Danalee Yarborough sips sweet tea and leans forward to make her point.

“My son’s friends call him Fish because of his sense of humor,” she says. “Remember the character on the old Barney Miller show? That’s Jarrett. Dry and funny, a very gentle man.”

The voice is like that of a mother telling a young child a bedtime story. But there is powerful emotion in her round blue eyes.

“Every time I hear about some other mother’s son or daughter being killed or missing in action, my heart aches,” she says. “I feel it in a way I don’t think anyone can understand unless you are a parent in this war.”

Fish came home from Afghanistan late last winter, bearded and 30 pounds lighter, very much alive and wearing a Bronze Star. In February, he married a local woman and tried to have a normal life for a time, even getting his first dog.

He is part of an elite unit that works closely with Special Forces in the hottest spots on earth, a “terminal attack controller” who calls in and directs vital air support when troops under siege desperately need it. It’s a job so sensitive and dangerous, says his mother, that his last name can’t be used here.

“It’s strange to say I don’t know all that my son does in his work or even where he goes,” she says. “But that’s the truth. I just have to trust he’ll be OK. I’ve learned to make my peace with this situation, to keep it all inside.”

A parent’s greatest joys and sorrows are private, the philosopher Francis Bacon once observed. They can’t speak of one. They won’t speak of the other.

Fish’s most recent theater of operation was the high rugged mountains passes linking Pakistan and Afghanistan, helping Special Forces search for Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters. The forbidding area is believed to provide aid and comfort to the world’s most wanted man. Last week, only miles from where he worked for more than a year, an Army helicopter attempting to rescue a team of Navy Seals went down, killing all onboard.

“When some of Jarrett’s friends came over to join us by Aberdeen Lake for the fireworks the other night, you could just see how this tragedy had touched them,” Danalee says. “They never say much, but don’t have to. I’m pretty sure they knew the soldiers who died. We’re all like a great big family in this thing, waiting for the day the job is complete and everyone comes home. One death touches us all.”

Faith in Midst of War

In some ways, stories like that of Fish and his mom are fairly common these days, tales of faith and family bonds in the midst of a war that seems at times to have grown a bit foggy around the edges and may even be in danger of being unfelt or even forgotten by the majority of us who merely hear the daily body count coming from the streets of Baghdad or Kabul.

Days before Fish and his new wife and friends celebrated the Fourth of July with Danalee Yarborough at Aberdeen Lake, his commander-in-chief, President Bush, came to Fort Bragg to reassure America that we’re on the right track in our struggle against global terrorism. Fish’s boss talked about the gratitude he feels for military families who are bearing the weight of this curious war that has no visible opposing army or apparent end in sight. London’s ordeal this week — Olympic-size joy followed by global-size terror — is living testament to this new reality.

In other ways, this Fish-and-mom tale is completely unique, a love story in the finest sense between parent and child.

Jarrett grew up without a father in the rural northern California town of Alturos. But he had a mother who worked half a dozen jobs to support their small family unit and quietly instilled a keen sense of personal responsibility in her son.

“In high school, when Jarrett wanted a car more than anything else, he had to work two jobs at a local hotel to pay for it and keep his grades up,” she says. “I told him, if those grades slip, no car. No excuses, either. He came through without any complaint.”

It didn’t surprise Danalee Yarborough that her son joined the military after graduation. Since about age 7, Jarrett had dreamed of being an Army Ranger.

But during his Ranger training during the first Gulf War down at Fort Benning in Georgia, a freak accident nearly killed Danalee Yarborough’s only child. Forced to drop 35 feet from a rope where an instructor who should probably be court-martialed had left him dangling, Fish landed on his feet but shattered five vertebrae in his back. Among other things, the impact caused his bowels to flip above his stomach. To make matters worse, she says, still wincing at the thought, he had to walk more than a mile back to his barracks before receiving assistance.

“My heart stopped when a doctor from Fort Benning phoned me to say Jarrett had been gravely injured,” Danalee says. “I’ll never forget what he said: ‘I understand we have a man down, and I have to tell you I don’t think he’s going to make it.’ That was it — and just about that warm. Honestly, I’d never felt so alone.”

‘A Kind of Peace’

Fish’s mom wept and prayed and waited. Because of an immune disorder that sometimes prevented her from working and traveling, however, she couldn’t immediately go to her injured son.

“When you have a child in the military, every goodbye could be your last,” she says. “So early on, Jarrett and I started saying our hellos and goodbyes at the start of our reunions — as if to get them out of the way, to minimize the emotional weight of them. It helped ease my anxiety and eventually even gave me a kind of peace. We know each other’s hearts so well. Nothing was ever left unsaid or done. But this ordeal really tore me apart inside.”

Fish pulled through.

“We burned up the telephone lines for months,” Danalee says. “I also wrote some hot letters to people about a real problem nobody wanted to address.”

From the ashes of this terrible time, she identified a major flaw in a system purportedly designed to ease the burden on military families in crisis.

“If a soldier is injured in the line of duty,” she says, “the service will pay for immediate family to go wherever he or she is hospitalized. Unfortunately, there is a lot of paperwork involved, which delays things, and there is no system that actually gets family members to their injured or dying soldier as quickly and efficiently as it should. Most of the details are left entirely to the family — how to get there, how to arrange transportation, even how to find the facility where their loved one is being treated.”

One-Woman Operation

Three years ago, when Danalee Yarborough relocated to the Sandhills to be closer to her son at his request, she began brainstorming a way to provide transportation and clearer logistical aid to military families in emergency situations.

She came up with the My Gift to Freedom Foundation, a pending non-profit organization that uses a distinctive logo and family images on T-shirts and other products to raise awareness of this transportation gap and fund a working solution to a common problem facing military families.

Her goal is to find a way to market and expand the family-friendly campaign on a much broader scale, ideally by a North Carolina-based apparel manufacturer who could take on the project and market it along the lines of the yellow ribbon sticker campaign you see on cars everywhere these days. At the moment, a California-based company is making and selling the foundation’s T-shirts, with only 50 percent of the proceeds going toward developing this service to families in crisis.

“I would really like it to be 75 percent or even higher,” Danalee says. “But for the moment at least, I’m a one-woman operation, a military mom just trying to make a contribution.”

Eyer Station of Southern Pines recently developed her Web page (www.mygifttofreedom.com), which features more tan 400 combinations that honor family members serving in all branches of the service. And with a new e-mail address up and running (mygifttofreedom1@earthlink.net), Danalee hopes to be invited to speak to local groups and organizations soon about the powerful need for this unique military family service.

On a different level, she admits, her strongest fears and joys remain distinctly private — like so much of this war in which her son serves. She knows it’s only a matter of time, perhaps only days or weeks, before Fish leaves his new “normal” life and goes back to work in some distant dangerous part of the world.

“That’s his job,” she says with a mother’s tender sigh. “My job is to keep faith and make sure nothing is left unsaid between us.”