First in an occasional series detailing the impact of war on military families.
It was B-day - baby day - for Rick and Gabriela Prete last week and they excitedly chatted as baby Nylah was about to be born.
The day was glorious for the couple and their two other children, except for one thing: Gabriela, 30, lay in the maternity ward of Norristown's Montgomery Hospital while Rick, 26, patrolled thousands of miles away at his combat outpost in Taji, Iraq.
Rick called Gabriela's cell phone periodically from a land line. But mostly they shared the big event through their now-preferred means of communication, Facebook over the Internet - Gabriela using a BlackBerry and Rick sitting at a desktop computer for their cyber chats.
3:39 p.m. Gabriela: I'm gonna start pushing now. . . . Hopefully soon!!
3:48 p.m. Rick: GO BABY GO!!!!
4:08 p.m. Gabriela: She's here! Beautiful and perfect.
4:54 p.m. Rick: OMG ok im callin.
Rick, a sergeant with the Pennsylvania National Guard's 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, posted a Facebook update the next day: "Just saw my newborn and heard her voice on skype!!! Get me out of Iraq NOW!"
The Pretes of Norristown, including their two other children, exemplify a cost of war that is largely overshadowed by the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: the impact of deployment on military families.
Away from the public eye as the wars have faded from an early media crush, military families often feel the rumbles of the battlefield in their own homes. Among the most acutely affected are their children.
Deployments to the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since their beginnings have affected about two million military children, according to the Defense Department.
About 265,000 active, reserve, and National Guard service members currently are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries that are part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Of that number, 18,544 members are from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, the Pentagon says. More than 47,000 children in Pennsylvania and New Jersey have at least one parent in uniform.
The higher numbers of mobilized National Guard members and reservists are an important facet of these missions. Their families live in communities scattered around the United States, often far from the services and support that military bases offer.
In a time of war, top brass naturally pays the greatest attention to what happens in the conflict zone.
But these men and women no longer go off to war with an occasional letter or even rarer phone call as their only lifeline to home. They e-mail regularly. They share video calls over the Internet with their families.
Loved ones at home also see TV reports of war's worst images.
Gabriella Prete turns off news reports in the few spare moments she has after taking care of her kids and working as Norristown's business-development coordinator. She doesn't want to dwell on the dangers her husband might encounter - especially when she is facing a summer of tending to the newborn, their 4-year-old daughter, Arianna, and Gabriela's 13-year-old son, Gene, from a previous relationship.
"The face of the military has changed. Now, this is a family military," says retired Col. Stephen J. Cozza, a military child and adolescent psychiatry expert.
As important as the Pentagon says military families are, there is precious little information on them.
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