They Marched Into Sunlight (12 page)

Using a tactic that would have made General Allen proud, the battalion encircled the village in a night move. “One rifle company was leading followed by the command group composed of the battalion commander, myself and our radio operators, we in turn followed by the other two rifle companies. After half of the encirclement was completed we received three rifle shots from the village. Everyone hit the ground thinking we would receive further fire. Nothing happened so the move was continued. Just before the leading rifle company completed the encirclement they bumped into 15 VC running out of the village and a running battle ensued. Although some of the VC were killed we recovered only one body. Reconstruction of events the next day proved that the VC village chief, who was also the #2 communist political boss in the district, was giving a communist political class to the villagers. The three shots we heard were warning of our presence and the group of VC running out of the village were the chief and his body guard which he normally carries when traveling from village to village. The most fortunate thing was that the body we recovered was the VC chief himself.”

Allen entered the village at daylight to observe the screening procedures, he told his wife. “Here the Division G5 and the South Vietnamese National Police and Army had lined up the male population over age 16. A Chieu Hoi (pronounced Chew Hoy) that is a former VC who now gives his loyalty to the government was identifying those he knew as VC. Three or four VC were rounded up this way. An additional 15 to 20 draft dodgers were also collected. While the screening took place the village males were fed GI fish and rice. Later in the day a small traveling carnival was brought in to entertain the village. The battalion remained deployed around the village while the house by house search continued. We found one VC and some weapons in a tunnel at the edge of town. I learned this village was considered about 40% VC or VC supporters. Ironically a village 10 miles away had very few VC due principally, I’m told, to the large number of Catholics.”

At the end of that village roundup, the battalion moved on to a three-day search-and-destroy mission in a jungle area to the south, closer to Saigon. “It was a dirty business. We received sporadic sniper fire, made occasional contact with small groups of local VC and found a number of mines and booby traps. All told we had eleven wounded. Sniper fire did come within 3 or 4 yards of me—he was a poor shot obviously. While moving single file down a jungle trail on the second day, the Sgt. Major who was just ahead of me discovered a trip wire across the trail. The wire was rigged at either end to two 60 mm mortar rounds. An entire company had passed over the wire but fortunately it was placed too far into the ground for anyone to trip it. Although we took casualties from the booby traps many were discovered and destroyed.”

The letter to his wife was so long in the writing that he continued it on Easter Sunday, before finally closing so that he could “drop this in the mail on the way to mass.”

How different that world of the Black Lions seemed from what Jean was experiencing in El Paso. Terry Allen Jr. might still be playing by the script, but hers was not unfolding the way she had expected. Her mother had died. Her father had remarried within six months. Her husband was in Vietnam, encircling villages. She had three small girls to look after and no one in El Paso to whom she felt close, her childhood friends married or gone. In that difficult and isolated condition, she felt the first undirected stirrings of something else, a need to break away and reinvent herself. In a visit to the new television station in town, ABC’s Channel 13, she proposed that they let her run her own weekly public affairs show. She was a striking figure in her short skirts, with long legs and flowing light-brown locks. She was also articulate and her family was well known, and such a show would cost little while satisfying the regulatory requirements of public interest broadcasting.
The Jean Allen Show
was born. It ran Sunday afternoons at two.

It was the typical local patchwork of the serious and the inane. Jean interviewed artists and authors and let local theaters perform snippets from their shows, but there was also the time a local dairy manager bragged about his best-producing cow and pulled out a picture of the cow and in a deadpan voice discussed the number of gallons she could let loose in a day. The show brought Jean into contact for the first time with people who were critical of the war in Vietnam, and day by day their thoughts altered her perspective. She noticed that people, even antiwar activists, seemed impressed that she was the wife of an army officer, but she was becoming less so. For the first time she began “to see the other side of the story in Vietnam,” and she embraced it, she would say later, as naïvely as she had previously “embraced not questioning politics.” She did not move to the other side gradually but suddenly, and it was more out of emotion than careful study. She was seeing life in a way she had never seen it before. Until then she had carried “abstract feelings with echoes of World War II in the background,” but now, suddenly, she was “watching television and seeing body bags brought out and scenes of villages where civilians had been bombed.”

