“After 9/11, James changed his mind about the professional focus of his military career,” said his mother, Shirley Huston. “He had signed on as a diesel mechanic, but now he decided to enter Infantry and become a machine gunner. From that moment, I knew that I could lose him at any time. But James wanted to be where the action was.”

• On a day when the eyes of the world were focused on all the mothers gathered in Crawford, Texas, to protest the war in Iraq, one mother was far from the crowd, doing what she has done every day since her son was killed: simply learning to live without him.... Shirley hardly ever watches TV and had no sense of what was happening outside President Bush's ranch. She honors her first-born son, a lance corporal, not on camera but by tending a memorial garden of red, white and blue flowers at her front gate, visiting his cemetery once a week, and doing the best she can to go on, one day at a time. Her vigil is private and quiet; her most public political act has been writing a letter to her local newspaper....

[Shirley's husband] Jim says Shirley likes to talk, but she doesn't talk politics unless she's provoked. Last year, on the day the last of James' personal belongings arrived at home, she wrote a letter to the East Oregonian in Pendleton. "After reading the Open Forum column on 10/7 with 3 negative writers about our President Bush, I decided it was my turn. . . . My son died on July 2nd of this year. I do not blame Bush for his death. . . . Bush didn't cause his death. Fighting terrorists for our freedom was James' cause of death." The Oregonian, 8/21/05