Full page article in today's issue of TIME worthy of all your attention: "A Call To Nurse" "For ARMY LIEUT. EMMA CUEVAS, there used to be nothing to compare with the thrill of skimming the treetops of Panama at 160 mph in a 10 - ton, 50 ft. Black Hawk helicopter. That was before she discovered the slower-motion joy of nursing her 21 lb., nine-month-old daughter Isabella. Since then Cuevas has twice asked the Army to let her leave the service, arguing that a pilot's demanding schedule has made it impossible for her to breastfeed her daughter properly. The Army says no, explaining that Cuevas made a deal when she bacame a cadet at West Point. U.S. taxpayers spent $500,000 educating her at the academy and at pilot training school in exchange for her pledge to stay in uniform until May 2000. In recent downsizing years, the Army has let many in her 1993 class renege on that deal, but not the pilots. That's because when it comes to these soldiers, who are in short supply, the Army is holding on just as tightly as Isabella. This week Cuevas' husband, Jeff Blaney, also a lieutenant, who graduated from West Point the same year as his wife, plans to sue the Army on behalf of Isabella in federal district court in Washington. The draft of his complaint asserts that his daughter is being denied nothing less than a "constitutional right to breast-feed by having her mother impounded by the government." Attached affidavits from pediatricians say Isabella will grow up healthier if she drinks her mother's milk until she is two. Cuevas doesn't want her baby drinking formula and is unable to pump enough breast milk to feed her." It goes on to say when she has duty at night the baby cries for hours and she joined the Army to "defend the country" but isn't willing to forsake her child during peacetime. "The Army has a simple maternity policy: six weeks off and it's back to work. Unlike the Coast Guard, the Army does not give a new parent the option of an unpaid leave. . . . . . . . Military officials say Cuevas' request is unprecedented, and fear that granting it will seriously undermine the military's system of mandatory commitments. Surprisingly, that's also the view of most of Cuevas' female colleagues. "Her selfishness," says Major Mary Finch, an Army helicopter pilot who attended West Point a decade before Cuevas, "is a disgrace to women in the military." Finch too is married to an Army officer and is th mother of two daughters ages five and three. She breast-fed them during her six weeks' maternity leave and then put them on formula. "This is playing right into the hands of those who believe there is a natural conflict between motherhood and military service," Finch says. But Cuevas doesn't see it that way. "Just as women deserve maternity leave, they deserve to be able to feed their children," she says. "The more we sacrifice our families for the military, the weaker our families -- and our country--become.". . . . . (That is about 2/3 of the article) TIME's e-mail address is [log in to unmask] Jane