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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."

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.

It is notable that the Army only began keeping records on suicides in 1980, a policy likely fueled by the cascade of attempted and successful suicides by Vietnam veterans. In 1983, with the introduction of the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, the military and VA began, finally, to acknowledge the debilitating effects of this combat-related trauma reaction. Increased risk of suicide is among the many symptoms of the half-million Vietnam veterans diagnosed with chronic PTSD. Using the most conservative estimates, there may be as many as 75,000 active duty military or recently discharged veterans with PTSD or significant symptoms of PTSD, according to psychologist Alan Peterson of the University of Texas. Peterson is a researcher with a multidisciplinary consortium recently awarded a $25 million Department of Defense grant to study behavioral treatments for PTSD.To date, there has been no comprehensive epidemiological study on military suicides resulting from PTSD. In 1988, however, the Centers for Disease Control presented congressional testimony, confirming 9,000 suicides among Vietnam combat veterans.

According to figures obtained by the Associated Press, there has been a steady increase in suicides since 2003, totaling 450 active duty soldiers, with the highest numbers occurring in the past year. Military suicides vary considerably between branches of the service, with the Army and Marine Corps frequently reaching the highest annual rates. Longer and more frequent deployments and the primacy of ground combat operations are factors often blamed for the Army’s higher rates of physical injury, mental illness and suicide. In October 2008, the Army announced a five-year, $50 million collaborative study with the National Institute of Mental Health to address suicide. In a rare public admission of the urgency of the problem, Dr. S. Ward Cassells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, stated in the New York Times, “We’ve reached a point where we do need some outside help.” Such efforts are encouraging but will yield little immediate assistance to active duty soldiers, returning veterans and their families.

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.

Tucker received a medical discharge from the Army last year and he now is Officer Chris Tucker of the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department. "You still get to serve your community and your country in other ways," he said. At age 26, he is a veteran of three combat tours. The patrol skills he learned on the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah and Sadr City come in handy as he drives his police cruiser around the neighborhoods of his Savannah precinct.

As the war hits the six-year mark, Tucker is part of a history -- and a legacy -- still being written as the military tries to better understand the depth of the damage to those exposed repeatedly to the violence. "I still have the nightmares and wake up and find myself downstairs and I don't know how I got there," Tucker said. "I still see and dream the same things. ... Faces. Kids' faces. People that you have engaged or you have had contact with. ... You see your colleagues blown up. Things like that." He left the Army with a sour taste. He was sent back for his third tour despite the nightmares, depression, major hearing loss and painful injuries to his back and both feet. Then, the Army decided to give him a medical discharge for his back issues even though Tucker believes he could have recovered with rehabilitation. But he tries not to dwell on his frustration. "I try to distance myself from it as much as I can, because for me, the more I think about it, the more I reflect on what happened and what we did, the more I think the dreams and the nightmares actually come back."

Police Cpl. Randy Powell is 50 years old and became a grandfather just last week. Watch Tucker and Powell tell their stories » Powell served nearly 20 years ago in the Persian Gulf War, then in 1992 took an early retirement package when the Army was downsizing after the war. The deal required him to stay on what the military calls the IRR -- the Individual Ready Reserve -- but even as troops were sent to Afghanistan after 9/11 and then to Iraq for repeat combat tours, Powell heard nothing. Then last year, nearly 15 years after leaving the military, he was told to report to a local Reserve center. Another request came in January of this year. Both times, after some perfunctory paperwork, Powell was sent home. But when he returned home from work one day last month, an overnight letter from the Army had arrived with orders that he was being activated for an Iraq deployment. First, starting next month, he'll have refresher training on radar systems at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.