Kathy La Mura is drinking coffee, staying off the computer, trying not to watch CNN and relying on her nursing experience to get through these days with a son serving in the Army in Iraq.

La Mura, 46, of Manasquan, N.J., is a licensed practical nurse who said life got in the way of following through to become an RN. She was eight months pregnant when she became a nurse-"the best damn LPN you'll ever know," she said.

She bridles at the lack of respect-for RNs and LPNs alike-that she believes is responsible for the nursing shortage. It's a point of pride that she no longer will work for hospital conglomerates that classify LPNs as patient care assistants. "I'm a licensed nurse. On my license it says nurse," La Mura said.

La Mura said she grew up with her son Christopher, a 24-year-old sergeant with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad.

Twenty-plus years of managing the stress of emergency room and psychiatric nursing helps her cope with the uncertainty of her son's situation and the one thing she knows for sure: that he is in a life-and-death situation. Her nursing experience also has helped her counsel him on back-to-back tours in the Middle East. Before the Iraq war, Christopher La Mura's tank unit was deployed to Kuwait from its base in Friedberg, Germany, where his wife and 3-year-old daughter are.

"Sure, nursing has prepared me. Absolutely," La Mura said of coping with a son in a combat zone. For the majority of her career, she worked in nearly every unit of what is now Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, N.J. "My favorite places were the ER and psych," she said, although it was a psychiatric patient at another facility, a "lovely man" with paranoid schizophrenia, who overturned a table on her and severely injured her back.

"I love the psychiatric aspect of nursing," La Mura said. She sees the need for it in volunteer work with the Vietnam Veterans Association, veterans of 1991's Desert Storm and now the war in Iraq. La Mura said her children-she also has a 21-year-old daughter-were raised at The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It's not unusual to find La Mura astride her Harley-Davidson motorcycle, riding in every Rolling Thunder-sponsored event in support of soldiers missing in action and prisoners of war.

La Mura regularly dealt with multiple trauma as one of three nurses in emergency from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. each Friday and Saturday at Jersey Shore, a Level II trauma center. She recently shared with her son the lessons of that experience. "He's had two incidents that he's had very hard times with," she said.

She recounted a phone call from Baghdad after Christopher La Mura lost a close friend in a bombing. A couple of months before that, a tank was blown up right in front of him. "He called and said to me, 'Mom, like, I'm shot [as in weary]. He said, 'How did you do it in the ER all those years? How did you deal with all those kids dying and the motor vehicle accidents? I need help.' "

La Mura said she answered: "First of all, it was different because those guys are your buddies. You know those guys. When a patient comes into the ER, most of the time you don't know them. You flip into code mode and you do your job. It hits you later and you may cry all the way home," which La Mura said she did sometimes. "You can't personalize it. It's a way of protecting yourself from the pain."

La Mura encouraged her son to slip away from the guys with whom he lives, eats, shares ammunition and for whom he would die, and have a personal cry. "I said the worst thing you can do is swallow it, because that creates anger and anger creates depression. That whole syndrome is so sick."

As a military mother, she spends a lot of her time in so-called code mode, sending care packages almost daily to troops and staying in touch with the parents of Christopher's buddies to see whether they're doing OK and whether she can help them. It keeps her mind off terrible possibilities as her son "rides around in his Humvee with his gun and hopes he doesn't get shot and doesn't have to shoot anybody."

She has mechanisms, too, for times when there is news, although the details are always too few. "This is crazy rationalization," La Mura said, but when she learned that a sergeant from Christopher's unit had been killed, she left home. "If you're not at home, the military car can't pull in your drive and tell you. So you spend the day running around, staying out of your home. Basically, most of the time I cope, except when I talk about it," she said, getting teary-eyed.

It's such times that La Mura, who was raised Catholic and characterizes her family as spiritual, if not religious, turns to prayer, as well as what Christopher told her when he joined the Army out of high school.

She said that when her son shipped out, he told her, "Mom, we all have a destiny. If my destiny is to die serving my country, then that's what God meant for me.

"I can sit here and I can pace and I can worry, but if I toss it up to God … " La Mura said, not completing the thought. "I say a lot of prayers. What I have to pray for is acceptance. If my kid can go over there and do that job, who am I to sit here and whine about it?"

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