Struggle starts at home front

SHIRLEY -- To prepare for her yearlong combat tour in Iraq, Massachusetts National Guard Sergeant Rebekah Spencer packed her body armor, her M16 rifle, and her 9mm pistol; bought tapes to help her study Arabic, and stocked up on dark chocolate she knew she was going to crave. Then came the hardest part. Spencer, one in an unparalleled wave of single parents going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, moved her children, Sarah, 14, and Adam, 13, across town into the four-bedroom house of her older sister, Elizabeth Flagg.

Several days before Spencer was scheduled to leave for Iraq, she huddled with her children and her sister on a couch in Flagg's living room, grappling with the monumental change her deployment was introducing into the teenagers' lives, and the strain it was placing on Flagg, her husband, and her two young daughters.

"I think it bites the dust," said Adam. "I try not to think about it because if I do I start crying."

The disruptions echo in the stories of many American service members, some 140,000 of whom are single parents. The Defense Department does not know the number that have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a count on Dec. 31, 2006, determined 12,734 were serving on that day. An additional 330 military couples who have children were deployed.

The number of single military parents deployed to war zones is unprecedented in recent American history, said Shelley M. MacDermid, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University in Indiana. During the Vietnam War, the US military relied heavily on the draft, and most service members were too young to have families. Now, a generation of military children is living for extended periods without parents.

Relatives of American troops and specialists who work with families of service members said that single parents in the military were largely unprepared for the prolonged and often repeated deployments that are accompanying America's first protracted war in decades.

Few single parents in the military ever imagined that they would have to go on deployments lasting as long as 18 months and leave their children in the care of relatives and former partners, said Jaine Darwin, a Cambridge psychologist who works with military families.

"They certainly find themselves in a position they've never been in before," said Darwin. "Now they are running around trying to find someone to take care of their child."

Christine Moody, 57, of Danvers, took care of her two toddler grandsons for three months in 2005 when the deployments of her son and his wife, who are sergeants in the Air Force, overlapped.

"It's a lot to expect for someone to take care of your child for 18 months," said Moody.

"It's killing the families these days, absolutely killing," said Moody's husband, Dick Moody, 60, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.

The children of single parents in the military are particularly affected by deployments, said Joyce Raezer, who runs the National Military Families Association in Alexandria, Va.

"The big difference is that these children no longer are with a parent, and in almost all cases the child is going somewhere else," said Raezer. "Not only are they watching their parent go away, they're also very likely to go away themselves, leave their house, leave their support network."

"It's an upheaval in their daily routine," agreed MacDermid. "For some children, it will aggravate existing vulnerabilities."

Spencer, a strawberry blonde with a quick smile, joined the National Guard in early 2001, and her deployment with the 65th Public Affairs Operation Center of the Massachusetts Army National Guard is her first combat tour overseas. She separated from her children's father 12 years ago, and he plays no role in the teenagers' upbringing.

Before her deployment, Spencer and her children lived in a rented three-bedroom townhouse in Shirley, so when Adam and Sarah moved in with the Flaggs they stayed close to their friends. A family friend promised to take Sarah to her bass practice and Adam to his football practice while the Flaggs are at work. To make the children's transition as smooth as possible the Flaggs decorated sections of their house with artwork that once adorned the walls of Spencer's townhouse. They hung photographs of Spencer and her children in the rooms where the teenagers now sleep.

Flagg, 35, a graduate programs coordinator at Boston University, and her husband, Allen, 36, a correction officer, had once planned to let their daughters, 3 and 6 years old, have their own rooms this year. But with Spencer's children in the house, that will have to wait.

And the couple will have to learn to accommodate the difficulties of parenting teenagers who are not their own and who are suffering the loss of their mother. Already, there are some tensions. When Flagg forbade Sarah from sleeping over at her best friend's house recently, Sarah stomped out of the room and shut herself in the room where she is staying at Flagg's house.

Despite the Flaggs' efforts, there is nothing they can do to compensate for Spencer's absence or take away the gnawing fear for her safety, the teenagers said.

"There are news reports [from Iraq] that aren't always the best," said Sarah.

The children have already had one taste of life with their mother gone, for nine months in 2001 when they stayed with the Flaggs while Spencer was in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

"I cried myself to sleep because I missed her, and I thought I would never get to see her again," said Adam.

Sarah suffered an anxiety attack.

"One night I became really ill, and I woke up and I couldn't breathe, so I crawled into my aunt's bed and woke her up," she recalled.

"You cried yourself to sleep?" Spencer turned to her son on the couch. A wrinkle ran across her forehead. Later, when both children were out of the room, Spencer said that she had bought presents for each of their birthdays for the next seven years, bought presents for their future children, and wrote letters to their future spouses, in case she is killed in Iraq. As she spoke, Spencer began to weep.

"I know that they'll be OK, that she loves them," Spencer said about Flagg, wiping away tears. But Flagg said she never would be able to take her sister's place in the teenagers' lives.

"I might not have known that they were crying themselves to sleep" during Spencer's 2001 absence, Flagg said. She looked puzzled. "I'm a different person from my sister, I'm not warm and fuzzy. I might have missed it."

Anna Badkhen can be reached at abadkhen@globe.com.