CORRIGANVILLE, Md. — Margie Blank remembers the phone call from Iraq sometime before Christmas. Her son, Army Spc. Joseph Darby, a reservist military police officer, was on the line, and she could tell something was wrong.

Darby, 24, would emerge later as the soldier who alerted the Army, and ultimately the world, to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad on Jan. 13.

"I could tell in his voice he was not sleeping," Blank, 45, recalls. "He said, 'I don't feel good.' And I said, 'You're not eating either, are you?' And he said, 'No, I haven't slept or ate.' "

She thought he might be in trouble. But he assured her he was not. "But let me ask you a question," he said, according to Blank. "If you knew something what would you do?"

His mother knew that whatever was bothering him was important.

"I said I would remain true to myself, because the truth sets you free. And truth triumphs over evil."

Darby thanked her, said he loved her, that his time on the phone was about up and he had to go.

Blank — who lives with a 9-year-old son, Montana, Darby's half brother, in a mobile home park here — says she doesn't know for certain what her son was concerned about.

But an Army investigation into the abuse at Abu Ghraib said it was Darby who alerted authorities. According to The New Yorker magazine, Darby turned over to military investigators a computer disk that contained photographs of abuse.

Friday, in televised testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld singled out Darby for praise, calling his actions "honorable and responsible." Blank, who lost a right eye to cancer and has poor vision out of her left eye, heard Rumsfeld.

"I was floored," she says. "This is a man (her son) who actually changed history."

Blank last heard from her son in a phone call from Iraq on Mother's Day, when she took the opportunity to praise him. "I got to say, 'I'm so, so very proud of you, and I love you with all my heart,' " she says. "I told him, 'Because of you, the Iraqi people know we're not dictators.' "

But she also fears for her son. She knows there are people, even here in the Corriganville area, who are unhappy that her son revealed the abuse to the world.