CHILDREN OF THE FALLEN

They were prepared to die, even the truck drivers and supply clerks; any American who sets foot in Iraq must be. They made out wills, as the military requires, and left behind letters and videos for their families. The families in turn prepared for the day when they might open the door to find a chaplain on the other side. In military families the notion of duty is not confined to the battlefield. On the morning that 14-year-old Rohan Osbourne learned that his mother, Pamela, had been killed in a mortar attack on her Army base, his father dropped him off as usual at Robert M. Shoemaker High School, where three quarters of the students are the children of soldiers from nearby Fort Hood, Texas. "I might not get a lot of work done today, ma'am," Rohan politely explained to his teacher. "My mommy died yesterday in Iraq."

War notoriously robs parents of their sons, but it also steals husbands and fathers, and increasingly wives and mothers. The Pentagon doesn't keep these statistics, but using figures compiled by the Scripps-Howard News Service and other sources, NEWSWEEK has calculated that as of last week 1,043 American children had lost a parent in Iraq. To put it another way, nearly two years after the invasion on March 19, 2003, among the 1,508 American troops who have died as of March 11 were an estimated 450 fathers, and 7 mothers. A wartime death presents unique hardships for children. It occurs in a far-off country, often to a parent who left home months earlier; young children may find it hard to grasp the finality of the event. Offsetting that is the impressive panoply and ritual of a military funeral, and the consoling knowledge that the sacrifice was in a worthy cause. The death of a parent often leaves a family not just sadder, but poorer, and surviving spouses are agitating for improvements in their benefits. But there are needs no government program can fill.

The fathers were big strong men, like Nino Livaudais, a 23-year-old Army Ranger with two tours in Afghanistan behind him before the invasion. His son Destre, now 7, is still struggling to understand how such a hero could have been killed by a mere bomb. "I can kind of picture it," he says hesitantly. "But it's hard to picture it. I don't really think explosions hurt that much. My dad's usually a tough man. He went through about five wars." Livaudais left, besides Destre (then 5) and his wife, Jackie, a 2-year-old son, Carson, and Grant, who was born after his death. As relatives gathered on the family porch after Nino's funeral, Carson grew excited by all the unexpected company and started calling for his daddy to join the party. He then turned around, puzzled, as the grown-ups all burst into tears.

And their mothers were loving and devoted, like Spc. Jessica Cawvey, 21. Before she left for Iraq last February with her Illinois National Guard unit, her daughter, Sierra, made her pinkie-swear she wouldn't die. So when Cawvey was killed by a roadside bomb in Fallujah last October, it was not merely a tragedy for Sierra, it was a kind of betrayal. "We had to explain that even though she died, it wasn't her mommy's fault," said Kevin Cawvey, Sierra's grandfather. Vanessa Arroyave, who was 6 when her father, Marine S/Sgt. Jimmy Javier Arroyave, was deployed, was certain he would die in Iraq. "She was very adamant about that," says her mother, Rachelle. The little girl was right. Last April, when Arroyave was killed in a truck accident, Vanessa told her mother: "I told you so." So Rachelle faced the mirror image of the Cawvey family's problem. She had to reassure her daughter that by predicting her father's death, she hadn't brought it about.

The sudden onslaughts of grief are sometimes almost more than Nelda Howton, the principal of Osbourne's school near Fort Hood, can bear. She has picked up the phone to find a mother sobbing on the other end, begging Howton to drive her son home. One girl's aunt walked straight to the classroom and appeared in the doorway, tears streaming down her face. The students do characteristically thoughtless things, like asking Jessica Blankenbecler for her autograph because they had seen her on television. Blankenbecler, a pretty sophomore, was the first student at Shoemaker to lose a parent in Iraq. That wasn't the worst of it; one girl told her, "I wish something would happen to my dad because then we'd get rich"--a remark that carried a particular sting because Blankenbecler's mother, Linnie, thinks they're actually going to be poor.

Compensation for the families of soldiers killed in action is a politically and emotionally charged issue, particularly in light of the changing makeup of the military. The saying used to be that "if the Army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one," but the proportion of married soldiers is higher today than in any previous war, says Charlie Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist. The military today is a better-paid career than most high-school graduates could aspire to otherwise, which may explain why the average male soldier now gets married at 24--three years younger than the rest of the population. The heavy reliance on Reserves and National Guard troops also puts family men and women on the front lines in unprecedented numbers. Of the Americans killed in Iraq through the end of November 2004, more than two in five were married.