It lasted less than a minute. An answering machine message with the voice of a solider son, bringing a bit of relief but a whole new world of worries.
"Hi, Mom and Dad. I’m in a hospital. I’ve been hurt. I’ll call you later."
The last time Teresa Fischer had heard her son Matthew’s voice, the 22-year-old Marysville man was in Iraq with his unit, the Army’s 535th Engineer Company.
Now, she didn’t know where he was, or how badly he had been hurt.
"We flipped," she said.
Teresa Fischer and Matthew’s father, John, began calling hospitals in Spain with no luck. The family grew more anxious with the passing hours.
"You imagine everything that could possibly be wrong," Teresa Fischer said.
Nine hours later, their son called back. He had been hurt when the truck he was driving collided with two other trucks during a sandstorm. He had been taken to a hospital in Spain and would be transferred to an Army hospital in Germany.
The call came April 2, weeks before Baghdad fell and while the worst of the initial fighting was under way. The family had seen much of it on television, and war news became the soundtrack for what Teresa Fischer called "the most stressful time of our entire lives."
"I was just sick. I didn’t eat. I woke up constantly every night," she recalled. "We just prayed constantly."
When Matthew Fischer called back, the family started to get the first details of his battlefield injury.
He had been driving a 20-ton dump truck in a convoy racing across southern Iraq. To his front and rear were two 50-ton dump trucks. But when the one in front stopped suddenly, Matthew Fischer’s rig was sandwiched between the two larger trucks. The one in front lost its load, and tons of clay smashed through Matthew Fischer’s windshield.
He was knocked unconscious, buried beneath the clay. His fellow soldiers dug him out and a medic unit that was passing by took him back to Kuwait for treatment.
His mother said notes on his medical treatment forms said her son was in intensive care for four days and had amnesia. He had double vision and a possible head injury.
There was a bright side, however.
"I was so relieved. I felt like he was out of danger," Teresa Fischer said. "I just felt this tremendous sense of relief; I could sleep for the first time."
Then, more good news: Matthew Fischer got to come home for a 30-day convalescent leave.
But he told his family he felt guilty that his fellow soldiers were still in Iraq, and that in some way he had deserted them by being injured.
His mother had never wanted him in the Army at all.
She remembered when he was a teenager at Cisco Heights Christian High School in Arlington and told the family he was thinking about enlisting. His father had served in the Army in the post-Vietnam years.
"I was really against it," she said, and recalled asking her son, "What if we have a war?"
His parents told Matthew Fischer to take his time and think about joining. Six months later, the eldest of the couple’s three children was still set on signing up.
"He thought a lot about it. It was what he wanted to do," his mother said.
"I took it pretty hard," she added. "I was a really bad mom. I threw a fit."
Although her son wanted to be a helicopter mechanic, he signed up to be a driver instead so he could be stationed close to home. And at the end of his four-year hitch last year, he re-enlisted for another 18 months to get an assignment in Germany.
Soon after he arrived at his new unit, he was deployed to Iraq.
Matthew Fischer spent much of his recent medical leave thinking about the soldiers still in Iraq.
With his war injuries permanent, the Army let him decide whether to go back.
To his family’s dismay, Matthew said yes. So the worries have returned as the news is filled with reports of roadside bombs killing coalition soldiers.
"It worries me a lot," said Leah Fischer, the soldier’s 19-year-old sister. "I wonder, is that my brother that they’re bombing?"
The death toll in Iraq has climbed to 310 since President Bush announced the end of major combat operations May 1, according to the Department of Defense.
And Matthew Fischer’s family knows he has to travel in a convoy every day, a one-way trip of four miles or so from his base to where his unit is operating. Earlier e-mails from Matthew Fischer have recounted times when his convoy has been attacked, one of its soldiers killed, and the time a bomb ripped apart a truck behind him.
For the family, dread is tempered with hope and prayer.
"I pray for him a lot," his sister said. "I try to think, ‘It’s OK, he’s safe.’"
"I felt like we were out of the woods, then I had this bad, bad feeling that anything can happen now," his mother added. "I have that feeling every day. I really have to trust that God is going to bring him home.
"He’s a good soldier, and he’s proud of what he does. And I’m proud of what he’s doing."
Reporter Brian Kelly: 425-339-3422 or kelly@heraldnet.com.
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