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Like many stories, this has several beginnings. Here is one: On a hot day in August, 1983, just before my senior year of high school, I walked into the Army recruitment office in Appleton, Wisconsin.

The purpose of my visit was practical. I wanted to go to college. The recruitment officer was a smoker. The fumes had stained the walls of his office, of maybe the plaster had actually been painted that color. The place was warm. I remember that I was dressed in a wool skirt my mom had made and that I should not have worn wool in August. The officer asked a few questions, talked a great deal, was respectful, and told me I would be a "good recruit." I was susceptible to this praise.

I remember a few other things. One was that my incipient patriotism took a running leap as he described how I might serve my country. There was a familial component to this emotion. My father and his brother were both Air Force men. My cousin had made a career as a Navy SEAL, something all of us looked on with pride.

I was interviewing for the Army Reserves, and the recruiter described the money the government would give me, enough to pay for four years of university, in return, after I graduated, I would serve full time in the Army for two years. I would be an officer. It was the money, though, that made my blood rush. I wanted it. I wanted an education. And I wanted to get one without causing my family pain. A few weeks later, school started up again, and I learned that none of my friends were considering military service. Peer pressure won. I didn't join up.

The recruiters hadn't finished with me, though. They called my house more than once during my senior year. Even after I entered college, they kept phoning. When I wasn't home on break, my parents took the calls. Together, we turned down the Army perhaps a dozen times, in both flush periods and on days when money for my education was hard to come by.

Over the years, I have come to see this decision, however arbitrary, as pivotal and defining--one of those choices that determines a life.

Some of my college classmates were in ROTC. They ended up going to the Middle East for the first Gulf War. After we graduated, I heard about their experiences in the desert and on leave. Always, just as on the day when I first saw them in uniform, I heard a bell sound in my brain. I sometimes felt I was witnessing my other life, the one I turned down.

I heard that bell sound again as I reported and wrote this article.

Across the country, in mall towns and big cities, the families of our National Guard and military Reserves are having trouble paying the bills. Many are barely treading water. Some go under.

Many households of Reservists--30 percent, according to a 2002 Pentagon estimate--lose income when activated. In 2002, the U.S. department of Defense also surveyed the spouses of Reservists who had been activated. Out of the 30 percent who said they had lost household income, the Pentagon survey indicated, half had monthly decreases of between $500 and $2,000 per month. Another 23 percent forfeited in excess of $2,001 monthly.

Poor pay and economic strife are conditions the Reserves and National Guard share with others in the regular military. "Lower-ranking enlisted people qualify for food stamps. It's not how we're used to thinking about government employees, but there it is," says Kathleen Gilberd, co-chair of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild. "Active duty pay has traditionally not been enough to help people get by." Extreme financial crises set in when service people are deployed because they then have no opportunity to get a second job to supplement their income.

But Reservists and National Guard members are especially hard hit. "The ones who do experience income loss, it's usually a significant income loss," says Shirley Calhoun, spokeswoman for the National Military Family Association. Many have good-paying jobs in the civilian world. But in the military ranks, the same people may not yet have made officer, "so they are at a lower pay level," says Calhoun.

Part of the problem is the loss of overtime pay. In California, many members of the National Guard are in law enforcement or in corrections, says Steven Maloney, the family assistance manager for Operation Ready Families with the California National Guard. They are used to working overtime for "ten, fifteen, twenty hours a week," says Maloney. "That can be a big chunk of change." When a corrections or police officer is deployed, the overtime pay disappears. "It's a shock to the system upon deployment.

For people who own their own businesses--and there are many such people in the Reserves and the Guard--deployment can also take a toll. "If you're a doctor, lawyer, or dentist" in private practice "and you walk away from your job," you are going to lose business, says Master Sergeant Retired Michael Cline, executive director of the Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States. "A client isn't going to wait for you to return to get his teeth pulled. He's going to another dentist." For those who run businesses like contracting or trucking, the results can be equally devastating. "You go buy a $100,000 truck to drive down the highway and that truck sits in the driveway, you still got to make payments on that truck."

Many members of the Guard "suffer a considerable amount of financial loss," says Cline. "There's not a day goes by that I don't get a request" for financial help "to pay the mortgage, make a car payment, buy food, pay the electric bill. Yesterday, I had four of them come across my desk."

Cline knows of several instances where families have found themselves forced into bankruptcy.

"You wouldn't believe the horror stories we have," he says. Just the other day, he says, a "guy's car got repossessed."

At the debate of Democratic Presidential contenders shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Senator John Kerry brought up the subject. "All across this country there are families right now, all of us have talked to them, who are suffering greatly because the Guards and Reserves have been called up. They are overextended," he said. "The troops of the United States of America are overextended. Their deployments are too long. The families are hurting at home because they lose money from the private sector when they're called up and they get paid less in the military and nobody makes it up to them."

Kathy Cruz is a bankruptcy attorney in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The state is home to the 39th Infantry Division of the Arkansas National Guard.

That division left Hot Springs in October to serve eighteen months total, twelve of these in Iraq. Already, Cruz's office has accumulated some clients.

"I was looking at four files this morning, and this is one little bitty law firm, and they were all military," she says.

One of Cruz's new clients, a family with four teenage children, owned a gas station-convenience store. The father of the family, an Army Reservist medic, was called for his deployment to Iraq in September. "When he's gone, there's no one to run the store," says Cruz. Within a month the family ran into serious financial trouble. "Better known as, 'Who's minding the store?' The answer is nobody. So now there's no store."

After they went bankrupt, family members realized that they could not afford the monthly payment on their house, so they gave it back to the mortgage company. Otherwise, it would have been repossessed, says Cruz. The bad luck spread. The soldier's parents had co-signed on the loan for the store. "If the grandparents don't file" for bankruptcy, they'll lose their own home, says Cruz. "And that's going to be real trouble because now all four kids are living with them. Where else are they going to go?" The grandparents are in their sixties, she says. The grandfather is disabled, and the grandmother has reentered the workforce to stay afloat. Recently, the whole family came to Cruz's office. "You've got three generations sitting in front of you, scared out of their wits," she says.

Cruz is pretty certain she hasn't seen the end of the bankruptcies. "This is the tip of the iceberg," she says. She explains how the downward spiral that leads to bankruptcy can start. "If you were making $1,000" a month "and now you're making $500," she says, you will tend to use your credit card to make up the difference in the first month and hope that you will catch up in the months to come. "And then if you can't pay up your credit cards, you go and refinance your house" and live on that equity. "Pretty soon you run out of options."