By Matthew D. LaPlante, The Salt Lake Tribune

She never doubted her decision to serve in the Army.

Not as she watched the spotlights dance across Baghdad Airport Road while fellow soldiers urgently searched for hidden bombs. Not as she trembled in a crowded bunker through an extended barrage of mortar explosions. Not when a rocket blast claimed the life of a dear colleague.

She didn’t doubt it then. And she does not doubt it now.

But with each passing moment in Iraq, and in the time since her return to Utah, Diana Bullock has come to appreciate just how much she lost while serving her nation at war. And the mother of two children has come to realize she might not have been the one who sacrificed the most.

Nearly a quarter-million women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly half of those women are mothers.

‘It wasn’t good.’ It’s a few days shy of Mother’s Day. Bullock, 47, is sitting behind the desk in her office, in a red brick building at Utah’s Fort Douglas, listening to her daughter describe the year her mother went to war.

She has stressed the importance of honesty to her children, so Kirstie Bullock pulls no punches.

“We weren’t a family,” the 20-year-old says over the phone as her mother winces. “My brother and me and my dad — without my mom here, it was just like we were three separate people.”

Her mother missed her prom.

And her graduation.

And then there was her father. She loves him, and she knows he loves her, too. But he just didn’t seem to understand what she was going through during her senior year in high school.

“We fought so much, and about so many things, that now I can’t even remember what we were fighting about,” Kirstie says. “I would get so angry. And when I would get angry, I would just shut down. I’d stop thinking. I’d scream. I’d throw things and break things. It wasn’t good.”

‘Still dealing with it’» Kirstie’s troubles caught her mother by surprise. When Bullock gathered her family around the dinner table to share the news of her impending deployment, the older teenager had been the stoic one.

“She had always been so strong, so independent,” Bullock says. “So I wasn’t surprised that she seemed to be OK with everything.”

It was her son, 14-year-old Evan, who Bullock had worried about most.

“He really took it hard,” Bullock recalls. “He was so hurt. He broke down. And I remember going downstairs to talk to him, to tell him what we were going to do to help him get through that year. But nothing helped.”

Ultimately, Evan came to terms with his mother’s deployment. But Bullock says she knows her daughter never has.

“She’s still dealing with it,” the soldier says. “I guess we all are.”

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The challenges at home » Studies show children of deployed military members have heightened stress and more emotional difficulties than their peers in nonmilitary families. They’re also more likely to have trouble engaging in schoolwork and getting along with classmates.

Seeing such research results can add to the anxiety felt by deploying parents, says Michelle Joyner, a spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association.

“What we’re hearing from military parents is that they want better tools to support their children and their families,” she says. “For a long time, the programs that existed were designed to support a military in peacetime.”

Recent changes have not always been able to keep up with the myriad struggles of military families, she said. And there has been scant research focusing on the trials of military mothers.

Joyner acknowledges such mothers likely face challenges that are unique to their traditional social role, and says children of deploying moms are likely impacted in different ways than those of deploying dads.

“One of the key points of our research has been that the well-being of children is very heavily reliant on the well-being of the parent that stays at home,” Joyner says. “And we do know that the family support groups that get together and support each other are often large groups of women. If that’s your method for delivering services, it’s possible than male spouses aren’t connecting with those resources.”

Technology has opened many channels for military parents to stay in touch with their children, Joyner says. But the connectivity can come at a cost, military leaders caution. Soldiers can become distracted, and even distraught, when they learn of problems back home they cannot fix from thousands of miles away.

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Left unsaid » Bullock took every opportunity she could to call home from Iraq. But she didn’t make it to the phone on the evening of April 29, 2008.

Earlier that day, a rocket had come screaming into the Phoenix Base compound in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Bullock had just walked into the base post office to pick up shipping forms. The rocket struck right outside the door, no more than 25 feet away.

The blast knocked her and another soldier off their feet. Bullock was diagnosed with a concussion. “I walked around in a daze for days,” she says. “I couldn’t focus. It was like I was in a dream.”

Doctors later told Bullock that she was suffering from vestibular nerve damage. She still has trouble walking in a straight line. “I always tilt to the left,” she laughs.

Bullock decided not to tell her family what happened.

They kept details of their struggles from her as well. For instance, Bullock says, she didn’t know until she got home that her daughter lived away from the family home for a time when things were particularly difficult between her and her father.

What hasn’t changed » Slowly, the Bullocks have readjusted and again become open with each other, letting out what they bottled up during the deployment.

Kirstie says she wishes it could have happened another way. Maybe her mother could have left earlier. Or maybe the deployment could have been delayed until after her graduation.

But the young woman says she’s proud of her mom. In the end, one thing never changed.

“I love you, mom,” she says before hanging up the phone.

“I love you, too,” Bullock replies.

Read the original story here.