The trend in recent years of grandparents raising their grandchildren has reached all the way to the military. There are about 2.5 million grandparents across the country caring for their children’s children, and while the military does not have its own comparable statistic, it does know how many single parents currently are serving their country: 140,000. Of these, there are 23,000 single parents presently deployed overseas (and a total of 190,000 since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began), which means the task of caring for the children of these soldiers has fallen, in many cases, to grandparents. Many of the parents are now asking the military to recognize the need to help grandparents with financial assistance. So far the only change approved by Congress has been to allow single-parent personnel to name their own parents as the beneficiary of the $100,000 death benefit if the soldier should be killed. To date, 508 single parents have been killed serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon.