For most of her adult life, Victorville's Mimi McCreary mothered orphans and foster children.

Today she mothers the men in the 151st Signal Brigade, stationed in Baghdad.

After her oldest son, Olaf, 38, a member of the Army Reserve, was deployed to Iraq, she e-mailed him every evening. "Every now and then, he writes back. And once in a blue moon, I get a phone call."

In June, Olaf wrote that he could hardly wait to take a shower.

Mimi called her younger son, Marvin, 32, an E.R. doctor in Columbus, Ohio, who arranged with Wal-Mart to ship a children's pool to Baghdad. The pool, which arrived on July 2, an Independence Day surprise for his fellow soldiers. "Mom it was great," he wrote. "I lay in the pool for two hours. Perfect for the Fourth of July. We already had fireworks."

When it was hard for her son to get drinking water, McCreary sent him bottled water ("Ridiculous," she said, "but you want to do something"). From the Sharper Image catalogue she ordered Olaf a battery-operated Personal Cooling Collar, and because his stomach couldn't take MREs (meals ready to eat), she sent him "boxes and boxes" of food.

After graduating from Victor Valley High School, Olaf joined the Army and later worked with juvenile delinquents in North Carolina, Florida and Delaware. Today he is an officer with the Clinton, S.C., police department.

In mid-October, after the media reported that nearly one-quarter of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq still had not been issued a new, superior kind of ceramic body armor - vests ordered in April - Olaf called his mother to say that his fellow police officers had mailed him such a vest.

"Apparently, some other soldiers' parents had also bought bulletproof vests for their children," McCreary said. "Ridiculous, that that should have to be!"

When Olaf told her about handing candy to Iraqi children, she recalled another child, another soldier and candy. Born in 1942 in Deventer, the Netherlands, Mimi was 3 when a Canadian soldier, part of the Canadian forces who liberated the town from the Nazis, gave her her first chocolate. "He handed it through a fence and I gave him a tulip.

Mimi's late husband, Fred L. McCreary, served in the U.S. Air Force. She met him when he was living next door to her family in Holland. "I knew English, so I could help Fred out," she said. After four years at the former Hamilton Air Force Base, in Novato, the couple was transferred to the Philippines, where Mimi ran the adoption program for servicemen.

In 1975, when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces were overrunning South Vietnam, she worked with Operation Baby Lift, an effort to rescue as many Vietnamese orphans as possible. "One little girl refused to take a bath," McCreary said. "I finally figured out that, rolled up in her panties, she was saving a leftover sausage. Once we showed her a table piled with more food, she let us give her a bath."

Among other postings, the McCrearys spent time in Turkey and two years at George Air Force Base.

Mimi has fostered several children and also served as liaison for the Dutch nonprofit agency World Children. As for her son Olaf, she reported that he'd been slightly wounded in Iraq and sent to Kuwait for treatment.

"Now he's doing better," she said.