Minefields of the Heart:
A Mother’s Stories of a Son at War
More than just one family’s story of a son serving in Iraq, Minefields of the Heart is a book about the impact of war – this war, every war – on the souls of those who fight and those who love them.
From the perspective of the home front, Minefields of the Heart chronicles the emotional roller-coaster that is war, and in the process raises the question: How do combat veterans and their families go about addressing the chasm that war – by its very nature – creates between them? Is it even possible to bridge that gulf? And if so, how?
On another level, Minefields of the Heart is also the story of a kid from a middle-class California suburb coming into manhood in a distant, war-ravaged land, and of a son and a parent in the process of redefining their respective places in the world and their relationship to each other. It is a story of growing up and a story of letting go, and the struggle that inevitably accompanies both, heightened by the hardships and horrors of war.
Ultimately, Minefields of the Heart is a story of innocence lost, understanding gained, and hope reaffirmed.
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Advance praise for Minefields of the Heart:
“Minefields of the Heart is very finely written, which is why I kept turning page after page after page. Because a mother’s love is so overpowering, so singular in its focus, I had half-feared that this book would be a morass of melodrama. But Sue Diaz is a disciplined and careful writer and this, ultimately, is where the power of her book comes from. She is spare where most writers would be mawkish, she is understated where most writers would be sentimental, and she understands that life, death, war, grief, gratitude and the loss of innocence—hers, and her son’s—need no baroque writerly adornments. The truly great and terrible stuff of life is most dramatic when told as simply and plainly as possible.
“I was fascinated—and touched, frequently to the point of tears—to see the life story of Roman Diaz (whom I had only known as Sergeant Roman Diaz, soldier and veteran) unfold in this carefully curated collection of his mother’s memories. By focusing on the intensely personal and specific—the silly name Roman gave his turtle, the way he surprised his family by joining the Army at all (let alone the infantry), and his quiet selflessness (such as when he insisted his family charge a nice dinner out on him even as he was deep in a war zone)—Sue Diaz has managed to make her family’s plight both unique and universal. Her work is a window into the ordeal that every service member’s loved ones endure, with every deployment, and for that, she has done us a great service by making their sacrifices palpable.” Excerpt from the book’s Foreword written by Jim Frederick, author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, Harmony Books, 2010
“It is a book to break your heart, and to heal it. Diaz writes to and for her son, to and for the veterans she leads in writing workshops. The larger gift of this book is its generosity, allowing the reader to take the journey of a mother whose son carries the wounds of two deployments to Iraq. Minefields of the Heart teaches us what we might rather not know, but knowing, we are deeper and better human beings.” – Pat Schneider, Founder, Amherst Writers & Artists. Author, Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press, 2003
“Minefields of the Heart is a brilliant, beautiful, and compelling book. Sue Diaz writes as the mother of one soldier and the daughter of another. She traces her son’s transition from a boy to a combat-wounded veteran of two tours in Iraq. She lets him speak for himself through emails, letters and conversation, all the while growing in her understanding of him and of war. She weaves together her family’s history with the larger events through which they have passed. Though intended specifically ‘for all who have served and those who love them,’ the book should be read by any American who wants to understand what war really does to those who endure and to their families. As a bonus, the book is a real page-turner. You can’t put it down until you finish it.” – William P. Mahedy, author of Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets
“Minefields of the Heart is an accessible and well told reflection on the impact of war on the families of our troops today. It is an intimate look through a mother’s eyes, giving us a heartfelt appreciation of the military family experience.” Edward Tick Ph.D., author of War and the Soul and Kate Dahlstedt, M.A. Co-Directors of Soldier’s Heart
“Harrowing, hopeful, and beautifully written. Ernie Pyle meets Anne Lamott.” Sharon Bray, author of When Words Heal
Jim Frederick, author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death, wrote the foreword to Minefields of the Heart. You can read the entire foreword here:
On March 15, 2010, I received an email from someone named Sue Diaz. I did not know Sue Diaz, but during that spring, it was not uncommon for me to get mail from strangers. About a month earlier, I had published a book called Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death. As the subtitle indicates, it was a rather blunt look at a particularly brutal subject: The 2005-2006 deployment of one company of soldiers —Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division—to perhaps Iraq’s most dangerous region at arguably its most dangerous time. The Triangle of Death, which was about 20 miles south of Baghdad, served up daily doses of carnage to the 135 men of Bravo Company. Bravo’s 1st Platoon suffered a particularly high death toll and a breakdown in leadership that led to an epidemic of poor discipline and unsoldierly conduct. Such bad behavior would, among some men of the platoon, spiral and intensify, culminating in an unspeakable atrocity. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would go on to commit one of the worst crimes of the war: the rape of a 14 year-old Iraq girl and the murder of her, her parents and her six year-old sister. Despite the undeniably unsavory subject matter, I tried throughout my research and writing to maintain what Norman Mailer called a “severe compassion” for everyone in the unit and all the Iraqis that they encountered. Without excusing such a brutal crime, I tried to understand the how the unthinkable actually happens.
