They Marched Into Sunlight (10 page)

T
ERRY DE LA
M
ESA
A
LLEN
J
R.
certainly had some choice in the life he would live, but the moments of doubt were rare. Imagine being a boy of thirteen in El Paso, and it is just before Christmas 1942, the war is on, and day after day you and your friends read and hear about the heroic deeds of American GIs fighting in North Africa against the Vichy French and the Nazis and in the Pacific against the Japanese, and you run around the neighborhood near Fort Bliss pretending to be soldiers. And then a letter arrives like the one that came from Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen Sr. postmarked 8 December.

“My dear Sonny,” the old man began, using the loving nickname he called his namesake and only child, whose picture he carried with him in a leather pocket case. He was enclosing a twenty-dollar money order for a Christmas present, which he would have preferred to pick out himself but found impossible to do, given where he was and what he was doing, which was in North Africa commanding the First Infantry Division. But he had another present for his son that would be delivered especially by a staff officer heading back to the States on emergency leave. It was a flag of the Big Red One carried by his assault units when they landed in Algeria, perhaps “the first American flag to be landed on the shores.” Later that same flag was “carried on a Tommy gun” by a soldier in General Allen’s jeep until it was retired from service and “marked and embroidered by some of the French nuns in a nearby convent.”

After urging Sonny to pay attention to his studies so that he could enroll at the New Mexico Military Institute the following year, General Allen closed his letter home with a copy of the verses of a new First Division song. “I don’t know exactly what the tune is,” he confessed, “but the soldiers seem to sing it to any tune that comes along.”

No mission is too difficult, no sacrifice too great

Our duty to the nation is first we’re here to state

We’re a helluva gang to tangle with

Just follow us and see

The Fightin’ First will lead the way from hell to victory.

A battle flag and a battle song—these were not toys or imaginings but the real thing. Terry Allen the younger grew up in a veritable museum honoring the grit and glory of the United States Army. A few months before the battle flag arrived, his father had sent home a pair of special-issue rubber-soled basketball shoes that he and his soldiers had used to exercise on the deck of the transport ship that carried them from England to North Africa. The war relics were expressions of a father’s love but also served as reminders of his expectations, and it was that combination that defined the bond between the two Terry Allens from the time of the son’s birth on April 13, 1929. It was not intimidation and fear of disappointment, but deep affection and constant tutelage that funneled the son down the narrow chute of his family’s military tradition.

The soldier’s life went back another generation to Samuel E. Allen, a West Point graduate who served forty-two years as an artillery officer in the regular army, and who was married to Conchita Álvarez de la Mesa of Brooklyn, the daughter of a Spanish colonel who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Samuel Allen was said to be unassuming and conventional, traits that never came to mind at the mention of Terry Allen Sr., who began his career as a hell-raiser at West Point, where he earned his first wild nickname, Tear-around-the-Mess-Hall Allen. He hated math, found schoolwork tedious, stuttered in the classroom, and flunked out of the academy. His determination to become an army officer pushed him back to school at Catholic University in Washington, where he earned a degree and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Over the next three decades he rose up the army ranks with a reputation as an uncommonly beloved leader who was disdainful of any rule or bureaucratic regulation that he thought inhibited the fighting spirit of his men.

During World War II, when he was commanding the Big Red One in North Africa, his freewheeling style made him a favorite of the American press.
Time
put him on its cover with a tribute to the infantry. A. J. Liebling profiled him in
The New Yorker.
Ernie Pyle occasionally slept in his tent (bedrolls on the ground, no cots for this general) and called him Terry and pronounced him “one of my favorite people”—high praise from the war correspondent who made his reputation writing about anonymous GIs rather than their famous leaders. An old jaw wound made Allen hiss through his teeth when he was riled up, emitting a sound “like a leak in a tire,” as Pyle described it, and the language that came whistling out was often “so wonderfully profane it couldn’t be put down in black and white” in any case. “This was no intellectual war with him,” Pyle wrote. “He hated Germans and Italians like vermin, and his pattern for victory was simple: just wade in and murder the hell out of the low-down, good-for-nothing so-and-so’s.” Hence the nickname Terrible Terry Allen.

