Perspective: Families' home-front battle

Some families with loved ones deployed to Iraq have turned to carboard cutouts to give children a sense of a missing parent being present.

While her dad served a long deployment in Iraq, Whitly Hunt was at a party where she saw a girl with her own father, hugging and kissing him, seeing and smelling him the way Whitly could not.

Distressed and lonely, the 15-year-old from Ft. Sheridan told her stepmother what had happened. Her stepmom gave T-shirts Hunt's dad had left behind to all three of their girls. From that moment, her dad's shirt was either on Hunt's headboard or wrapped around her shoulders where she could bury her face in it, his essence triggering powerful memories of roughhousing and video games.

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