COLUMN ONE : Duty’s Call a Strain on Family Ties : Thousands of parents of young children--many single--are among servicemen and women ordered to Saudi Arabia. A generation ago, such household upheavals were virtually undreamed of.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — After 11 years in the military, Staff Sgt. Brenda Brown thought she would never get the call. Then, with little advance warning, she found herself sending her 3-year-old son to her sister in North Carolina and struggling to explain why.

“I just told him that me and his father have to go away for a while and it was part of our jobs,” Brown said as she and her husband, also a sergeant, prepared to leave for Saudi Arabia from Ft. Stewart’s Hunter Army Airfield. “I didn’t want him to feel we were sending him away for no reason. It’s hard to explain to a 3-year-old when you’re packing his bags.”

It is harder yet to explain the deeper fear that she will never see her son again.

“I’m scared,” Brown admits. “I’m afraid of dying.”

This kind of sudden confrontation with reality is hitting thousands of military personnel and reservists this month--not just in households like the Browns’, where both husband and wife are in the military, but in others where soldiers double as single mothers or fathers.

Although American women have been involved in military conflicts since the Revolutionary War, the U.S. response to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is taking a toll on families in ways that were virtually unknown only a generation ago.

For some, such as those who have infants or have been recently divorced, the timing has presented special hardships. Others, like the Browns, must worry about the survival of both spouses and the welfare of the children they left behind.

For many, the sorrow of separation has simply proved more traumatic than they ever imagined.

Capt. Demetrious L. Thomas, a 26-year-old Quartermaster Corps officer who soon will be leaving for Saudi Arabia, had looked forward to enjoying her 4-month-old daughter.

“To be able to see your child take her first steps, get her first teeth, say her first words,” says Thomas. “I’d always hoped and prayed I’d be the one to see that.”

The growing number of women in the work force--and the emergence of more single-parent families in the United States--over the past two decades has had a sizable impact on the armed services.

Women now make up 224,272, or 11%, of America’s 2 million active-duty troops--a four-fold increase since 1973--as pilots, mechanics, intelligence specialists, communication experts, supply supervisors and truck drivers. There also are 55,103 single parents in uniform.

Although by law women currently are excluded from direct combat, experts say such distinctions would make little difference during actual combat, where staging areas are just as vulnerable to attack as the front lines.

To be sure, some would argue that none of this should have come as a surprise. Each parent in uniform is a volunteer, and knew when enlisting or joining the reserves that he or she might well be sent overseas.

Indeed, some, such as Judith Boehm, a clerk-typist for the city of Ontario, Calif., whose naval reserve unit was called up last month, even welcome the chance to test their skills. “It will be a challenge,” she said shortly before departing. “It will intensify my training.”

And the armed services have amassed an impressive array of support services for spouses and offspring who remain behind--including legal and financial aid, housing assistance, counseling and parenting classes.

‘Family Care Plan’

Military authorities also have for some time required that active duty personnel as well as reservists file a “family care plan” with their unit, transferring responsibility for their children to a relative or friend if they are deployed.

Still, Milt Wofford, chief of the family support division at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, acknowledges that there always are a few cases where the best-laid plans seem to go awry.

In one such case, Staff Sgt. Faagalo Savaiki, who was called up on Aug. 29 with his Ft. Campbell, Ky., unit, has been charged with leaving his three children without food.

The youths, ages 13, 12, and 9, were found dirty and hungry with a note on the wall telling them how to use Savaiki’s automatic teller card to withdraw money from a bank.

Savaiki, whose wife returned to Hawaii after their recent divorce, has pleaded not guilty to three child-abuse charges in Clarksville, Tenn.

Officials at various military Family Assistance Centers, which provide around-the-clock help for soldiers and their families, said last week that they had encountered no problems as serious as the Ft. Campbell case.

But here at Ft. Stewart--amid patriotic trappings such as banners proclaiming “God Bless Our Troops” and T-shirts emblazoned with “Somebody ‘s Me in Saudi”--they have been swamped with inquiries and requests for help.

