Many moms will break bread with grown children this Thanksgiving Day. The ones who don’t have that opportunity rightfully expect a phone call.

Colleen Sturgis of Auburn will settle for an instant message. She’ll sit down and wait for stepson Tony’s e-mail screen name to pop up, as is her new custom on weekends and holidays. Every word and computer-generated smiley face is a treasure.

She’ll hope for small talk. Nothing like the day Tony told her he declined a Purple Heart.

“He got hit when a roadside bomb detonated,” she said, relaying the story as matter-of-factly as Tony, the boy she helped raise since he was 7, surely told it.

Tony Sturgis, now 21, is in Mosul, Iraq, as a radio technician with the 133rd Engineer Battalion of the Maine Army National Guard.

“He lost some of his hearing, and it scratched him pretty good under his left eye,” Colleen explained, saying the abrasion was visible in photos Tony e-mailed his family. “They offered him the Purple Heart. He said, No.'”

That’s just not his style.

Not when friends have died for the cause. Not when 5-year-old Iraqi children risk their lives to walk the length of barren streets, touch his calloused hands and offer small tokens of appreciation.

Besides, the ringing in his ears has subsided. The flesh wound is now a scar.

“He just says, Aw, it’s no big deal. I’m fine.’ He’s such a good kid,” said Colleen. “He wouldn’t ever want me to worry.”

Once Tony made up his mind to enlist when he was a high school junior, neither his stepmom nor his dad, Rick, dreamed of trying to stop him.

Not that it would have mattered. Tony wasn’t your typical teenager.

Colleen remembers a Sunday night almost two years ago when she was scheduled to sing a solo at First Assembly of God in Lewiston. Most of Tony’s friends had congregated at Super Bowl parties throughout the Twin Cities.

But for him, there was no quick kiss or sheepish goodbye.

“He went to church and sang a duet with me, instead,” Colleen recalled. “He does things like that all the time. Tony’s not your run-of-the-mill kid at all.”

Maybe that’s the influence of an extraordinary stepmother.

Marking milestones

When Tony turned 21 on Oct. 28, thousands of miles away from his classes at Central Maine Community College, it reminded Colleen of how she celebrated that milestone birthday in her life.

A native of Lewiston, she had drawn kitchen duty in the Mojave Desert that day, where her Army unit was training. For desert warfare, no less.

“Horrendous. I spent half my day crying,” she said. “My friends handed me a shoe box when I got off duty that night that looked like a gift. It was a big turtle. I screamed and threw it as far as I could! Never got them back for that.”

Colleen’s desert training in late 1982 lasted two months. She never saw combat. And now Tony, whose training exclusively incorporated cold-weather survival tactics, stands in the “hot spot” of the war on terror in every sense of the word.

His stepmother says she isn’t worried. She clings to faith and the understanding gained through her own military experiences. She knows her family’s thread of service was part of Tony’s motivation for putting his dreams of becoming a pharmacist on hold.

“My father was a Marine,” Colleen said. “And of course I told (Tony) a lot of my stories. He just loved that.”

Colleen and Rick await the day when their son will crash on the couch and add his own stories to the family lore.

For now, they cherish every typed conversation.

“Of course, he can’t say much. His attitude is that he’s there to do business and let’s do the job and come home,” Colleen said. “I’m upbeat. He’s upbeat. That’s just the kind of kid he is.”

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].