How his soldiers wore their uniforms, shaved their faces, and behaved in town while on furlough was less important to him than their devotion to the division and the ferocity with which they fought. While this attitude won him the unswerving loyalty of his troops, his superiors came to believe that his division was too much a separate force, individualistic and undisciplined, operating by its own rules. General Omar Bradley yanked Allen from command near the end of the Sicilian campaign, laying on him the unusual flaw of “loving the division too much.” Allen was nevertheless too valuable to leave on the sidelines for the rest of the war. He returned to the States with orders to form a new division, the 104th, which was trained in time to march through France and Germany with a typical Terrible Terry battle cry leading it on, “Nothing in hell can stop the Timberwolves!”

The general’s devotion to his soldiers, and their loyalty in return, was repeated tenfold in the relationship between father and son. Terry Allen Sr. was a skilled polo player whose horsemanship was legendary, going back to 1922 when as a cavalryman riding a big black army horse named Coronado he defeated the Texas cowboy Key Dunne in a long-distance horse race between Dallas and San Antonio. It was a five-day marathon that took him from the Adolphus Hotel to the Alamo and drew thousands of spectators along the rain-soaked route, inspiring press coverage matched by few sporting events in the Lone Star State outside football. Whatever he loved, he wanted his son to love as well. Sonny was only two when he was placed on his first saddle at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, and six when he took riding lessons while his father was stationed with the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas. A love of polo was also passed along. Terry Jr. learned the game before he was ten and later became team captain and one of the best players at the New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI), his career fostered by Terry Sr. from afar. From the war zone in Europe in 1945, the general wrote a letter to Charles Meurisse and Company in Chicago placing a special order of polo sticks for Cadet Terry Allen. “I want four sticks 51" long and three sticks 52" long…. I want cigar-shaped maple heads of about medium weight and I particularly want these sticks to be well balanced and of the best possible grade.”

Nothing but the best for Sonny.

General Allen’s passionate interest in his son’s polo development was surpassed only by the zeal with which he pushed for Terry Jr.’s appointment to West Point. “I have avoided seeking political influence for myself, but I feel that it is quite proper for me to do so for the sake of Terry Jr.,” he acknowledged in a letter to Captain Reese Cleveland of Midland. And lobby he did, virtually nonstop starting in August 1944, when his son was only fifteen and he was back at Colorado Springs organizing the Timberwolves. He took time out then to meet with Senator Tom Connally of Texas to press for the appointment, though it was still several years off, and followed that with a letter extolling Terry Jr.’s qualifications. As the Timberwolves trudged their way through Europe, his lobbying only intensified. Letters went out regularly to influential friends and politicians in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Washington, all the way up to Vice President Truman. He recruited members of his staff to pull strings as well. First Lieutenant Alfred W. Wechsler of Connecticut, a loyal Timberwolf, wrote letters to several Democratic politicians in his home state, including one to State Senator Matthew Daley that pleaded the case in blunt terms. “The General has only one boy who is fifteen years of age and he is the apple of the old man’s eye,” Wechsler wrote. “The General’s paramount wish is to have his son follow the family tradition of professional soldiering. It is also the boy’s wish…. I would like for you to contact your friends in Washington and have them do their all in laying the foundation for the direct principal appointment…for this young man.”

Part of the old man’s motivation surely was to have his son succeed where he had failed and enjoy the long-range benefits of West Point connections that he had missed. But if Terry Jr. was more handsome and exhibited some social skills that Terry Sr. lacked, they shared an unease with math and a boredom with schoolwork. The general was at once understanding of his son’s academic disposition and relentless in his gentle prodding that he strive for higher marks. In a February 1945 letter wishing Sonny luck in his high school midterms, Terry Sr. offered heartfelt advice about tests: “Above all—do not let them worry you, as you are capable of doing well if you do not get nervous about them. I just wanted to let you know that I am very happy over your progress and the fact that you are trying hard is satisfactory, insofar as I am concerned.” Two months later he wrote a letter to the headmaster at NMMI expressing concern that Terry had been “dropped” from plane geometry—a course that he needed in preparation for the math heavy curriculum at West Point. When Terry Jr. sent him a strong report card at the end of that semester, the father gushed praise and noted sympathetically that studying was “a terrible bore, but is very necessary if you want not to have too hard a time when you go to West Point.”

