For Two Remote Salvadorian Villages, the Iraq War Hits Close to Home

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"It's sadder for (four-year-old) Mario because he doesn't understand where his father is, and he cries often," says Hilda. Sure enough, Mario begins weeping during the interview, until his sobs become wails, as if he is having trouble breathing. "I told him that an airplane took Daddy away. Now Mario and Elvis want to fly away too, and go visit him. They haven't seen their father in almost two months."

Hilda thinks about Juan mostly in the evenings, when she is preparing dinner and the kids are running around the house looking for entertainment. They received one letter from him, from Kuwait shortly after he departed, stating that everything was fine ... but nothing since. The family has no telephone, and they realize that any news would be bad news. They are aware of what happened to Tivito, the poor boy from nearby Guaymango, but don't like to think about it too much.

Hilda likes to pull out photos of Juan when she is lonely: proud shots of him posing in his army fatigues and holding various weapons, several pictures of him marching in San Salvador or playing soccer as a boy, and even a baby photo.

"He's handsome to me," she says with a shy smile. Hilda and Juan have been together for five years, and they plan to marry in the local church in Tacuba if he returns ... "when he returns," she says with a smile.

The poorest coalition soldier to die in Iraq

In the morning the jeep leaves Guaymango on the smooth new highway headed for the Pacific Ocean and suddenly turns and lurches down a dirt road punctured with washouts and potholes. Mango trees appear in the fields along the road and the jeep pauses so the Salvadorian driver can get out and urinate on a stick fence.

"¿Donde está la casa de Natividad Mendez ... el soldado que murió en Iraq?" the driver rolls down his window and nonchalantly asks an old woman with a cane, as if getting directions to a popular tourist attraction.

She jumps in the backseat and beckons the jeep to halt behind a concrete building just past the Canton San Andrés country school. The woman, the driver, and we two journalists disembark and squirm single file through the narrow opening between a barbed wire fence and the corner of the house, then walk down a dirt path to yet another concrete house with a corrugated tin roof. A welcoming party of skinny chickens, dogs sucking on their momma's nipples and four filthy pigs greet the visitors.

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