Honor and duty for his fallen son

"Rich Dvorin speaking, how are you today? All right, how is everything going? Did you meet with the doctor?"

"OK," he continues. "Very good. . . . Just keep going to the doctor. It helps -- even though you don't think it does, it helps.

"I will call you in a week or so. Stay well. Stay safe," he says, before hanging up.

"When I put the phone down, I've done the best I can; I've honored my son," Dvorin says. "That's my mourning."

Dvorin has never seen a counselor for his depression. Staffers at the call center have become his support network, and talking others through their problems, he said, is enough to help him get by.

There isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't think about Feb. 3, 2004. He remembers how he tossed and turned that night, waking up at 4:30 a.m. He made coffee and listened for the thump of the newspaper at his front porch. He turned on CNN and saw a banner gliding across the bottom of the screen announcing that a serviceman had been killed and another wounded in a roadside explosion five miles south of Baghdad.

"I knew that was where Seth was. All night long I had been thinking of Seth," he says.

He tried to keep his mind off the worry, cleaning his house, dusting shelves. About 6 p.m., Dvorin received a call from Seth's mother-in-law, followed by a call from Seth's mother: His son had been killed.

Two days later, Dvorin scribbled an angry letter to President Bush. "His life has been snuffed out in a meaningless war," he wrote. "Where are all the weapons of mass destruction? Where are the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons?"

Dvorin had not spent much time with Seth or Seth's half-brother Josh when they were growing up. He blames bitter relationships with both mothers, which made visitations tense, and few and far between.

In March, Josh, 19, moved in with his father. "We're getting to know each other," says Dvorin, who never expected to spend his retirement years working and taking care of his second son. He lost time with Seth and hopes it is not too late to nurture Josh.

Dvorin treasures the time he and Seth eventually spent bonding, but, he says, it ended too soon. When Seth went to college at Rutgers University, near Dvorin's home, the two grew close, spending weekends together. Father and son talked of raising horses together in Texas.