When your son or daughter is in a combat zone, you do not sleep except with a telephone next to the pillow. You can't decide if you should obsessively follow the news or avoid watching the news. You break into sobs while driving down the highway. You can't listen to country music songs about Arlington Cemetery, you have unaccountable fits of anger when a well-intentioned person asks if the troops get to come home for the holidays, and you hear your child's voice on via a static-filled satellite phone line only once in eight months. You don't want to look at the scary folder with the documents he had to sign, with his power of attorney and his life insurance policy designating his sisters as his beneficiaries. You know that someone in the battalion has been killed when all outgoing emails are shut down so that the bereaved family can be notified, and you swing between sadness for them and terrible relief that it's not your child.