It took all of that lobbying and cajoling plus a year of remedial tutoring at another military prep school, but Terry Jr. finally made it to West Point on a senatorial appointment in 1948. As a cadet in Company H-l, he became known for “his good nature” and “burrhead haircut.” He was in the Spanish club, played polo, and boxed. At Christmastime 1949, when his mother Mary Fran came to visit, she stopped by the gymnasium and distracted him just enough for his sparring partner to break his nose, an accident that later prompted a letter of reassurance to Mrs. Allen from Colonel Earl W. (Red) Blaik, the West Point football coach and athletic director. “Like boots and spurs to a cavalryman, a broken nose is a mark of manly distinction to a youngster, and in cases where they have been properly set there is no reason to worry about whether such a break will affect either the good looks or the health of the individual,” Blaik wrote. Cadet Allen was regarded as “a good listener,” though in a classic understatement, the
Howitzer
yearbook confided that he was “never an academic standout.” In fact he finished second to the bottom of the class of 1952, one man away from being the goat of his class. It mattered not at all; he had survived West Point where his father had not, and though his personality was different from the famous general’s, his classmates noticed in him many of the same leadership skills that would prove more important in his chosen career than an aptitude in mathematics. “On occasion,” a classmate later wrote, “he would use a heartfelt yell and a slap on the back as a means to influence those around him.”

Lieutenant Allen reached Korea with the Fifth Infantry Regiment at the end of the conflict there in 1953 and then returned home to Fort Lewis and began an ascent that paralleled his father’s four decades earlier. Terry Sr. was watching his son’s progress with more than casual interest, as attested to by a letter he received on December 20, 1955, from John C. Schuller, a life insurance agent in El Paso who had inside sources at the Pentagon and was able to obtain Terry Jr.’s personnel records. “Terry has an OEI (Officer Efficiency Index) of 132 as of now. This is a numerical evaluation now being given officers based on their efficiency reports. 150 is the max. 132 places him well up in the upper ONE-SIXTH of all first LTs in the army. In other words, he is highly outstanding among officers in his grade. It is relatively rare for a LT to get as high as 132.” Schuller went on to assess Terry Jr.’s prospects for getting into advanced officer training courses and promotion to captain. (“Here again no worry because he has such a fine record.”) All of which surely pleased the old man, who was by then retired and living in El Paso. The family ambition, shared as well by Mary Fran, was for Terry Jr. to exceed his father and someday wear the three stars of a lieutenant general or four stars of a full general.

After reaching captain, he served as a staff officer for the Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and then was sent west to Colorado Springs as a junior aide to General Charles Hart at the U.S. Army Air Defense. That is where he met Bebe Coonly and her husband, Bill, who was Hart’s senior aide. General Allen had stayed in Colorado Springs in 1944 while establishing the Timberwolves and was put up at the Broadmoor Hotel, where he became friends with the managers of the resort, the Tutt family. The Tutts were now quick to find Terry Jr. an apartment near the ice arena. The dashing young bachelor captain drove around town in a 1957 Thunderbird convertible with his polo boots and mallets in the back seat. He stopped over at the Coonlys’ almost every day, or night, sometimes as late as two or three in the morning, knowing that he could bang on the door at any hour and feel welcome. On his way home from a party, he might “come in smiling expansively” and pronounce to the groggy Coonlys that his father had always told him never to drink alone. The life that his father had helped shape for him looked fine indeed in those final days of the fifties, and on the first of April 1959, Terry Sr.’s birthday, the loving disciple sent home a telegram that read, “My best wishes from the luckiest son in the world—Sonny.”