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Obama said her commitment to improving family support began two years ago at the beginning of her husband's campaign, after hearing about the challenges military spouses faced. "I spent a lot of my time talking about issues that really affected me as a working mom," Obama said. "I met more and more military families who were not just struggling with those basic issues that all civilians are dealing with, but they were tacking on multiple tours of duty and having to figure out how do you keep a family together when you moved 10 times in the same number of years." "I was moved by the power of those stories, and I committed to myself then that if I was blessed with the opportunity to be the nation's First Lady, then I would make the issues facing military families a top priority for me," she added. The First Lady said some of the issues military families faced included quality education on military posts, adequate childcare for families who live on- and off-post and for military spouses, how to balance higher education, careers and family support during deployments.

She said a lot of family members spoke to her about streamlining the available support so that it is more consistent at all bases. She said it is equally important to make information available to families to prevent hardships once they transfer to different bases.

Obama wants to put a call out to the nation to be mindful that we are a nation at war. "There are troops out there right now fighting for our freedom and our security," she pointed out. "When they go, they leave behind families. The First Lady extended the opportunity to help military Families to the rest of the nation, whether they lived in military communities or not. "It's incumbent upon us as a nation to look in our schools and figure out which child has parents that's deployed and be aware of that and be conscious of that," she said. "It's incumbent upon us to look in our own back yards to our neighbors and to figure out who's out there serving our country and what kind of support that they need. We need to make sure, as a community, that we're coming together around those families."

Getting military personnel home safely requires much more than an airplane ride and a cursory post-deployment checkup, says Pat Canerdy, administrator of the Army Reserve's Chattanooga-based 591st Transportation Detachment. It's a lesson officials and families alike have had to learn the hard way throughout the global war on terror, which has led to historic highs in suicide and divorce rates.Just more than 5 percent of Army suicide victims had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a recent Department of Defense news release, and 17 percent reportedly had problems with substance abuse. Meanwhile, at least 60 percent had relationship problems.

Strain in the ranks is leading directly to a tragic suicide epidemic in our military. A Senate hearing is slated for today on the subject. It’s an epidemic and a disturbing problem that this nation must solve. It has the attention of the top civilian in the US Army. We hope the Army’s plan to help our troops cope with the stresses of war works — but we’re sure that reducing the continuous load of deployments on our troops would be very helpful.  War-related trauma doesn’t just plague our veterans — it also haunts our military children, too. Is there a technique for weakening traumatic memories? The fact is, our troops are also dying at home. Add Nevada to the list of states considering special courts for our veterans suffering PTSD — as war has injured them, not that criminality has overcome them. Add Texas to the list of states looking to boost the mental health of military families. Because the most pervasive combat injury is invisible. Sexual assaults in the military are on the rise — but a glimmer of a silver lining is that such assaults are now being more readily reported than swept under the rug. Even a Navy Chaplain stands accused of sex-related crimes.

The few veterans courts in the nation are modeled on drug courts that allow defendants to avoid prison in exchange for strict monitoring. Most are only a couple of months old and it is difficult to track their effectiveness, but the results from the first court, which opened in Buffalo, N.Y., in January 2008, are striking. Of the more than 100 veterans who have passed through that court, only two had to be returned to the traditional criminal court system because they could not shake narcotics or criminal behavior, said Judge Robert Russell - a far lower rate of recidivism than in drug courts. "It's the right thing to do for those who have made a number of sacrifices for us," Russell said. "If they've been damaged and injured in the course of their service . . . and we can help them become stable, we must." There are no comprehensive statistics on how often veterans get in trouble with the law, and the majority never become entangled with the legal system. But psychiatrists and law enforcement officials agree that the traumas of combat can lead to addiction and criminality. Studies have shown that as many as half of the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer post-traumatic stress and other disorders, and mental health is the second-most-treated ailment for returning veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs system.

Since Russell's court started, veterans courts have opened in Orange and Santa Clara counties in California; Tulsa; and Anchorage, Alaska. Pittsburgh, southern Wisconsin, Phoenix and Colorado Springs, Colo., are opening or considering new courts this year. Some in Congress have proposed a federal program to help spread veterans courts across the country. Most veterans courts admit only nonviolent felony offenders, though some include violent crimes. Defendants are required to plead guilty to their crimes. In exchange for a suspended sentence that can include prison time, they must consent to regular court visits, counseling and random drug testing. Should they waver from the straight and narrow, their sentences go into effect. Orange County, Calif., Superior Court Judge Wendy Lindley started her veterans court in November after a young Iraq war veteran on her docket died of a drug overdose. "It was horrible," she said. As in most of the nation's nascent veterans courts, many of the defendants in Lindley's court fought in the Vietnam or Persian Gulf wars. But she has seen a few Iraq war veterans, all of whom had clean histories before joining the military but started getting into trouble after they returned.

In light of the review announced today, Susan Kelleher, a reporter for the Seattle Times, contacted Ms. Silicio, now living in Everett, Washington, to get her reaction. Ms. Kelleher writes: The news came as a salve for Tami Silicio, an Everett woman who was working as a military contractor when she took the first published photo of fallen U.S. soldiers’ coffins in 2004. Silicio’s photo, published in The Seattle Times, fueled a political firestorm over whether the U.S. was manipulating public opinion or protecting family privacy by blacking out images of the Iraqi War dead. It was a debate Silicio said she neither welcomed nor intended when she initially shared the photo with family and friends. “It was a passionate picture that they turned political,” she said on Tuesday. “They should be honored coming home. They should be addressed. What parent doesn’t want their child honored when they come home?” Allowing coffins to be photographed more widely, she said, would put the focus back on the soldiers.