The latest flurry of attention toward gays in the military shows that the question of who gets to be a soldier, and why, is sometimes unavoidably moral. So let’s ask that question about another group of soldiers who haven’t attracted as much talk but should: mothers, many of them single, in combat boots — and combat zones.

By Mary Eberstadt–Washington Post–

 

Consider the case of Spec. Alexis Hutchinson, against whom the Army filed criminal charges in mid-January before granting her an other-than-honorable discharge instead. Ordered to Afghanistan in November from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, the Army cook and single mother refused to go. Subsequently, she was arrested and her son temporarily placed in foster care — because, a spokesman explained, she’d had “plenty of time” to find a babysitter while the only parent in his 10-month-old life went off to war.

When Congress passed a law in the 1970s allowing women with dependent children to enlist, a collision between motherhood and soldiering became inevitable. The wonder is not that a mother with a baby might choose the baby. Rather, it is that — given two wars and current military policy — more cases like Hutchinson’s have not erupted.

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