Bedtime Stories From Iraq

Will Mouat is good at reading to his kids. He has to be because he is half a world away, reading into a video camera.

His kids - four boys aged between 10 and 2 - are back home in Jacksonville, Fla., where the tapes show up a few weeks later. Responding to a TV image of their father is as close as they get to him these days, CBS News Correspondent

"I feel like he's right there, just talking to us, actually reading to us," says son Ryan. "It means a lot."

Mouat is stationed on a carrier somewhere off the coast of Iraq, one of thousands of service personnel at sea and in the thick of the fighting who are taking advantage of a program that sends videotapes of book readings and messages back home.

The at-home parent records the children's reaction and sends those tapes back to the parent serving in the field.

With so many tours in the war zone being extended, and with no end to the conflict in sight, many families are enduring the hardship of parents being away and in danger for months longer than they expected.

For the kids, it can seem like an eternity.

"It feels like he's in there, in the room watching it with you and it kind of makes you feel a little better," says son Christian.

"Just having that visual face of looking at him and seeing him and he's connecting with us when he's making it," says Mouat's wife Stacy.

For the spouse left behind and faced with temporary single-parenthood, the tapes are also a way of keeping at least the image of the absent parent fresh in the kids' minds.

"All technologies that we have nowadays and ways of communicating are just ways of keeping the family together … in difficult times," says Stacy.

Her husband has already been away for a quarter of his youngest son, Caleb's, life.

Without the tapes, his father might seem like a stranger whenever he finally returns and can embrace his children for real.