 18, live in a small, one-story stucco house in the middle of a checkerboard grid in the heart of town.

Alamogordo, which means “fat cottonwood” in Spanish, was an old railroad stop that eventually became a military town. Ft. Bliss, in El Paso, is a 90-minute drive south and Holloman Air Force Base a 10-minute drive north.

A few hundred townspeople held a rally Sunday in Joseph Hudson’s honor. They met at the fairgrounds and honked their horns and held up signs that read, “We’re praying for you, Joe!”

Anecita Hudson watched from her van, recognizing people she passed in the aisles at Wal-Mart, people she used to work with, and many others whom she didn’t know.

“Cita,” as her friends call her, used to work in a cookware factory before her health went bad. She stands barely 5 feet tall hunched over. She walks tenderly as if her feet hurt. She suffers from diabetes. She has bad kidneys and a patched-up heart. Two years ago, she underwent triple bypass surgery and friends say she has not been the same since. Her eyes appear swollen, the pupils just peeking out.

A pink plastic rosary dangles from her neck. She clutches the cross with one hand as her eyes try to follow the news scroll at the bottom of the television screen. The phone rings. She ambles across the room to answer it. It’s her friend Angela.

In Tagalog, they arrange to meet at the Palm Side at 9:30.

Hudson sinks back onto the couch. She talks of Joseph. In some ways, she says, he was a mama’s boy. He liked to do all the things she liked to do: camping and fishing and bowling, bingo at the Elk’s club, karaoke at Shooter’s or the Palm Side.

“He couldn’t carry a tune,” Hudson says, her eyes lighting and tearing up at the same time. “But he’s Filipino. Filipinos love to sing.”

His favorite was “Pretty Woman,” a song he dedicated to his wife, Natalie. She was his first girlfriend and he was her first boyfriend. They met at Alamogordo Senior High School when she was 15 and he was 16.

*

At home, Joseph was a “good boy” who never got over his father’s death. He wanted to do all those things that sons do with fathers. He just felt something was missing, says Anecita Hudson.

When Natalie came along, she became the center of Joseph’s life. The couple had a daughter in 1997, and two years later, Joseph Hudson, following his father, did the most natural thing in a town like Alamogordo: He joined the military.

As a mechanic in the 507th, stationed at Ft. Bliss, Hudson fixed things, mostly vehicles that carried combat soldiers.

Outside the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, four days into the war, the unit joined a convoy headed to the front. Some vehicles stalled and members of the 507th stopped to repair them. Later, they tried to catch up with the rest of the convoy but were overtaken by Iraqi forces. Two members of the unit were killed on the spot, four were wounded, and Hudson and four others were taken prisoner. Eight were listed as missing.

Jessica Lynch, one of the missing, was rescued April 1 by U.S. special operations troops. Natalie Hudson prays the same will happen to her husband. (The bodies of the other missing soldiers were found during the rescue.)

Natalie Hudson, who has just returned to her job as a bankteller in El Paso, said in a phone interview that the hardest part has been taking care of their 5-year-old daughter, Cameron, and trying to answer the child’s questions.

“She wants her dad. She doesn’t understand there’s a war and people are dying,” Natalie Hudson says. Her tone was detached. “All she knows is that her dad is in a place with a bunch of dirt.”

*

Anecita Hudson spends the rest of her afternoon watching the television anchors whom she simultaneously disdains and depends upon. At one point, she mutters: “I don’t trust them.”

She prays under her breath, clutching the rosary. Occasionally she’ll get up and walk into what used to be Joseph’s bedroom, where she has set up a small shrine on a bookshelf. It consists of a picture of the Virgin Mary, a large red Bible, a small black book of prayer and a candle. She sits at the edge of the bed.

“Lord, I don’t want to bother you, I’m always bothering you,” she says, her eyes glazed and watering. “But this time I really hope you can hear me. I ask you to please watch over Joe. Please protect him.”

She moves slowly, like someone underwater, and it takes her a long time to get ready for the night out with her friend, Angela Davis, also a Philippine immigrant and the widow of an Air Force veteran.

The two friends meet in the parking lot of the Palm Side, a boxy one-story adobe building encircled by the only palm trees in town. Davis has brought along her 26-year-old son. The three of them walk into a smoky room. Everyone seems to know them. People approach and give hearty hugs, taking an extra moment with Hudson.

A short, blond man in a cowboy hat kisses her on the cheek and asks, “Are you doing OK, honey?”

Hudson affectionately waves him off, saying, “Yeah, I’m OK.”

As the trio enters the darkened karaoke room, lighted with only a couple of floodlights and a mirror ball, people yell out: “It’s Mama Cita!” Even the DJ, a baritone-voiced silhouette in the background, greets her:

“It’s the mother of my hero and your hero, Joe Hudson,” he intones.

It becomes clear why Hudson wanted to come here. This is her crowd. These are her friends, and now her friends are chanting for her to sing a song. Hudson smiles and waves them off and finds a seat in the darkness.

She spends most of the evening expressionless, staring blankly at the revelers who take to the stage. Instead of clutching a rosary, her fingers now clutch a cigarette. She goes through four cigarettes in an hour.

In some ways her posture is identical to the one at home, on the couch. Only here, in the karaoke room, there’s no television. No TV people twisting her gut with glib words. Here, people sing songs of defiance and new life, of love and longing, and once in a while, Hudson recognizes a tune and sings along.

“Sitting here resting my bones, this loneliness won’t leave me alone,” she sings so softly that only those around her can hear. “Two thousand miles I roam, just to make this dock my home. ... I’m sitting at the dock of the bay, wasting time. ... “

For the rest of the evening, Hudson sits silently, not appearing to hear anything at all. Without asking, friends bring her cranberry juice, a cup of coffee, more cigarettes. Some stop by to hug her before leaving.

Anecita Hudson appears not to notice. She is surrounded by smoke. Her eyes are a thousand miles away.