CEDAR FALLS - The phone lines were clogged. The tear ducts weren't.

Families and friends of troops in Iraq jammed phone lines at radio station KCVM "Mix 96" Friday morning as on-air personalities Jamie Philips and Jim Coloff recorded a special live show to be delivered to troops in time for the holidays.

It's part of the "Iowa's Bravest" project being spearheaded by John Deere Waterloo employees and members of United Auto Workers Local 838. The recording will go in food and gift "care" packages for more than 200 troops.

In all, 100 calls were recorded. More were still coming in by midmorning. Many family members choked up. Others wrote down their messages in advance so they wouldn't. Some got off the phone just as their voices started trembling. Others didn't make it that far.

"You can tell a lot of these people are just on the edge of crying," Philips said.

The hearts of everyone in the studio dropped when one soldier's family took the station's one-call-per-family request to heart, put all the children on the line at once, and they shouted, "We love you Daddy!" in unison.

"I miss my boys. I miss them horribly," one mother with two sons in Iraq said.

Barb Dunakey of Waterloo, mother of U.S. Army Sgt. Corey Dunakey, recalled what may have been a favorite holiday television show of her son's youth.

"Our holidays season will be a lonely one without, but you'll always be here with us in our hearts," she said. "Christmas Eve arrives in Iraq way before it does here in the States. So when you see Rudolf's red nose out there, you send up a flare, and maybe he'll think it's the Island of Misfit Toys. He'll come swooping down and let you all jump on his sleigh and in the wink of an eye, you'll all be back home." Dunakey told her son.

"I'll see you on the moon, lovebug," one weeping mother of five told her soldier husband.

"Can't wait 'til you're home. Things are gonna be rockin', and we're going to have a big party for ya," a mother told her two soldier sons.

"I'll try not to cry," one mother said. But she did, as did another caller who had both a husband and son in Iraq.

"Keep praying, Brian, 'cause we're praying for you," said the grandfather of Brian Tuve, a soldier in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, whose unit participated in the July raid in Mosul in which Saddam Hussein's sons were killed. Tuve's Humvee windshield was shot up in that raid.

While the "live" verson of the show lasted only an hour, loved ones of military personnel continued calling for another two hours. Thirty of the calls made it on the air. All will be added to the recording. Many more were turned away or unable to get through.

"I'm pretty emotionally drained by this point," Philips said after about three hours. "I've been in radio for going on 28 years, and really, I've never done anything like this before.

"We're just overrun with calls, not just from here but all over the state," Philips said. Word of the show was spread by Internet to military families outside the station's broadcast radius.

Philips and station manager Coloff knew what they were in for when the calls stared coming in a day early, after which they put out the one-call-per-family request.

Few songs were played in the hour during which calls were taken on air. Two of them, "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down and "Bright Lights" by matchbox twenty, have become adopted anthems of the troops.

Doing the show was a "call to duty" that Philips, the son of a D-Day veteran of World War II, could not refuse.

"I think after the war ended a lot of people put it in the back of their minds about what's going on," he said. "The fact is, while the president says the war is over, the war rolls on for the families around here that have troops in Iraq. They have relatives and friends that they care about and worry about every single day."

Mix 96 is not the only local station involved in the "Iowa's Bravest" effort. Station KCRR, 97.7 FM, in Waterloo is also recording an in-studio program to go in the "Iowa's Bravest" packages, station manager Cory Ford said.

It includes a playlist of troops' favorite songs, and spots by the "Bob & Tom" syndicated comedy team. The station also has asked former "Saturday Night Live" star Dan Ackroyd to include a spot reprising his "Blues Brothers" character Elwood Blues, still used in his role as host of the syndicated "House of Blues" show.

The Mix 96 show was called "Good Morning Iraq," a variation on the Robin Williams movie, "Good Morning Vietnam," very loosely based on real-life military disc jockey Adrian Cronauer.

Jamie Philips may or may not be the Adrian Cronauer of the Cedar Valley. But troops' families believe Philips, Coloff and "Iowa's Bravest" project volunteers have made a more wonderful world for them and their loved ones overseas.