For weeks now, I’ve been making a list, checking it twice. The 18-year-old is graduating. Is his mother sending him into the world with the ability to …

Sew a button? Check.

Scour the bathtub? Check.

Iron a shirt? Oops.

Last week, I wadded up all the mental notes and pressed the delete button. Courtesy of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, I realize there’s only one test worth stewing over.

When my son heads out the door for college, come August, will he have a moral compass tucked into his head and his heart?

Would he know, as did 24-year-old Spc. Joe Darby of Cresaptown, Md., that it is wrong to put a leash around the neck of a naked prisoner and lord yourself over him? Wrong to debase human beings with physical torture and sexual humiliation?

Check.

Would he remember that after working 16-hour days in 120-degree heat with his scheduled furlough home canceled and grenades and mortar fire in the background and his buddies injured or killed and his superiors asking him to “soften up” prisoners who are, after all, presumed to be evil?

I hope so. Leave it at that.

When the circumstances are so other-worldly, so out of context to our experience, how can any of us know — about our children, even about ourselves?

Word is that some folks at the Pentagon are referring to the members of the 372nd Military Police Company, who will soon be going on trial for the misdeeds at Abu Ghraib, as “the six morons who lost the war.”

In our fondest fantasy, they are only six, an isolated breed of cretins performing pornographic misdeeds that no one else in the American military would contemplate. We are still the wholesome, optimistic liberators, the troops to which every enemy soldier in World War II preferred to surrender.

Can that patriotic self-image survive the current scandal? It’s hard to see how, certainly not in the world’s eye, and almost as certainly, not even in our own. More likely, we will spend the months, even years ahead, contemplating how far the tentacles reach.

We know that we live in a society coarsened over the last half-century by standards in entertainment and public behavior far different from those that defined earlier generations. From Vietnam, we understand better than we once did that war exposes the shadow side of human nature, the dark abyss where rules and mores flounder.

Listen to the families of the Abu Ghraib soldiers, and it would be almost impossible to predict who would wind up on which side of that divide. To their families, all flew off to war under a hero’s mantle.

“There’s not a malicious bone in her body,” Kerry Shoemaker-Davis told the New York Times about her good friend, Pfc. Lynndie England. England, she of the pixie haircut and devilish smile, is now imprinted on our brains, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, a thumbs up sign crudely belittling a naked Iraqi prisoner.

The family of Staff Sgt. Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II of Buckingham County, Va., wants us to know that their husband-nephew-son is no monster either. A prison guard at Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, Frederick is charged with dereliction of duty, cruelty, assault and indecent acts with another person.

The Fredericks have posted a Web site with pictures of the sergeant. In one, his arms drape two Iraqi children. In another his boot rests solidly on a dirt mound planted with an American flag.

“I’ve known Chip all my life,” Frederick’s uncle, Bill Lawson of Newburg, W.Va., told The Richmond Times-Dispatch. “He’s a laid-back person who does things right. He’s meticulous, and I know he hasn’t hurt anybody physically. It’s something he wouldn’t stand for.”

The relief in the comments of Margaret Blank is as palpable as the desperation in those of Shoemaker-Davis and Lawson. Blank’s son, Joe Darby, is the hero of Abu Ghraib. After viewing the sickening photographs, he notified his superiors, first anonymously, then in person.

“You did a good thing, and good always triumphs over evil,” Blank told her son, according to ABC News. “And the truth will set you free.”

I can spend the next three months repeating such aphorisms. But no one knows in advance of life’s crossroads how well the words take.

The divide between good and evil is sometimes as tenuous as an impulse. “Once to every man and nation,” said poet James Russell Lowell, “comes the moment to decide.”

Only then, in that space when instinct prevails, can anyone really say for their children or themselves, check.

Margaret Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. Her e-mail address is margaret.eddspilotonline.com.