GILLETTE (AP) - Annette Miller lights the candles each night, bows her head, and prays her son comes home safely.

Sometimes, she just looks at his picture. At a time when she hopes to glimpse her son on the news just to know that he's OK, the candles quiet her soul.

"I hope that he's OK and safe. And if anything does happen, I hope that I get a call," she said.

It is the quiet that has caused such unrest and makes her cry herself to sleep. Marine Cpl. James Miller never has been able to e-mail home and he can't call.

He's sent only two short letters in the more than two months he has been in Kuwait. Those few words are all she has.

In a world of instant messaging, satellite phones and e-mail, she knows little about the life her son now lives.

What she and other families know of the war they learn from CNN. The letters, the short phone calls and the e-mails they got earlier have been replaced with a roaring silence.

The earlier messages told of desert temperatures that can drop 50 degrees in one hour when the sun sets.

They told of men who bathe themselves with baby wipes because water can't be wasted. They explained that the few free minutes a soldier finds, away from home's distractions, his thoughts may wander to what next … or, what if.

Dear Mom, Camp sucks. It's nothing like the brochure. The counselors suck and none of the daily activities are any fun. The nature walks have no nature and the food is horrible. Come get me!

On a serious note … this place really is horrible.

Mother Karen Fox knows so little about what her son does.

Marine Sgt. William "Cole" Gustafson is in military intelligence with a special forces reconnaissance unit. He can't tell her, or his father, William Gustafson of Gillette, much.

Fox, formerly of Gillette and now of South Pittsburgh, Tenn., does know that Cole wrote the letter from a trench he built in the desert.

He told her he is underfed, has filled a lot of sandbags, and that it's not too hot yet - only about 70 degrees instead of 120. But she knows little else.

It's hard on her. She can't eat one day, and can't stop the next. She can't sleep to the point of exhaustion.

"Then you fall asleep and you feel guilty about feeling comfortable. It's really quite a roller coaster ride emotionally," she said.

Her letters from Cole give her a glimpse of his world, a connection. And she laughs at his sense of humor indelibly captured on ink and paper.

"I got to see a camel spider," Cole wrote most recently. "Let me describe it. It's roughly the size of a dinner plate with a body the size of your fist. It doesn't spin webs, just crawls on stuff at night and squirts this stuff on you that dissolves your skin, then it drinks it. Yummy!"

Arretta and Jim Hasquet of Gillette depend on a similar connection. They've turned off the news.

"Every time you hear something, you are just on edge, looking for names to see if your son is all right. We get regular updates and leave it alone," said Arretta Hasquet, mother of Marine Cpl. James Hasquet.

The few letters they have received in the mail from northern Kuwait show how James lives. His living quarters are a lot like "M A S H," just not as good and more crowded.

"We have 13 guys in our tent … there's about 2 feet between each of our racks with all of our stuff crammed underneath and at our heads. There is no coffeepot, no microwave, no showers, no sink. Just one lonely Porta-Potty at the end of the row," he wrote.

And the lizards are big enough to eat - about as long and thick as his leg. "Bigguns. Little ones are all over the place though and more of a challenge. They are fast little buggers."

E-mails from Wade Christensen, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, tell dad Larry Christensen that he is OK. Wade is serving in Turkey, but hasn't been able to call Larry in the month and a half since he's been there.

He doesn't get to e-mail much either, because he works nights. He can't say what he's doing. Wade did say it's raining and kind of cold.

"He says there's a big white owl that comes in every night looking for some rats. The only thing he's seen is a kind of a smelly old Turkish guy with a bunch of goats," Larry said.

Larry sent a care package this week - bow hunting magazines, a razor, beef jerky and Copenhagen. Gummy Bears, toothpaste, hand cream, lip balm.

Well Mom, this is the part of the letter when I ask you to send goodies and stuff which will rot my teeth … And Dad, I hope you have some really good beer when I get home because I sure could use one right now. And also some of that home cooking.

Marine Cpl. James Miller

Dwight and Debra Jennings haven't heard from Lance Cpl. Michael Jennings of the Marine 1st Expeditionary Unit since he left in January.

"Both of us, every day pull up the list of the soldiers killed in action on CNN. It's not that you want to know, you have to know," Debra said. She strains her eyes looking for him on TV and in photographs.

Vicki Pomeroy cringes when the phone rings or there is a knock on the door. She got an e-mail last week from her son, Army Spc. David Ryan Pomeroy II "Just want you to know this will be the last time I get to e-mail anyone so I will write you letters as soon as (I get) some of yours … I will be safe and make sure I and everyone else here gets home safe … BYE!!!!!!!!!"

"Oh God," Vicki thought. "I hope it's not the last time I ever hear from him."

Pomeroy watches the news. She has to. It's become her only link to the world in which her son now lives.

She wonders how her mother dealt with this silence when her father fought in World War II. Her stomach aches. Belva Martinez waits and hopes for nothing at all.

If her phone doesn't ring, if there is no knock on the door, if nothing breaks that horrible silence, her son is OK. She watched Monday as news channels posted lists of casualties from her son's regiment.

"It's terrible. You sit here waiting and you realize those names are not your son's. And you thank God," she said of Joseph Martinez, a corporal with the Marine's 3rd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Division of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

"Then you realize. That is someone else's son."

She finds help on marinemoms.us, a Web site started by a mother whose son was shipped to Kuwait. The site tells Belva what her son might need eye drops, sunscreen, snacks and helps her deal with the situation.

When another Marine mom posts a letter from her son, it helps Belva think maybe Joseph is doing all right. In one of the few letters Joseph wrote home to Belva and his dad, Matt Martinez, he said he became a Marine because he wanted to make them proud.

They were already proud, Belva said.

She recently got a plaque in the mail from the Marine Corps. Joseph was meritoriously promoted to corporal while in Kuwait. It still had sand on it. Belva didn't wipe it off.