Sgt. Marquette Whiteside, 24
WAR AGES A ROGUISH SON
Catherine Whiteside is flipping through an old photo album, looking for a newspaper clipping of her eldest son, Marquette, 24, winning a 4-H honor as a teenager. She stops to laugh at a picture of him in his "bushy" phase, when his hair was pretty much standing on end. Mother and son are close. People often think they're a couple because she looks so young at 42, with her taut muscles and sleek pageboy. "You know what he did while he was with the Army in Germany?" she asks mischievously. "He was dancing, stripping, under the name Scissor."

She dubbed him Sizzle instead, just to rib him, and the nickname stuck. That's how he signed his letters home from Baghdad. His early missives have the tone of a jokester writing to a friend, not to a worried mom back in Pine Bluff, Ark. They open with "Dear Chocolate"—his name for her—and include macho tales of his refusal to duck while under fire, followed by admonitions not to worry. He cracks jokes about how insurgents once lobbed rockets at his unit's base as the soldiers lay in bed. "My son," says Catherine, "has a weird sense of humor."

Marquette's correspondence took a more sober tone in November after a humvee in which he was riding was hit by a roadside bomb; his revered platoon leader lay mortally wounded in his arms. Now he e-mails home almost daily, often to confide about his nightmares. He keeps replaying the image of his dead lieutenant with a bloody gash where an eye should have been. Catherine knows about fear. She is a beat cop in a town of 55,000 where the crime rate is double the national average. "I know I could get shot at, but he's living it every day." Marquette was scheduled to come home in early 2004. Catherine thought it would be for good, that he would pursue his plan to become a nurse. But without telling his mother, he signed up for an additional three-year Army stint. He has been promised a six-month break between tours of duty, but his mother is worried his luck will run out before he can get home. After U.S. troops arrested Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13, a bullet narrowly missed Marquette's head while he was on patrol in Baghdad. "He says it's worse now. They've gotten really wild," says Catherine.

Asked how she's holding up, Catherine picks up a prescription bottle of Zoloft from the coffee table and checks the date. September. That's when she found out that Marquette had re-upped and that the youngest of her three children, Shamario, 18, also a soldier, would be going to Iraq early in the new year. Then she saw a picture of Marquette in Baghdad that was posted on an online site for African Americans. The photo—of a thinner, older-looking Marquette—scared her. "I had to take a stress leave. He usually smiles all the time. He looked so sad." For two weeks she lay in bed, watching TV, unable to turn off coverage of the war.

She is angry now, angry that the war might claim two of her children. "I don't worry too much about Marquette because of how crazy he is. But my 18-year-old? He's not ready," she says. "Every time I see the President, I turn from him. There's nothing he can say unless he says he's bringing all the kids home." On weekends Catherine takes care of Brashawn, Marquette's 6-year-old daughter by an ex-girlfriend. Catherine and her granddaughter wrestle and play hide-and-seek, watch videos and go shopping. It's all very normal, says Catherine, except for the part where they e-mail Marquette to tell him to stay safe. There's an awkward silence, then she starts thumbing through the album again. She had looked forward to her son's coming home permanently, and now she will have two in harm's way. "I thought it was over." she says, "All over."
—By Cathy Booth Thomas/Pine Bluff

Sgt. José Cesar Aparicio, 31
WHEN THE FAMILY GLUE IS GONE
The cramped, cluttered home of Gloria Tapia and Victor Hernandez sits half a block off the I-5 freeway in Los Angeles. The couple, illegal immigrants from Mexico who became U.S. citizens through an amnesty program, raised six American-born children in the city. Today their two-bedroom bungalow is home to 11 people representing three generations and is the hive of activity for the extended family. Here, each relative feels the absence of José Cesar Aparicio, 31, a reservist serving in Iraq, in a different way. Gloria, 51, misses her son, her confidant. Of all her children, she says, Cesar, as the family calls him, "is the one I can talk to most openly." Says the matriarch, who suffers from diabetes and kidney disease: "I can tell him about my illnesses."

His unmarried half sister Ana, 23, says that Cesar, who served eight years in the Marines before joining the Army Reserve, was a surrogate father to her three young sons; the eldest calls him Daddy. Cesar dubbed his daughter Amber, 10, and her two girl cousins "Charlie's Angels." Before he was called up for duty in Iraq, Cesar lived in San Diego, where he worked in the border patrol, but he spent his days off at his parents' house in Los Angeles and took the girls each week to Soak City, a local water park. He has been a role model to his youngest half sibling, Victor Jr., 21, a bank teller. Twice, Cesar has been on the phone with Victor Jr. when shots and explosions could be heard in the background, and Cesar hung up in a got-to-go hurry. "Then I can't sleep," says Victor Jr. To cope with his worries, he bangs on his drum set in the basement or goes target shooting.

When she learned her father was in Iraq, Amber, who lives near her grandparents' house with her mother, from whom Cesar is separated, fell ill with a fever and lack of appetite, missing a month of school. She speaks to Cesar one to three times a week, when he phones home. But during the calls, "she's quiet," says Cesar's half sister Martha. "If he doesn't ask her, she won't say anything." Gloria had an American flag put up outside the house to honor her son, but inside, the family's patriotism is mixed with dismay. "I don't know what this war is about," confesses Gloria. Says Victor, 68: "We have to defend the country. I'm proud of Cesar." But, he adds, "I see the news. I'm scared." Commenting on the arrest of Saddam, Martha says, "We're glad they got him. I hope it's over, but I don't think so." Victor Jr. pitches in: "It's pretty dumb. People are dying when the war is supposedly over." He does not say such things to his brother, however. "I don't want him to feel that I'm not there for him."
—By Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles

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