From Here to Maternity

The Sixties baby boomers may have lost the White House, but a new generation is on the way at Fort Bragg, home to the 22,000 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and 29,000 soldiers from other units. Since they began returning en masse from serving in Iraq, they have set off a tsunami of pregnancies among returning women soldiers and army wives. The base hospital is delivering 300 babies a month and on Saturday, 1,000 recent mothers and mothers-to-be gathered at the largest military baby shower ever assembled, the New York Times writes. Attendance at Dads 101, a class for new and soon-to-be fathers, has doubled. And there has been a run on maternity-size combat uniforms in the digitized, sand-patterned camouflage used in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think it’s the nature of war to come back and to want to create something,” explained Wanda McCants, a nurse on the labor and delivery unit.