[04/13/03]The mother of a Vicksburg soldier spotted him in live television coverage of the bringing down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad Wednesday morning.

“I’m sure I saw a glimpse of him,” said Ellen Stewart, the mother of Staff Sgt. Terrance Wilson, 30. “It looked like he was standing on top of a tank. I saw his face, for just a couple of seconds. It was right after they pulled the statue down and everybody was jumping up and down.”

Wilson, a tank mechanic with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), based in Fort Stewart, Ga., has been in the Army since graduating from Vicksburg High School, Stewart said.

He is married with a 10-year-old daughter, she said.

Stewart has been watching the live television coverage of the war from her home off Fisher Ferry road in southern Warren County. She said Wilson has been involved in conflicts before, but the immediacy of the coverage of this war has made this one more difficult for her to watch, she said.

“It’s worse on me,” she said. “He’s been in three other wars but it didn’t bother me like this.”

She added that she also had a son, who grew up in California, who was on active duty as a military policeman during 1991’s Persian Gulf War.

Stewart said the one letter she has received from Wilson was sent just after he arrived in the Middle East.

She said that before he was deployed there, in the second week of February, he used his training in chemical warfare to explain to her how she might protect herself if such a terrorist attack were to happen locally.

“He looked like he was OK,” she said of Wilson. “I haven’t heard from him since he left in February. I just pray that he and all of the others come home safely.”

The day she saw her son in coverage of U.S. troops’ arrival in the Iraqi capital was also her birthday, she said, adding that “it was a good birthday present.”

Stewart said Wilson’s protectiveness of his troops increases her concern for his safety when he is deployed on such combat missions. She said he told her before he left that “wherever the front line is, I’ll be one mile behind the front line.”

The television war coverage, which Stewart said she watches for up to six or seven hours a day, has caused her many “sleepless nights,” she said.

“If I could just get a word, hear his voice, something, I would feel better,” she said.