Counselors at Ft. Stewart’s main base in Hinesville, Ga., southwest of Savannah, handle about 500 calls and 150 to 200 walk-ins each day, says Jane MacDonald, an Army community service chief.

Although the majority of contacts involve such routine matters as obtaining a copy of a military pay stub, or helping a soldier’s spouse get out of a lease, some complications have been more serious.

“A couple of wives decided their husbands were going to Saudi Arabia, and they didn’t want to take care of the kids, so they just ran off,” says Major William Broome, Ft. Stewart’s family life chaplain. “They were either immature or they had bad marriages to begin with.”

Search for Child Care

In both cases, the men’s departure was postponed indefinitely or delayed until they could find child care. “The Army does a lot better with child care than a lot of civilian employers,” Broome asserts.

Linda Grant De Pauw, a history professor at George Washington University and founder of the Minerva Center in Arlington, Va., which studies the role of women in the military, agrees that in some respects, the armed forces appear to be ahead of the private sector.

“The reason a lot of single parents are in the military is because the military is an equal opportunity employer,” De Pauw says. “You do a good job, you’re secure, you get health care, you get promoted. If there is sexual harassment, there is at least a chain of command to report it. Many women trying to do the best they can for their children will have joined.”

Supply Sgt. Nereida Lassus, 32, left Puerto Rico in 1980 to follow her uncle and brother into the Army. Now, a year after divorcing her husband, she, too, faces the trying prospect of leaving her 7-year-old son, Arnaldo, with her aunt when she sets off from Ft. Stewart for Saudi Arabia this month.

“He watches TV, so he knows more or less what’s going on,” says Lassus, a petite woman with short, curly hair and pink fingernails. “Sometimes he asks: ‘Will you come back? You might die over there. People die in the desert, you know that, mom.’ ”

Despite such emotional tugs, Lassus is stoical about shipping out. “I’m a career soldier,” she says. “I came into the military to serve my country. I have a mission to accomplish. The less you think about it, the better.”

The tens of thousands of husbands left behind with kids have found themselves with a newly defined mission as well. They also serve who stand and bake--or clean and comfort.

“For every one, there’s not enough hours in the day,” says Jeannette Ruffing, director of the Family Support Center at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, which operates programs for spouses and children of those deployed in addition to its ongoing single-parent support groups.

Reade Hamilton, a Fayetteville, N.C., policeman whose wife left Ft. Bragg with her military intelligence company on Aug. 26, knows all about making every minute count. Hamilton, 49, makes breakfast for his 6-year-old son before racing off to work at 6:40 a.m. each day.

He gets back at 3:30 p.m. to check Benjamin’s homework, join him on a bicycle ride, cook dinner and put him to bed before collapsing himself. On weekends, he shops, does laundry and cleans house. “I listen to him more now,” Hamilton says. “There’s no ‘Go see your mom.’ ”

Fellow policemen have dubbed him Mr. Mom. “I’m doing it all,” he says.

But even for families that have found ways to cope with the contemporary role-reversal, there are inevitably those times when a mother’s touch is sorely missed.

William Lensing’s wife, Susan, a nurse and lieutenant commander at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, left Aug. 13 on the 1,000-bed hospital ship Comfort. Lensing, 49, also a registered nurse, says he and his daughter, 20, and son, 16, are holding up well.

But when Brad Lensing’s high school football team was routed in his first game as starting quarterback, he returned to their Chevy Chase, Md., home, retired to the den and re-read his mother’s five letters. “I could tell he really wanted her there,” Lensing says.

Wofford, Ft. Bragg’s family support chief, says he is already anticipating a traumatic Christmas for children whose parents may still be gone. For some of those parents, it will mark the second such experience in a row. Many were in Panama last Dec. 25.

“We’re beginning to look at that,” Wofford says. “I’m sure that as time goes on--if they stay an extended period of time--there will be different problems arising.”