Washington ? Catherine Perusse remembers the chilling call she and husband Ted got one recent Tuesday. The military phoned to tell them their son, Robert T. Benson, of Spokane, Wash., had been badly wounded in Iraq and transferred to a hospital in Kuwait. Surgery had gone “as planned.”

That’s the last thing the family heard until 20 hours later when they were told he was dead.

“We were just very frustrated to have a 20-hour time period with a very brief message about his status,” said Perusse, Benson’s stepmother. “You would consider five minutes a terrible time to wait to hear about your child.”

There is no good way to tell someone their husband, wife, son or daughter has been killed in action.

Still, as the bodies of U.S. servicemen come home from Iraq, some families are disquieted by the military’s handling of this heartbreaking news.

Their grief has been compounded by the slow pace of getting word, or the lack of detail when they do find out.

Even in this world of rapid communications, some families complain that they hit barriers when trying to get more information.

Lisa Perez’s brother died in July and she still doesn’t have all her questions answered.

An officer notified Perez and her mother that 24-year-old Pfc. Wilfredo Perez Jr. and two other soldiers were killed in a grenade attack in July while guarding a children’s hospital in Iraq. But when the officer came by to tell them the news, he took their Social Security numbers and was out the door in 10 minutes.

“He handled his business and that was it,” said Perez, 25, of Ridgewood, N.Y.

The military does its best to get notification to families as swiftly as possible — within 24 hours ideally — on what it does know about the circumstances surrounding death and injury.

That’s often no easy task in a complex war so far away.

“We don’t deal in rumors, we deal in the facts as we know them, and we are as honest with family members as we possibly can be,” said John Molino, deputy undersecretary of defense for military, community and family policy.

Each branch of the armed forces does the notifying when its service member dies.

A notification officer and chaplain go to the spouse’s home, or if the soldier was single, to the parents’ home.

Molino says in that first visit, mainly the family wants “just a quiet moment.”

Perusse wanted more than that after the initial word her stepson was wounded. Benson was shot in the head at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

She found the lack of communication between the family and the military frustrating — time zone differences seemed to hamper their ability to be in the know faster.

“You’d think if we could talk to the moon, we should have been able to talk to Kuwait.”

Despite all that, she and other family members know it is not easy for the military, either.

“The Army has been wonderful,” she said, “and treated us and our son with great respect.”