I recently saw a statistical graph that made my jaw drop.

The graph showed the results of a study that followed an Army unit over the course of a one-year deployment to Iraq. The purpose of the study was to identify the top three things that caused the most stress to deployed soldiers. Here's what the graph revealed.

During a wartime deployment, the third biggest stress is difficulty within the unit -- personality conflicts, abusive leadership, and so on.

The second biggest stress is combat. Are you surprised that combat isn't number one? I was. It's certainly what the rest of us assume must be off the charts in terms of stress, or at least that's what theTV news and movies would have us believe.

But no. In fact, the number one stress for deployed soldiers is hidden behind closed doors. It's the homefront. What's happening back home with their families caused soldiers nearly twice as much stress as being on the front line of battle.
           
I don't know why I was surprised. When my husband and the spouses of my friends were in Iraq and Afghanistan, I experienced firsthand how much our deployed loved ones depend on us to keep them sane. And when I was in Iraq myself, I saw how they line up outside the Internet cafes and phone banks at all hours of the day and night just to connect with the folks back home.

And yet, a Marine major told me that if he could, he would pull the plug on all of it. Why? Because not everyone found comfort when they called home. This major told me that the homefront was the source of his biggest problems -- Marines who were unable to keep their heads in the game because their spouses, girlfriends, or parents were struggling with depression, or fighting with their Marine on the phone, or cheating on him.

New technologies have revolutionized the relationship between the battlefront and the homefront. People often ask me if cell phones and e-mail have been good or bad for families going through a deployment. My answer is always, "Yes." The technology itself is neither good nor bad. It's what we do with it. As an Army chaplain put it, "If you use it for sharing events, staying connected, the immediacy of sharing while it's fresh, that's good. But if you're unwise, if you use it to fight and complain about who's got it worse -- that is not reconcilable, who has it worse."

So military families have a responsibility to do what they can to reduce the stress the homefront places on our service members. But so does the rest of our country. A graph that reveals the soaring stress of the homefront on the battlefront underlines the critical importance of taking care of military families. Making sure they receive the support they need to get through a deployment clearly has a direct impact on our nation's ability to successfully fight a war. A spouse experiencing clinical depression can't jolly herself out of it. And yet, as our overseas conflicts go on, services like marriage counseling on military installations are being cut. For families enduring repeated separations, getting their marriages back in shape between deployments is an absolute necessity.

It's up to the civilians who send us to war to make sure we can afford all the costs of war, and that includes the costs of taking care of our military families.