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A message from a POW's mother

Hudson after his capture.
Hudson after his capture.

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(CNN) -- Anecita Hudson, mother of U.S. POW Army Spc. Joseph Hudson, said she first heard about her son's capture in Iraq Sunday as she was making coffee.

A friend called to tell her to turn on a Filipino TV channel, which was showing pictures of the just-captured POWs.

"I said, 'How come Joe is on TV?'"

"The Filipino channel that I was watching, he was on it, and being interviewed by the other cameramen in Iraq," she said in a shaky voice.

Sunday was the day Iraqi troops ambushed the 507th Maintenance Company based at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Hudson, 24, became one of 12 in the unit to be captured, killed or missing.

Anecita Hudson told The Associated Press that she screamed and wept when she first watched the tape of her son.

At Hudson's home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, his wife Natalie Hudson said she also was informed about her husband's capture on Sunday, almost exactly one month after he left for duty, the AP reported.

"He'd been gone exactly a month Saturday," Natalie told the AP. She began dating her husband when she was a sophomore at Alamogordo High School. The couple has been married three years and have a 5-year-old daughter named Cameron, according to the AP.

Hudson grew up in a military family and graduated from high school in 1998 -- also from Alamogordo High. His father was an Air Force retiree killed in a Florida motorcycle accident in 1991, according to the El Paso Times. Mother and son returned to Alamogordo after the accident because they had lived there when her husband was assigned to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Now Hudson's mother is dealing with constant questions and interviews from the news media. "I'm trying to handle things," she told the AP. But she has a message: "I want to tell all these parents with kids in the war that all they can do is hope and pray that their sons will come home alive. I know they love their sons as well as I love my son."



Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.

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