The Hidden Home Front

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.

Few studies on military families have been done during the operations in Afghanistan, which President Obama is gearing up, and Iraq, which he is drawing down. Such studies aren't just academic: More information on military families' situations can lead to developing and targeting services for them.

"It's not an easy thing to do research on military kids," who often move from base to base with their families, says Shelley M. MacDermid Wadsworth, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University.

"We don't know as much as we should, certainly not as much as we'd like to," she says.

Research from previous wars shows that military kids and their families are generally resilient people; their lifestyle demands that they manage separation and change. Relatives nearby are a huge source of support for military families. So is religiously planning the week's events, so the needs of the children and the parent at home are met.

Rick Prete, who was an emergency-room technician at Montgomery Hospital before going to Iraq, used a stuffed animal to help little Arianna deal with his deployment. She takes comfort in the custom-made monkey dressed in Army fatigues. When she squeezes it, the stuffed animal says "I love you" in her father's voice.

"Plenty of families fall apart for a lot less stress," says Rachel Lyons of New Jersey's Operation: Military Kids.

But the current missions have no clear precedent.

Tours in Iraq have been extended to as long as 15 months, three months more than the one-year battlefield stint for troops in the Vietnam War. Less time passes between coming home and serving again.

The fighting is unconventional - the enemies' signature weapon is the roadside bomb. Advances in battlefield medicine have meant soldiers who are victims of such weapons are more likely to be saved from serious brain trauma and other injuries. Families celebrate their loved ones' survival, yet many have to adjust to disabilities.

The nature of the military has changed in another way that impacts families. Females in the military - 220,138 women have so far been deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan missions - serve on much more equal footing with men, including in dangerous assignments.

Women, including mothers, now perform almost every kind of battlefield job. They drive trucks, guard prisoners, and fly aircraft, though they still are barred from serving in direct combat units.

"We have kids growing up who know their parents in no other situation," says Michelle Joyner of the National Military Family Association.

Some details about the stresses on military families are emerging. A newly released Pentagon survey found that 60 percent of the spouses of active-duty service members and 67 percent of reserve and National Guard spouses said their children showed increased levels of fear or anxiety during the other parent's deployments.

"It was very clear that spouses were very concerned about the cumulative effects of deployments on their children," Barbara Thompson, director of the Pentagon's Office of Family Policy/Children and Youth, told a Senate subcommittee.

Earlier research bolsters that survey: It suggests that children ages 3 to 12 with a deployed parent in uniform tend to show increased anxiousness, withdrawal, or aggression compared with youngsters of at-home parents. Different ages show their emotions in different ways.

Adults can act out, too. A study in 2007 found that reports of child neglect and abuse in Army families increased when a parent was away at war.

A range of organizations, from military family-advocacy groups to Sesame Workshop (affiliated with TV's Sesame Street), are rising to highlight issues for these children. The military is increasing its support for families, including creating informational Web sites and child-focused programs, and assigning behavioral-health specialists at bases.

At some moments, though, groups and programs don't help. Just ask the Tarricone family - mom, dad and three sons.

Nine-year-old John's emotions churned at unexpected times for his dad, Michael, a captain in the New Jersey Army National Guard who just returned from Iraq.

John - who likes to keep his light-brown hair "high-and-tight" in a buzz cut, like his father - was playing soccer in a local league when he got kicked in the side and fell to the ground. The coach ran over and picked him up.

The boy looked at his coach and said: "You smell like my daddy."

That night in their updated ranch-style home in Manahawkin, N.J., "there was no consoling him," John's mother, Terri, recalls.

Terri has had her disconsoling moments, too, like the time after the Tarricones had booked a vacation for Michael's return from his first Iraq deployment in 2007.

She had heard rumors that National Guard tours were going to be extended, but the family got no official notice. Son Steven, 14, ended up learning about the longer tour in a newspaper while sibling Miles, 15, heard it from a friend.

"When we found out he was being extended, that was a really bad time," says Terri, 42.

Miles adds that his mother was "really out of it and moping all the time, walking around zombie-like."

The separation also weighed on Michael Tarricone, 42, who recently returned from Iraq, where the unit he led out of Camp Bucca escorted convoys and protected civil-affairs officers.

Michael Tarricone is making up for his absence now. He attended Miles' junior ROTC graduation and will personally deliver his wife's anniversary gift.

"It's been great," Michael Tarricone says. "We've been out paintballing. We have a couple shows in Atlantic City we've scheduled to see. I'm going to make my 25th high school reunion next week."

Lila Guy of Twin Oaks, near Chester, spent two years in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, where the U.S. Army sergeant's duties included escorting supply convoys.

She recalls aching most as she lay down to sleep and thought of the three children she had at the time with her husband in Chester. She especially yearned for Izayah, then a year old.

"When it was time for me to go to bed, I would hold my pillow in front of me like I was holding my son," she recalls. "I really missed him."

Guy still recalls how, in Iraq on Mother's Day 2005, the chaplain at a Sunday service asked mothers to rise.

"I stood up and they were clapping for me," Guy says, "and I cried then, because I really didn't feel like a mother. I had left my kids."

Guy, 29, got a hardship discharge in 2007, one year shy of serving her full three-year contract. She and her husband had separated - being a long-distance couple was a problem - and Guy needed to devote her time to the kids. The family, including the couple's youngest daughter, 8-month-old Lauryn, now lives with Guy's parents as she works toward a nursing degree at Widener University through a Veterans Affairs program.

When she returned from Iraq, Guy met with her children's teachers to see how the kids were doing. The teachers told her that Leila, then 6 and who suffers from epilepsy, and Harrison, then 7, both had trouble concentrating in class.

"Harry was all over the place and wouldn't pay attention," Guy says. "Leila would be just fine and then, all of a sudden, she would cry."

The kids are calmer now, though Leila clings to her mother when talk of military services comes up at the kitchen table. The girl throws her slender arms around her mother's neck and buries her head in Guy's shoulder. Leila's hands are clasped tight in the embrace, as though not letting go will keep her mother in their kitchen forever.

Children's fears that a parent may leave again for military duty are not uncommon - which is all the more reason to study more deeply the impact of deployment on children.

The military routinely assesses its service members' condition in battle zones, says Charles Figley, an expert in combat stress and a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans.

"We should be doing the same thing at home to find out how the home front is doing," he says. "The whole country should be pulling for these kids. We should be doing everything we possibly can."

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