EL CAJON, Calif -- A former soldier in the U.S. Army who said she was forced a decade ago to choose between going AWOL or giving her children up to foster care was arrested for desertion, it was reported Tuesday.

Giselle Flynn, who has been listed as deserter by the Army since March 1999, was arrested Saturday in her apartment by El Cajon police, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

El Cajon police got a request from the Army's warrants division to pick her up, and she was locked up at the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee.

Flynn told the newspaper that she tried to surrender twice over the years at local Navy installations, because the Army has no base in the area. But Army officials asked the Navy to tell her to go home both times, the newspaper reported.

Flynn, a single mother of two, said she was forced to abandon her station in Georgia when her son was hospitalized in San Diego on February 1999 with ringworm, anemia and pneumonia.

The Army granted her emergency leave and eventually, the mother sought permission to bring her children back to Fort Gordon. The Army told her that trainees were not allowed to have children on base and Flynn argued that her family wouldn't take her children.

Flynn said the Army instructed her to put the children in foster care, and that's when she decided to go AWOL.