In the weeks following publication, the book received several favorable reviews and was embraced by a wide range of civilian and military readers (including many members of Bravo, and the other companies of the 1-502nd Infantry Regiment). I started receiving emails from readers who said they were touched by the book. I was always flattered and gratified when I received feedback, but especially when it came from the men of Bravo, their wives or their family members. Those were the readers who meant the most to me.
Sue Diaz was, I thought, one such correspondent. The subject line of her email, after all, said, “Message from mother of soldier in Black Hearts.” Before clicking the message open, I had already recognized her last name. She must be, I thought, the mother of Sergeant Roman Diaz, whom I had interviewed during my research and who makes a few small but unambiguously positive appearances in my book, brief glimpses of combat heroism, short but clear-eyed quotes about the untenable nature of the whole company’s situation, fleeting but strong impressions that if the platoon were filled with more guys like Roman Diaz, things might not have ended so badly.
But the content of Sue Diaz’s message was quite different than most of the moms who had written me. “You and I share a connection,” she wrote. What she meant by that, she went on to explain, was that we were both journalists (me, for TIME; her, for the Christian Science Monitor) and we had both written books about the Black Heart Brigade. Mine was already out, obviously, but hers had yet to be published. Would I read it, she wanted to know?
I did. And I am glad I did. I sat down to read it on a Sunday afternoon, and I did not put it down until I had finished it. Not quite a memoir, not quite a collection of essays, Minefields of the Heart is like a scrapbook, exactly like the boxes filled with newspaper clippings, photos, report cards, childhood drawings and other milestones of a life—boxes filled with memories—that form one of the earliest and most enduring metaphors of the book. To call it a “scrapbook,” however, is not to suggest that it is not finely written. Minefields of the Heart is very finely written, which is why I kept turning page after page after page. Because a mother’s love is so overpowering, so singular in its focus, I had half-feared that this book would be a morass of melodrama. But Sue Diaz is a disciplined and careful writer and this, ultimately, is where the power of her book comes from. She is spare where most writers would be mawkish, she is understated where most writers would be sentimental, and she understands that life, death, war, grief, gratitude and the loss of innocence—hers, and her son’s—need no baroque writerly adornments. The truly great and terrible stuff of life is most dramatic when told as simply and plainly as possible. Over the course of her book, due to Sue Diaz’s finely tuned “severe compassion,” the reader comes to know not just Roman, but the whole Diaz family and how they all aged and matured both during and after Roman’s two harrowing deployments.
Sue Diaz was right. We do share a connection. In some ways, our books are oddly complementary. My book tells the story of a year-long deployment of an entire infantry company. Eighty-three soldiers are mentioned by name. And, quite consciously, I located almost all of the action of Black Hearts, geographically and psychologically, in Iraq. I pay almost no attention to the soldiers’ families or home lives—or even their thoughts of home. In framing my book that way, I aimed to emphasize just how far away the very idea of home is, just how alien a warzone is, just how distant the notions of kin and kindness and love and familiarity are when men are engaged in combat for prolonged periods of time. My book purposely shut out the home front.
Minefields of the Heart, on the other hand, is all told from the home front. It is all about what goes in a mother’s and a family’s life when a family member goes to war. I was fascinated—and touched, frequently to the point of tears—to see the life story of Roman Diaz (whom I had only known as Sergeant Roman Diaz, soldier and veteran) unfold in this carefully curated collection of his mother’s memories. By focusing on the intensely personal and specific—the silly name Roman gave his turtle, the way he surprised his family by joining the Army at all (let alone the infantry), and his quiet selflessness (such as when he insisted his family charge a nice dinner out on him even as he was deep in a war zone)—Sue Diaz has managed to make her family’s plight both unique and universal. Her work is a window into the ordeal that every service member’s loved ones endure, with every deployment, and for that, she has done us a great service by making their sacrifices palpable.
