Torn by war, families are caught between the troops they love and a mission they don't support

Thirty-five years ago, Santa Rosa teenager Rob Jackson wore shoulder-length hair and worked for George McGovern's campaign against the Vietnam War.

Jacquie Cruz, a nurse, told her six sons that if any of them wanted to "head for the border" to escape the Vietnam-era draft, she would help them.

A generation later, Jackson, a trial lawyer, and his wife, Jill, a school teacher, both 50, have a 23-year-old son in the 101st Airborne, one tour in Iraq completed and another looming, probably later this year.

Cruz, now 76, saw all six sons join the military: one was wounded in Vietnam and another, California Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Michael C. Ottolini, 45, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq 27 months ago.

Both Cruz and the Jacksons remain resolutely anti-war.

They want America to get out of Iraq - but don't try to question their loyalty to the troops.

"That's the idea that really ticks us off," Rob Jackson said at home in Bennett Valley. "Any parent would tell you: bring them home."

"This is a terrible thing we are doing," said Cruz, an Irish Catholic who lives in a Windsor mobile home park. "We went after the wrong country."

As support for the Iraq war sinks in the polls and newly invigorated Democrats seek to hobble President Bush's warmaking powers in the face of his plan to send more than 20,000 additional troops overseas, war backers like Vice President Dick Cheney continue their appeals to patriotism.

"The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people," Cheney said last week in Japan. "Try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit."

"That really frosts your fanny," said Jackson, who agonized for a year while 14 IEDs exploded under his son's Humvee, and mortar and sniper fire tore the air in Hawija, a violent Sunni city in northeast Iraq.

Spc. Sam Jackson, a 2003 graduate from Montgomery High School, his parents' alma mater, is now between deployments at Fort Campbell, Ky. Sam told his parents that soldiers in the 101st Airborne, proud of their ability to capture enemy ground, felt hobbled in Iraq, where more than 3,150 Americans have been killed in the nearly four-year-old war.

"We idle in the kill zone," Rob Jackson said, quoting his son.

The November election, in which Democrats took control of Congress, signaled a turning point in the debate over the war that some called a campaign against terrorism and critics dismissed as a grab for oil.

But for people like Cruz and the Jacksons, it's not about neocon theory or pacifist principles. It's about love and fear, loss and faith. It's about family and spilled blood. It's as personal as it gets.

"We're very proud of him," Jill Jackson said. Sam's enlistment two years ago took his parents by surprise, but they respect it. Jill admires her son's courage and said he is "serving his country in an honorable way." Yellow "support the troops" ribbons adorn both their cars.

At the same time, Jill Jackson said: "We never felt this war was justified." One sentiment "doesn't preclude the other," she said.

Watching the political tide turn against the war gives her some hope, Jill Jackson said. Her students at Hidden Valley Elementary School sent cards and letters to Sam and his comrades in Iraq; someone bought the family dinner at a restaurant in Rohnert Park.

Friends tell them the war will wind down before Sam's unit is sent back, but Rob Jackson thinks the 101st may be among the last American divisions in the war zone.

A pained look crosses Jill Jackson's face when she's asked about the possibility of losing her son. "I've never really let myself go there," she said.

Jacquie Cruz, whose grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War, grew up in Santa Rosa, schooled by nuns at St. Rose and Ursuline Catholic schools. In the 1940s, she remembers seeing the Gold Star insignia appear in the windows of families who lost a child in World War II.

"I never dreamed I would be one," said Cruz, a Gold Star mother.

The Iraq war is a mistake, inspired by the oil and armaments industries, she said, and Cruz, who works as a nurse at a Healdsburg doctor's office and at Sutter Medical Center, fears the troop buildup is a prelude to an invasion of Iran.

Skeptical of politicians, Cruz voted for the Green Party presidential candidate in 2004 and thinks many Democrats "used the war to get elected" in November.

It was just like Michael Ottolini, a 27-year National Guard veteran, to volunteer for duty when the Santa Rosa-based 579th Engineer Battalion sent about 90 soldiers to Iraq in March, 2004. "I trained them; I should lead them," he told his mother.

"Oh, Michael," the whitehaired grandmother sighed, recalling that she named him after St. Michael the Archangel, God's warrior. Ottolini, a hay truck driver, had been married for 28 years to his high school sweetheart, Sharon, and had two grown children.

He was driving the Humvee that left Camp Anaconda, near Balad, on Nov. 10, 2004 and ran over a pressure-sensitive roadside bomb.

As soon as the death notification detail left her home, Cruz headed for Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Windsor. Her Catholic faith sustains her, she said.

"It might have been a little easier," Cruz said, to bear the pain if she believed in the war. "But a mother's loss is a mother's loss," she said.

Rob Jackson said there shouldn't be any conflict between honoring the soldiers' sacrifices and ending the war. Saddam Hussein is gone, there were no weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqis have elected a government.

"We're done," he said. "Now bring the boys home."