By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Quigley

The sad fact is that mothers and fathers have been sending their children off to war since the beginning of time.

But never before have they been able to watch them fight it so intimately.

An eerie and disturbing by-product of the high-tech world of media and military is playing itself out in homes all over America this week, as the parents of the young men and women pushing their way through the Iraqi desert towards Baghdad watch, in real time, the satellite images of soldiers and Marines on the march.

It happened Friday in the home of Trish and John Quigley of Blue Ash.They watched the TV reports with considerable amazement and much trepidation as the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, a mechanized force of tanks and armored assault vehicles, made its way to Baghdad. They knew, of course, that their son, 21-year-old Private Mark Quigley, was on one of those vehicles, riding at the very point of the U.S. advance through Iraq.

"It is very frightening to see," Mrs. Quigley said Friday afternoon, as the images on the TV screen switched from columns of tanks punching through desert dust to the sight of bomb blasts and flames rising up out of Baghdad.

"I'm afraid for all of them,'' Mrs. Quigley said. "All we can do is watch and pray that they are safe.''

The Quigleys say it has been a month since they've had any e-mails or phone calls from Pvt. Quigley. All they've been able to do is scan the TV news reports from reporters traveling with the 3rd Infantry Division in Kuwait to see if they could get a glimpse of their son.

"The last time we talked to him, he thought they might turn the phones off in a couple of days,'' Mr. Quigley said.

Their son passed his 21st birthday last month in the Kuwaiti desert, waiting for the order to step off toward the Iraq border.

Soldiers can put years under their belts without an overseas deployment, much less a war with live combat. But the call came quickly for Mark Quigley - he graduated boot camp at Fort Benning, Ga., only last November, the day before Thanksgiving.

He came home for a short leave, reported for duty at Ft. Stewart, Ga. and was only there a few weeks before his unit, the 15th Infantry Regiment, was shipped off to Kuwait.

The young soldier was highly motivated, his father said.

"He felt, after 9/11, that he wanted to do this,'' Quigley said.

Quigley said that in his last conversation with his son, he was "in good spirits, tired of the sand and tired of waiting.''

While in camp, the men of Mark Quigley's regiment "loved to receive snack food,'' Quigley said. "The PX is not very large and with the increasing amount of soldiers and Marines that are there, the supplies run out and the wait can be hours just to get in.''

John and Trish Quigley both work at Summit Behavioral Healthcare - he as an administrator and she as a cosmetologist. Their co-workers, Quigley said, "have been great.''

"They give us snacks to send to him and had some of the patients write to him,'' Quigley said. "He shared the letters and snacks with some of the other soldiers.''

But those times are over - there will be no more contact and no more packages from home for Mark Quigley until the mission is complete and they are in a liberated Baghdad.

In the meantime, all his parents can do is watch TV images flickering from the Iraqi desert, images that have brought the war their son is fighting right into their living room.

"They are so young, all of them; nothing but kids, and they're being asked to do so much,'' Mrs. Quigley said. "All we can do is pray.''