An American Family Goes To War

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For these military families, being prepared for an emergency means more than having flashlights and water stored in the basement. It means 18-year-old infantrymen who have to decide who gets their stuff if they never come home, and parents agreeing on who gets their children until they do. It is sperm banks offering to give military couples a year's free storage, in case a chemical attack destroys a husband's fertility or an older wife wants to keep trying to have a baby and can't afford to wait a year while her husband is gone. It is a single mom watching her adorable baby girl bond with a caregiver on her post who always wanted a daughter: the baby sitter paints a room in her home pink and smiles when the baby calls her Mama, even when Mother is in the room. It is Laura Richardson's dad, a 68-year-old pediatrician, wondering whether he should get smallpox and anthrax vaccines, so that if his kids were in trouble he could get on a plane and help them. "I thought I could go over if one of my children was horribly maimed or something like that," he says.

And in thousands of cases, the question years from now will be, "Mommy, what did you do in the war?" Women make up about 15% of active-duty soldiers, up from 11% in the last Gulf War--but numbers don't tell the story of their new role. In a war this time around, women will be flying F-18s, launching Tomahawk missiles and serving in front-line intelligence units. You still will not find women in the infantry or driving a tank, but changes in technology and in the very nature of war have blurred the front lines and the definition of being "in combat."

After the first Gulf War, in which five female service members were killed in action and two taken prisoner, Congress lifted the ban on women serving on combat ships. The Pentagon scrapped the rule that barred women from assignments with a high risk of facing enemy fire. Now women are excluded from only 9% of Army roles (though that represents nearly 30% of active-duty positions); 99% of all occupations and positions in the Air Force are open to women, and in the Navy, women are excluded from only SEAL teams and submarines.

The pressure on families is growing because longer and more frequent deployments make for wrenching choices. As the number of women on active duty reaches 200,000, of a total of 1.4 million, it means that more mothers are likely to discover what it really means to balance job and family under extreme circumstances. The commute is hell, the business trip can last six months or a year, and the note left for the baby sitter includes your power of attorney and your will. Those who have husbands staying behind while they deploy find themselves conducting a crash course in smooth braids and matching clothes. "I gotta tip my hat to women," says Robert Ward, 31, a father of three whose wife has just shipped out to the gulf from Fort Campbell. "I didn't know it was so hard. Really hard."