Twenty-one year-old US Airman First Class Raymond Stewart Jnr is now in Baghdad, Iraq. He is part of the coalition force stationed there since last March. Operation Iraqi Freedom is his first deployment and his mother Denise Ottey gets anxious whenever the phone rings.

“Yes, I’m Raymond’s mother,” she answers guardedly.

She breathes more easily when she realises it’s not the phone call she dreads most – the one that will tell her that her son has come to harm.

“He’s my only son and I’m worried for him. I don’t want to get any bad news,” she explains.

Raymond has been in the US army for three years and by his count, he is one of at least eight other Jamaican-born soldiers at his location, with others stationed in different sections of Baghdad.

While he fights on the front lines, his family members back here cling to memories and often look at the photos that captured lighter moments between him and his nine year-old sister, Toni-Ann.

The pictures are scattered all around Ottey’s modest Kingston 16 abode. But there are none of all three together as Raymond – or David as his family calls him – took those with him during his Christmas visit.

“Toni-Ann cried when he left because she was worried, just like me,” says Ottey of that last visit.

Even now, Toni-Ann who will be 10 in September, still worries about her brother’s safety. “I feel afraid for him,” she says.

“He’s more like her second father,” says Ottey, explaining her children’s bond.

Raymond, as Jamaicans say, is from good stock and he has done his best to live up to his family’s expectations – and meet the lofty goals he set for himself.

“His father is the Jamaican sprinter and 1988 Seoul Olympic silver medallist Raymond Stewart – and so when Ray passed his common entrance from Vaz Preparatory for St George’s, he said that he wanted to go to his father’s alma mater, Camperdown High School,” his mother explains.

The young boy first dabbled in football: he was a member of the school’s under-14 football team in first form. The team placed second that year.

But a year later he turned his attention to track and field.

“He did the 100-metre and relay (like his father who to this day holds the Jamaican 100m record of 9.96 seconds),” says his mother.

It was a bit of a surprise when Raymond joined the army. His family knew of his aversion to guns.

“Growing up he never liked to even hear gunshots and now he’s in the army,” Ottey marvelled.

The twists and turns that took Raymond to Iraq include his mother’s desire to get him away from the violence that rocked the Dunkirk, McIntrye Land areas in 1991. By then, Raymond was an impressionable 14 year-old who had already had a US green card for eight years. Over the years he had often visited his father who was living in Texas, but the decision was made that he should live with his grandmother in New York.

At 16, he was on his high school’s honour roll, and often sent money back home to his mother from his weekend job at a laundromat.

He joined his father in Texas after graduating from high school and eventually joined the US Army.

Raymond last spoke to his mom on Mother’s day and is anxious to be reunited with her when his 120-day rotation ends later this month.

For now, he clings to his memories of home while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the job at hand.

“I don’t have an outspoken opinion about the war in its entirety, but it’s a good feeling when you can help out poor Iraqis in dire need of help because of their country’s current instability,” he said via e-mail. “I really don’t consider myself just fighting for the US, since there’s a vast number of coalition forces combined as one team trying to complete multiple tasks. To me it’s an honour just to be part of history in the making.”

He has seen many of his colleagues hurt, and one lasting memory is of an ambush during routine patrol. But he does not let fear paralyse him.

“I really don’t think much about the danger that surrounds me, because I have to stay focused and alert so that my parents will see me yet another day,” he said. “I miss the Jamaican vibes, the food and not being able to be with family and close friends I grew up with.”