At the ripe old age of 20, Nathan Hast has already seen more military action than his mother likes to admit.

Deciding to join the US National Guard after his first semester of college, Nathan had no way of knowing he would be tested so severely so soon after completing boot camp in the spring of 2001 - just months before September 11 and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

If anything, however, 9/11 only served to make Nathan, swiftly armed with an M-16 and sent to guard Washington, D.C.'s Reagan International airport, even more patriotic, said his mother Holly Trott.

And, waiting now for orders which will send him either to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or to Kuwait to take part in the US-led war against Iraq, Mrs. Trott said her son was even more devoted to his job. "I asked him if he was afraid," she said, flipping through pictures of her son waving guns in the woods at boot camp, pausing to point out one especially eerie photo of him standing in a `bed' he had just dug in the ground - a bed which looked undeniably like a grave.

"He said, `Mom, what I'm afraid of is if we don't do this, my children will have no future.'

"For a 20-year old to say that - he's thought about it."

Attached as a foot soldier to the Third Infantry of the Virginia National Guard, Nathan first began looking into the National Guard because of what he was doing in school: computer networking.

"He figured if he went into networking in the National Guard he would meet lots of people there also in networking," his mother explained - networking for networking. "He plans things," she said proudly.

Nathan's father and his mother are both American, however they divorced years ago. In fact, it was while attending school in the States that Nathan and his Bermudian friend Martin introduced Nathan's mother to Martin's father, Hav Trott. "We've been married for four years now," said Mrs. Trott.

Nathan did attend MSA for some time, however he later returned to the States for military school and college before leaving school to join the National Guard. "48 percent of the armed forces in the United States are the National Guard," said Mrs. Trott. "So many of them go (abroad to fight) ... Some of his unit is already in Turkey.

"He is the youngest in his unit - he's a specialist, army First Class with the Third Infantry.

"It's been a wonderful experience for him ... he keeps his spirits up better than I do." Mrs. Trott seems to be doing everything she can to keep her own spirits up, however, from occasionally switching off the constant war coverage on TV in favour of the Home and Garden channel to painting a mural on the wall in the front entranceway to her house.

"His most recent orders last weekend said the choices were going to be Cuba or Kuwait, but he will not know for the next few days ... I'm trying to get up there as fast as I can.

"I'm proud of him," she said, taking a deep breath. "Like any mother, I'm not for war, but in this case I am pro defeating a regime that kills its own people."

Growing up in the Vietnam-era, she said, she had never expected that her son would be fighting in something that people around the world had compared to the Vietnam war.

However: "Like my son, I feel that if it is done correctly and swiftly fewer lives will be lost, and it will be a step in the fight against terrorism."