CHILDREN OF THE FALLEN

Characteristically, the military and Congress have responded to the urgent needs of the survivors by adding new layers of bureaucracy to a system that dates back to the Civil War (and, in fact, is still paying benefits to five offspring of Civil War veterans). Spouses receive a lump-sum "death gratuity" of $12,420, plus life insurance of as much as $250,000. This payment would be effectively doubled by a bill that is expected to pass in the next month. Families are eligible for Social Security payments and for two different kinds of government annuities, although the fine print requires an offsetting reduction in one if you also collect the other. Survivors are eligible for generous college-tuition grants and lifetime subsidized health care. As an illustration, the National Military Families Association calculated the benefits for the family (a wife and children ages 1 and 3) of an enlisted man with a salary of $38,064 a year, including a housing allowance and combat pay. Apart from the lump-sum payments, his wife would receive the equivalent of an annual income of $57,624, falling to $45,804 after two years, then declining in steps as the children reach adulthood. By the time the younger child turns 23, the wife's check would amount to only about a quarter of her husband's active-duty salary.

Last year the Department of Veterans Affairs added bereavement counseling to the package of benefits. This supplements the work of a voluntary organization called TAPS--Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors--which organizes "emotional peer-to-peer" counseling among kids. There are also freelance outreach efforts by the adult children of servicemen killed in Vietnam, who are now approaching middle age themselves. Tony Cordero, who was 4 when his father, William, was killed in 1965, founded a survivors' group called Sons and Daughters in Touch, which has begun inviting the children of Iraqi casualties to its Father's Day memorials. Ever since the publication of her family memoir ("Hero Mama"), the writer Karen Spears Zacharias, whose father was killed in Vietnam, has become a magnet for bereaved kids, who write and call her at all hours. In quiet visits, she tells them she understands how they feel: "It's difficult to lose a father in an unpopular war."

Psychologists have learned a lot about how to help children through the grief process. Unfortunately one of the most important recommendations--to avoid unnecessary changes to the child's daily routine--is impossible for many military families, who generally have to move off base within six months. Previous advice that a healthy adjustment required a clean break with the deceased parent is now inoperative; current thinking is that children "want and need a continuing bond to their dead parent," according to J. William Worden, co-director of Harvard's Child Bereavement Study. "They talk to them, they keep things that belong to them, they dream about them and think about them," he says. Tony Bertolino Jr., 15, appears to have memorized the entire career and duties of his father, an Army sergeant who was killed in an ambush in late 2003. "He was a highly respected soldier and man," he says. David Kirchhoff Jr., whose father, an Iowa guardsman, died of heat stroke in Iraq in 2003, has turned his bedroom into a virtual shrine to his father, including a wall of photographs. Like many sons of soldiers, he imagines enlisting himself someday. His plan, though, is to "go over there and tell everybody it's not worth it." Compared with the 20,000 American children who lost a father in Vietnam, the families of Iraqi war casualties have the advantage that almost all of them are getting a body back. Many men back then were lost in the jungle or the air and were--or still are--listed as "missing," leaving their families to wonder, "Is he going to be coming around the corner one day?" says Cordero. It was with that in mind that Tina Cline, whose husband, Marine Lance Cpl. Donald Cline, was killed in an explosion on the fourth day of the invasion, decided to let 2-year-old Dakota look inside the flag-draped coffin at the uniformed body inside. The body had no head.

"Daddy's not coming home," she whispered to her son, who was dressed in a tiny dark suit and tie. "He's got a bigger job to do, helping God in heaven."

Parents have always said that, to little boys who stood at attention and promised their moms they would be brave. They wore their father's dog tags to school, and, in the way of things, eventually went off to fight in their own wars. On the same day that Cline's vehicle was hit by a shell, Marine Sgt. Phillip Jordan was killed in Nasiriya, leaving behind a 6-year-old son, Tyler, whom he called "Lavabug." For a week after, Tyler sulked around the house in his 6-foot-3-inch father's camouflage shirt, refusing to eat or to talk to his mother, Amanda.

"God needed Daddy in heaven," she explained recently.