Deployed Troops Battle for Child Custody

Lt. Eva Crouch holds a 2004 photo of her daughter, Sara, at her home in Lawrenceburg, Ky., in this June 29, 2005, file photo. A member of the Kentucky National Guard, Crouch was deployed in 2003. Soon after her return, a judge would decide that Sara should stay with her dad. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke) (Ed Reinke - AP)

Military mothers and fathers, meanwhile, speak of birthdays missed. Bonds, once strong, weakened. Returning from duty not to joyful reunions but to endless hearings.

They are people like Marine Cpl. Levi Bradley, helping to fight the insurgency in Fallujah, Iraq, at the same time he battles for custody of his son in a Kansas family court.

Like Sgt. Mike Grantham of the Iowa National Guard, whose two kids lived with him until he was mobilized to train troops after 9/11.

Like Army Reserve Capt. Brad Carlson, fighting for custody of his American-born children in a foreign land after his marriage crumbled while he was deployed to the Middle East and his European wife refused to return to the States.

And like Eva Crouch, who spent two years and some $25,000 pushing her case through the Kentucky courts.

"I'd have spent a million," she says. "My child was my life ... I go serve my country, and I come back and have to go through hell and high water."

In the midst of World War II, back in 1943, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the soldiers' relief law should be "liberally construed to protect those who have been obliged to drop their own affairs to take up the burdens of the nation."

Shielding soldiers, after all, would allow them "to devote their entire energy" to the nation's defense, as the law itself states.

But in child custody cases, the opposite often happens.

"The minute these guys are getting deployed, the other parent is going, `I can do whatever I want now,'" says Jean Ann Uvodich, an attorney who represented Bradley. "If you have an ex who wants to take advantage, they can and will. The obstacle is that the judge needs to respect the law."

Bradley had already joined the Marines, and his young wife, Amber, was a junior in high school when their son Tyler came along in September 2003. With Bradley in training, Amber and the baby lived with Bradley's mother, Starleen, in Ottawa, Kan.

When the marriage fell apart two years later, Bradley filed for divorce and Amber signed a parenting plan granting him sole custody of Tyler and agreeing that the boy would live with Starleen while Bradley was on duty.