(USA Today posted the following article by Haya El Nasser on its website on April 3. Ronald D. Young Sr. is a conductor at CSX and his son, Ronald Jr., is a POW in Iraq.)
LITHIA SPRINGS, Ga. — A framed poem next to the picture of Army Chief Warrant Officer Ronald D. Young Jr. bears a simple title: War Is an Ugly Thing.
Five blunt words that Ronald D. Young Sr. points to when he can’t explain how a young, smart, strong and driven boy like his son can fight eagerly for his country one day and wind up captive in a foreign land the next.
The display hangs in the living room of Ronnie and Kaye Young, high above the fruit baskets, plants, flowers, posters, “POW Ron Young” T-shirts and crates of mail from well-wishers they’ve never met.
It has been 11 days since Kaye Young first saw TV footage of the downed Apache helicopter in a field near Karbala, Iraq. She recognized the “Vampires” insignia on the helicopter. That was Ron’s unit in the 1st Battalion of the 227th Aviation Regiment. She knew the Vampires had only six helicopters. Worse, in a bit of mother’s intuition, she had sensed Ron reaching out to her the night before, felt his arms hugging her, smelled the sweet aroma he’d had as a baby.
A few hours later, a chaplain and officer were at the door. Yes, they were told, it was Ron’s helicopter, but there was no sign of him.
That night, any lingering doubts evaporated. Iraqi TV showed Young, 26, and his crewmate, Chief Warrant Officer David S. Williams, 30. They wore cream-colored pilots’ overalls and didn’t speak. Young was holding a drink and appeared to be eating a wafer.
In the warped reality of war, this was good news for Ronnie and Kaye. Their son was a prisoner of war — but alive. He looked unharmed. Better yet, he looked stubborn, resolute, even angry. Vintage Ron, thought his parents, who were suddenly cheered.
“Ron’s biggest shortcoming is patience,” says Kaye, 53.
The days that followed Ron’s capture are a blur now for his parents. The incessant phone calls. The TV satellite trucks. Midnight interviews with British TV. The constant comings and goings of relatives, friends, neighbors and strangers. The flagpole in the front yard donated by the local sheriff. The kitchen counter overflowing with food. The governor calling to pray with them.
Longtime friend Carla Toole stepped in as the “secretary.” She answers phones, takes messages, prepares address labels to respond to the flood of mail. The first day, she logged 188 phone calls.
“It was like a bad dream,” Kaye says. She couldn’t eat for three days. Somebody gave her sleeping pills to help her rest at night, but she stopped taking them.
“You eat and you’re not sure if he’s eating over there,” she says. “You’re sleeping in a bed and you’re not sure if he’s getting any sleep. You feel guilty.”
Talking about Ron
Kaye and Ronnie, 56, haven’t gone to work since the news hit. She is a part-time hairdresser and caterer; he is a freight train conductor for CSX. His buddies offered to give him their paid vacation time.
The parents have spent the time talking to everyone who asked about their middle child. How he’d wanted to fly since he was 2. How he loved to visit his grandma because she lived near an airport. How he loved to raft, fish, play the guitar. How he never left the house without telling them he loved them. How he loved creepy-crawlies and reptiles.
When they visited him at Fort Hood, Texas, Kaye recalls with a chuckle, “he had a tarantula on the back of the commode.”
The military “casualty assistance officer” told Ronnie and Kaye not to talk about their son to reporters too much, that what they say might be used against him by his Iraqi captors. But Ronnie is convinced that the more he’s in the news, the better.
“They’re going to feel he’s too important an individual” to harm him, he says. “I just have a gut feeling that it’s OK.” Plus, he says, reaching out means that thousands of people are praying for his son. And that can’t hurt.
The phone rings again. It’s Joe Hall, a former warrant officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. He was held hostage along with 51 other Americans for 444 days until their release on Jan. 20, 1981. Hall tells them that he doesn’t believe their son will be hurt.
But then Kaye, who usually watches the Home & Garden channel, sees TV interviews with former POWs during the Gulf War of 1991. As she hears them tell of torture and starvation, she thinks: “They can’t have my son. You never think this could happen to you.”
The families of 17 POWs from that war have detailed their anguish in a $910 million lawsuit against the Iraqi government, a case being heard in federal court in Washington. The 17 were held for eight to 47 days, a short time compared with the internment of American POWs in other wars but an eternity for their families.
In court papers, the loved ones recount vivid nightmares, the inability to work, loss of appetite and high blood pressure. Some say they feared terrorist attacks against them at home. Children recall stepping into the role of adults to help their grieving mothers, letting their grades slip and getting into fights on the playground.
Paul Wetzel, the brother of POW Lt. Robert Wetzel, says he drank more, slept less and occasionally broke down and cried uncontrollably. “Just the mention of the Gulf War, which was obviously commonplace during the war itself, was enough to set off these crying episodes,” he says.
Jeffrey Zaun, a Navy lieutenant captured after his plane was shot down, says guards taunted him by reminding him that his mother must be very upset. He says they told him, “They think you are dead, and you are going to be.”
The Youngs don’t watch much TV anymore.
Laughter survives
Ron’s red Ford pickup has been parked behind the Youngs’ house since he shipped out Feb. 12. He grew up in this house in a middle-class neighborhood outside Atlanta where no one locked their front doors until a few years ago.
It was the house where the neighborhood kids liked to hang out. Ronnie, an elder in the Mormon Church, is the jokester with the heart of gold, the dad always happy to take care of the kids to give his wife a break. Kaye is “corny Kaye,” the hugger and earth mother who likes to collect white angel figurines and Gone With the Wind memorabilia.
The house was always full, much like it is now. Ron has four brothers and sisters Mark, 32, Kelly, 29, Jesse, 25, and Samantha, 23. And even in this time of sadness, the laughter continues. “We are the teasingest family,” Kaye says. “We all laugh a lot. We grin a lot.”
She recalls that Ron’s smile got him into trouble in boot camp. His drill sergeant screamed at him, telling him to wipe the smile off his face, Kaye says. She got Ron into trouble when she sent him a postcard that said: “Tell that mean old drill sergeant to be sweet to my baby boy.”
The sergeant saw the card. Razzing the “baby boy” became part of his training.
The phone hasn’t been ringing quite as often the past couple days. There are fewer requests for interviews. Ronnie and Kay are trying to get back to normal. They’ll go back to work next week.
They have a good feeling about seeing Ron home soon. They were heartened this week by the rescue of injured Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, 19, from an Iraqi hospital and by the release of four journalists. All of them had been missing.
Ronnie knows that even if his son isn’t injured, “it’s not going to be a picnic” when he returns. But that’s a small worry compared with the alternative.
If he doesn’t see his son again, Ronald D. Young Sr. says, “I don’t think I’d live very long or that I’d care to.”