Ronnie Polaneczky: Called into action with kids at home: Where do military moms' loyalties lie?

MY HEART ached for Lisa Pagan. But something about her predicament gave me pause.

Pagan is the Army mom on reserve status who was called into active duty but claimed that she had nowhere to place her kids while she was deployed.

Her husband's job required constant travel, so he couldn't care for the kids while his wife was gone. Nor could grandparents assume custody of the couple's children, ages 5 and 3.

Despite Pagan's appeals, the Army summoned her Sunday to Fort Benning, Ga.

So she brought her little ones with her.

"I guess they'll have to contact the highest person at the base, and they'll have to decide from there what to do," Pagan told the Associated Press last weekend, in a story that has been picked up around the globe.

"I either report and bring the children with me or don't report and face dishonorable discharge and possibly being arrested. I guess I'll just have to make my case while I'm there."

By yesterday afternoon, military officials had decided to discharge Pagan, though it wasn't yet known whether it would be an honorable parting.

You can imagine Pagan's anguish: What mom wouldn't fight to stay put with her kids?

Andrea Hooper, that's who.

"She needed to find child-care for her family," Andrea told me yesterday. "She made a serious promise when she enlisted, and she's obligated to fulfill it."

Like Pagan, Andrea, an Air Force captain, is also on "individual reserve-ready" status, i.e., she could be called into active duty on a moment's notice.

So might her husband, Will, a Marine Reserve lieutenant colonel based at Willow Grove Naval Air Station.

"There's a chance that both of us would have to leave the kids at the same time," says Andrea, 35, who lives in Newtown Square, where she's an at-home mom to two toddlers.

"That's why you make a family-care plan. You have to honor the commitment you made. Military families do it all the time."

According to the Associated Press story, though, Pagan said that she knew, after giving birth to her first child while on active duty, that there was a chance she could be recalled. But instead of making a family-care plan, she buried the thought and had a second child after she left active service.

She was recalled in December 2007. Her subsequent two appeals postponed the call by 15 months - during which time she still could have devised that all-important family plan.

Instead, she dug in her heels.

To be fair, Pagan made her commitment to Uncle Sam before she had children. It's likely that, at the time, she couldn't fathom how profoundly motherhood would alter priorities that she once thought were set in stone.

"No one wants to leave their families," says Andrea Hooper. "It would be very difficult to have to leave my children. But when you make an obligation to your country, you know there might be sacrifice. You don't run from it when it comes."

 
Andrea expresses similar thoughts in "Women in the Military: Willing, Able, Essenti
 
al," a new documentary produced by the Pennsylvania Veteran's Museum. The movie's world premiere is tomorrow at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, in Arlington National Cemetery.

A veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, during which she commanded a support squadron of 700, Andrea is joined in the film by impressive military vets.

Among them are Brig. Gen. Anna Mae Hays, America's first female military general; Marine Capt. Vernice Armour, the first female African-American fighter pilot; and Maj. Gen. Jeanne Holm, a World War II, Korea and Vietnam vet who was also the first woman to attain the rank of major general.

These are brilliant, compelling and formidable women, made of a particular brand of "military right stuff" that many of us, myself included, will never embody.

The commitment of military mothers especially awes me, because, when they're deployed, they often leave young children behind.

The way Andrea Hooper will, if called.

The way Lisa Pagan now won't have to.

Perhaps she has learned, too late, that she's more like the rest of us than she ever thought. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ ronnieblog.