Here’s an excerpt from Minefields of the Heart:
A Soldier’s Silence
March, 2006
“So, what do you hear from Roman?” Mary asked, as friends and family often did, more than ever after our son’s Christmastime brush with an IED. My answer was always the same. “Not much,” I’d tell them, with a shake of my head and a helpless shrug. “Since that day in December, not much.”
That’s not the way it was during Roman’s previous deployment. Old-fashioned letter-writing had never been his thing, but the first time he was in Iraq, his dad and I “chatted” often with him online via instant messaging, sometimes for hours at a stretch. We joked that our son talked to us more in the months he was in Baghdad, than he did all through high school.
During those online conversations Roman schooled me then in the shorthand of that new form of real-time communication. “BRB” for “be right back.” The letters “OIC” for “Oh, I see.” That phrase became a favorite of ours, typed in response to questions about everything from the weather in Baghdad to, occasionally, the political climate – there and here. Our conversations, for the most part though, were chatty and light.
That’s not to say Roman’s initial fifteen months in the Sunni Triangle were easy. No one’s time in Iraq is easy – not by a long shot. But in light of “that day in December” and the region’s escalating violence and instability, Roman’s first deployment was beginning to look like a march in the park.
I continued to drop a card or a letter in the mail to him a couple times a week, along with an occasional care package. But the only communication we had had from his end in the months since Christmas had been a brief phone call with a bad connection, two short e-mails (one about his bank statement), and a late-night conversation with his dad on Instant Messenger. My husband initiated it when he noticed on his computer screen that Roman had signed in online.
“Is that you, Roman?” he typed, clicked, then waited for an answer.
Finally it came. “Hey! What’s up, Pops!”
“How are you, Roman?”
“Eh, I’m alright. How are you?”
Their “hellos” behind them, a few lines later my husband asked, “Do you want or need anything from over here?”
“No, I’m good.”
“How about some chicharrones or pickled pigs feet?” (Convinced, apparently, that the way to a soldier’s heart is through an eclectic assortment of pork-based snack foods.)
“No, really, Dad. I’m good.”
“Need any extra armor?”
“No.”
“Jackets?”
“No. It’s going to warm up soon.”
And so it went. A fatherly offer here, a quick “no” there. Interspersed with small bits of small talk about the Olympics, rumors of a recent troop visit by Jessica Simpson, and at the end, a sudden, “Dad, I gotta go.”
The next morning my husband shared with me their conversation, and coupled with Roman’s silence in recent months, the gist of it all seemed to me to be, “Mom, Dad. For your sake and for mine right now, don’t love me so much.”
I didn’t really understand what his reticence meant, but I wanted to try. The Web was as good a place as any to begin. On one site I read about the psychological aspects of combat. It described “psychic numbing as a defense mechanism and an aid to survival for the soldier.” Another noted, “If troops think too much about emotional issues in combat situations, it could undermine their effectiveness in battle.”
I closed my eyes and saw my son’s face. He didn’t return my gaze. Of course not. How could he, when he stared down death every day he was over there? I pictured him heading out on another mission, no glance backwards, at me, or anyone or anything he loves, or wants. There was nothing, nothing I could do, but whisper a prayer that he would come back.
Lt. Col. Jerry Powell, an Army chaplain for eighteen years, veteran of Iraq, and cyber-friend of mine, explained something else. “Soldiers do not have the ability to describe the events because the activity is so visceral,” he told me in an e-mail. “They are able to share the experiences with one another only by looks, tears, hugs, and the inevitable Army grunt. To convey the same emotions and thoughts to parents is just not possible. The only alternative is silence.
“When I called home during my deployment,” Lieutenant Colonel Powell continued, “the sound of my wife’s voice on the other end caused such a lump in my throat I could not speak for a moment. I could only squeak out, ‘Hi’ and let her talk until I composed myself. I blamed the phone connection when she asked if I was there and could I hear her, when the real problem was I was wrecked by a simple, ‘Hello.’ ”
And as for what we here at home could do, Powell offered this, “I think that sending funny cards is very healing. Comedy DVDs are a good idea as well. All the squad has seen all the war movies ever made. What they probably need is laughter late at night when the world goes quiet.”
Later, still turning over in my mind the chaplain’s words, I recalled the instant messaging phrase Roman taught me back when conversation between us came easier and more often. “OIC,” I heard myself sigh, scanning the sale bins at Blockbuster for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
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