Brandy Stewart holds her daughter, Catalina, 22 months, while she chats online with her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Stewart. Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser

"It's one thing they do," said Stewart, who saves Saturday morning for her toddler to talk to her father from a war zone on the other side of the world.

"Usually it's his nose she touches, but now it's hers."

In these difficult days of being a single mother, going to school full time, working as a tutor and struggling with a new diagnosis of recurrent cancer, Stewart has also become a powerful role model for other young military wives — although she won't tell you that.

At Leeward Community College, where she graduated in May with a perfect 4.0 grade point average and the admiration of students and administrators alike, Stewart formed an informal support group for other young military wives struggling to be students, mothers and supportive wives for husbands at war.

"My husband was telling me from Iraq that the wives were having some issues and he would say, 'Would you go talk to so-and-so and see how she's doing,' " she said.

So Brandy began reaching out and meeting monthly with half a dozen or more wives at school to talk out issues together.

Sgt. 1st Class Charles Stewart

It doesn't replace the formal Family Readiness Group support network that offers social and emotional support at every level for families of deployed soldiers, she said, but it's part of expanding the reach of helping hands during long months of uncertainty for families.

"It's just a group of students whose husbands are deployed," said Stewart, diminishing her role in helping others face everything from legal tangles to the behavior of their children. "We just get together and talk and make sure everyone's OK.

"Everybody's unit has a support group, but it's mostly older wives and the young ones don't tend to participate. So I thought at school they would like support from fellow students."

It's this spirit that has impressed students and administrators at LCC, where almost 10 percent of the 5,400-member student body is a member of the military or a spouse.

"Our valedictorian, Eli Tsukayama, at one point wanted to relinquish the speaking opportunity to Brandy because of all the trials and tribulations she's facing," said Stuart Uesato, acting dean of students. "He wanted her to be able to give the speech."

Stewart thanked him but turned the attention away from herself. Even her own burdens she carries quietly, turning for strength to her younger sister, who has come to live with her, and the daily phone and e-mail communication with her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Stewart. A drill sergeant when they met at Fort Jackson, S.C., he now runs the operations shop for a helicopter unit in Iraq.

Despite the demands of military service in a hostile area, it is he who does the hand-holding and asks the probing questions each time the phone line clicks open between Hawai'i and Iraq.

"He's seriously amazing," she says of the man who saw her through her first battle with cervical cancer four years ago. "He calls me every day he can to check on me."

Even so, she didn't want to tell him after she got the bad news in March.

"At first I wasn't going to, but I talked to a good friend who said 'If you don't tell him and something happens to you, you'll regret it.' We always tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts."

Despite the recurrence, she didn't expect the Army to send her husband home from Iraq. "It has to be something really serious," she said.

For the time being, Stewart is taking medication to shrink several tiny tumors, and her physician is evaluating the need for further surgery.

At such times, Army Family Readiness Groups can also play a vital role.

"It's like an extended family," said Patricia Simoes, spokeswoman for Schofield Barracks, home to 12,000 troops and their families, with 10,000 of those soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. "It's a good forum to resolve problems because you've got senior people who have the answers. Or if they don't, they know where to get them."

But Simoes had high praise for wives like Stewart who also form splinter support systems among smaller groups of families.

"It's awesome," said Simoes. "She realized there was a smaller group that had a special need and had the leadership to put this together."

For her own part, Stewart tries not to dwell on the hard times. Besides, there's too much to do volunteering for the American Cancer Society Hawai'i chapter and the Institute for Human Services, serving as president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society at LCC, dreaming of going to medical school some day, and keeping her young daughter from missing her dad.

"She knows he's gone because she's always slept with us, never in her own bed," she said. "Every so often in the middle of the night I'll see her little hand feeling for him and sometimes she'll wake up calling for him."

But the Saturday mornings with her father on the other end of the Web-cam help make up for all of that.

"I think in her mind it means Daddy's still here somewhere," said Stewart. "I think interacting with him like that is making it OK."