Weeks before Christmas, Joe Godwin readied 10 empty boxes, filling out customs forms and addressing them to a U.S. military base in Mosul, Iraq. Then he handed them out to friends. "I'd say 'Here, I don't want a present this year, but please send something to my son instead,' " said Godwin, a retired construction supervisor who lives in Raleigh.

Those boxes joined a heavy stream of care packages sent to Spc. Mitchell Godwin since he deployed in July.

The cavalcade of gifts -- DVDs, beef jerky, cigars, Xbox games, shampoo, books, magazines -- has flowed from family, friends, neighbors and an uncle's co-workers. Children at the church school of one of his stepfather's co-workers sent cards.

In return, Godwin, an Athens Drive High School graduate, sends e-mail messages to a long distribution list. In marathon phone sessions each Thursday, he calls not just friends and family but neighbors and members of his church, up to 20 people in consecutive calls.

During his yearlong tour at Forward Operating Base Diamondback, Godwin, 24, a helicopter electrician with the 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, can lean on a startlingly broad support network back home. The strands of this web start with the obvious -- friends and family -- then branch out to include his parents' neighbors, members of his church, his mother's co-workers and even friends of friends who have never met him but ask how he is doing.

More than 23,000 service members from North Carolina and its two major military bases are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan this holiday season. Scientific methods for studying social networks suggest that they have millions of relatives, friends and acquaintances.

In a paper that appeared recently in an online journal, Duke University sociologist James Moody calculated that up to 6.5 million Americans know someone who has been killed or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, something that illustrates the broader cost of casualties to society.

The methods he used -- such as plugging in a generally accepted average for Americans of 290 friends and acquaintances each -- can also give a sense of the number of people talking, thinking and worrying about service members they know overseas.

A personal stake

For the troops deployed from North Carolina, that number could be as high as 5 million, but Moody said that even conservative estimates counter the common claims that few Americans have a personal stake in the war.

"Imagine that something like 3 million North Carolinians know someone who's deployed," Moody said. "That would be the pool you could count on to help the troops and to help their families. Those are the people who know this is real, that it's not an abstraction, ... and this is the group for which the war is most relevant."

That means they are more likely to weigh in politically on questions such as whether we should send more troops to Iraq.

Support webs such as Godwin's have informal hubs, notably in churches and workplaces. Across the state, the names of deployed church members or relatives of members commonly appear in church bulletins or other calls for prayer. At Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh, for example, regular e-mail messages are passed around among the elders and family members of those deployed, with a running tally of who is overseas so they can be included in thoughts and prayers. There are 13 members or close relatives of members deployed now.

The key players in Godwin's web -- and some of the bit players, too -- sent Christmas gifts weeks ago. Now they have time to ponder his spartan holiday and do what they often do: Call each other and talk about how Godwin's doing, whether he is really as safe and as bored as he claims.

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