"He needed direction. He wandered kind of aimlessly after dropping out of college ... so I was supportive. I thought 'Thank god, he's going to do something.' I never dreamed we would get a president who would wage such a war."

Fast forward four years, and her son, now 23 and married, is a mechanic in the US Air Force serving with US troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom and increasingly alienated from his mother.

At the root of the acrimonious family rift is a disagreement over the US-led war in Iraq -- one that not even a quick victory will dispel.

Moss' anti-war activism -- letters to the editor, rallies in Washington and Richmond, Virginia -- have not gone over well with her son, extended family and some neighbours in the corner of southwest Virginia she calls home.

"'I told you all that protesting wasn't going to do any good,'" Moss' son reproached her in a telephone call from his base in England the day before he shipped out to the Gulf.

Then there were the "ugly" comments from family members, the hate mail saying she would burn in hell, the "terrorist sympathiser" jibes, the daughter-in-law who calls her, "an embarrassment to the family."

The 44-year-old, who declined to identify her son for fear of compromising him, shrugs it all off. "I'm glad I did it. History will tell the story," she says.

"It bowls me over that people can be so suckered in," she adds. "Who is the Bush administration going to take out next? Syria, Iran, North Korea?"

Still, Moss thanks God she is not "a Marine mom, an Army mom," or even worse "an Iraqi mom," -- women whose sons are on the front lines of the war in Iraq.

Some 600 miles away in Chicago, "Marine mom" Fran Johns is grappling with the same dilemma. As a Marine sergeant, her 31-year-old son Robert Sarra is part of the infantry offensive on the ground in Iraq, in the vanguard of a war Johns campaigned to stop and continues to campaign against.

"If he was risking his life to defend our country, if he was in Afghanistan, or searching for (al-Qaeda leader) Osama bin Laden, I could accept it," said the 58-year-old advertising executive.

"But I cannot accept my son risking his life and killing people for President Bush's political agenda ... for some plan for US hegemony in the Middle East."

Sarra and Johns have come to an accommodation of sorts over their different positions on the war, although Sarra did implore his mother in one phone call not "to embarrass the Marine Corp."

"It's the president I want to embarrass," she replied.

A California liberal, Martha Winnacker came of age during the Vietnam War era, and toted her son to rallies against nuclear weapons in a backpack during the 1980s.

She has been equally active in this anti-war movement, but these days, she has a lamp burning in her window and a yellow ribbon tied to the tree outside her home in Berkeley like any other mother with a son in the military.

Winnacker's 28-year-old son is an infantry officer, somewhere in the thick of it in Iraq. (She declined to identify him in order to protect his privacy.)

Mother and son have agreed to disagree on this issue.

"I think he understands that as a civilian I have a duty to participate in the political decision-making process. And I respect his loyalty to the oath that he took when he enlisted."

SPACE.WIRE