BOSTON -- In just weeks, hundreds of members of the 181st Infantry will head to Afghanistan. But what does it mean for the families left behind when loved ones head to war?

Jeanne Munsell started flying a single Blue Star military flag outside her Ware home in early August.

"It signifies that you have someone away," Munsell said.

Her husband, Staff Sgt. Bill Munsell, is one of almost 700 members of the 181st Infantry Battalion who will head to Afghanistan later this month. They've been training at a base in Indiana since early August before going to war.

"Saying goodbye that day could have been the last time I'll see him," Jeanne Munsell said.

"When he had to get out of the car and me and my mom had to go quickly, it was kind of hard for me and her crying on the way home," said Munsell's 11-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn. "But we got through it, and we always will."

Life doesn't stop on the home front. The emotional toll isn't the only part that gets harder.

Jeanne Munsell has to be a single parent for at least a year with bills to pay, dinners to make and a daughter to raise.

"I'm mom and dad at the same time with no choice, nobody to lean on and nobody to help make the decisions," she said.

Bill Munsell has been training day and night at Camp Atterbury before he heads to a war zone in late October. Back at his home in Ware, cell phones and Skype are as close as his wife and daughter can get to him.

"The time has actually gone quickly because we've been so busy," Jeanne Munsell said. "I'm sure once the holidays start, it's going to be tough again because he's not going to be here with us."

New York City’s Board of Elections came under withering criticism Monday for failing to send absentee ballots to New Yorkers in the military and living overseas before a federal deadline.

Sen. Charles Schumer, who wrote the 2009 legislation that required the ballots be mailed out in plenty of time for men and women in the military to vote, said the ballots should be put on the next plane to Afghanistan.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said any such delay would be “reprehensible,” though he added he did not personally know if the ballots were late

“It would not surprise me if the Board of Elections screwed up on this,” Bloomberg said Monday. “They’ve not done a good enough job yet, and rather than criticize them, maybe it’s time we just tried to help them. The trouble is, they don’t seem to be willing to take help from other people.”

At issue is a new law requiring states to mail ballots to troops 45 days before a general election. Because the New York’s primary is relatively late — it came this year on Sept. 14 — that state received a deadline waiver. Yet New York City and several counties’ boards of elections still failed to meet that new deadline of October 1.

According to a letter sent to the Pentagon last week by state board of elections officials, New York City, Erie, Niagara, Putnam and Westchester counties all failed to get all their ballots in the mail to military personnel and Americans living abroad.

Schumer said in a statement that the whole reason he wrote the law was “so our brave men and women overseas would no longer be disenfranchised and there is absolutely no excuse for failing to get this done.”

Spokespeople for the city and state election boards did not immediately return messages for comment on Monday, a government holiday.