This was all very different for her, and she was having a visceral reaction. As the weeks went by, in April and May, she could no longer make a distinction between her husband as a soldier and the military as a whole. If it was wrong, so was he. She began seeing the world as us versus them, and Terry Allen Jr. was one of them.

“T
HIS IS FOR
all the women who waited for their husbands,” Mary Fran Allen used to say as she started a story about what it was like to be home in El Paso while her husband was fighting in North Africa and Europe. The general’s wife could be an imperious figure around Fort Bliss, expecting clerks at the PX to drop what they were doing when she entered the store and lifeguards at the base pool to take extra care in watching out for her little granddaughters, but there was an authenticity to her sense of self as the soldier’s wife. One day she was swimming at the Officers’ Club pool with her granddaughter Consuelo when a bugle calling “Retreat” sounded over the loudspeakers along with the end-of-the-day blast of the howitzer. She reflexively started climbing up the pool ladder so that she could stand at attention on deck, as she always did. Consuelo didn’t understand and pulled at her to come back and play, accidentally scraping her grandmother’s leg against the sharp edge of the ladder. Mary Fran reached down, grabbed her granddaughter, and set her down at her side, and Consuelo gaped in amazement at an early childhood vision that she would never forget—the quintessential military wife standing at attention with blood dripping down her leg.

“A very special place must be reserved in Heaven for Army wives as reward for the years of separation they have endured because of military requirements…. There can be no greater admiration than that of the husband to return and find, as he has hoped, that his own wife has met the test of keeping up her end of things.” So began a section on how to be a proper army wife in
The Officer’s Guide,
the standard bible of the soldier’s profession.

Jean Ponder Allen was no longer interested in following that path to heaven. She struck up a relationship with the TV clown, started sleeping with him, and soon invited him to stay at her place, a house on a street called—of all things—Timberwolf, named after the famed division that Terry Allen Sr. led through Europe and that nothing in hell could stop. She was in a state of mind in which she felt no embarrassment and did not try to hide her relationship. Her daughters wondered who this strange man was in their house, who seemed to drink too much and who broke Bebe’s tricycle, but Jean was not thinking of her children as anything more than an extension of herself. She wrote Terry Jr. a letter telling him what she was doing and how she felt. Terry called from Vietnam, but the connection was bad, figuratively and literally; it sounded as though he were on a radiophone out in the field. Soon he was getting emergency leave, flying back to El Paso, calling Bebe Coonly and making her shriek with surprise.

H
E DROVE OVER TO
5014 Timberwolf in the pink Cadillac and tried to win back his wife. Feeling a need to defend her position, she overstated it, calling him a baby killer. She remembered his saying that he had grown to understand a lot of things that he hadn’t understood when he first got to Vietnam and that he was taking notes and would write a book about it when he got back. He was abandoning the lifelong dream of becoming a general, he told her. He didn’t know what he would do, maybe teach. The boy who considered scholarship tedious had evolved into a man who loved to read and was a voracious student of history. As Jean would remember it later, this was “in some ways maybe the most honest conversation we’d ever had between us.” They sat in the bedroom, man and wife, estranged and struggling. He said that he wanted to make love to her. She wanted to but would not let him. He kept talking about the war, offering nuanced explanations of what the American military was doing and failing to do. She was not interested in complexity, only in what she had seen and heard about civilians getting killed. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” she told him. “It’s finished.” She explained to him, for the first time, how upsetting it had been for her to have three little children and make so many moves, and he said he never should have let it happen. He asked her to see a psychiatrist, and she agreed, and when the first one failed to connect with her, she went to another, one of Terry’s best friends, Dr. Frank (Kiko) Schuster, who had an extraordinary ability to make anyone feel safe. She felt understood, for the first time, with him.

At night over at the Coonlys the conversations were also, inevitably, about Vietnam. “You wouldn’t believe how things are going over there,” Terry told Bill. It was a whole new ballgame, nothing like what they taught at command and general staff college. Senior commanders didn’t seem to comprehend the reality of what was happening on the ground, in the jungles.

Bebe, a professional artist, told Terry that she had been working on a large painting out in the casita behind the house, and she wanted him to see it. The painting was her effort to show how this was a political war. The background on the canvas was an American flag, with the map of Vietnam and a hammer and sickle in the middle; superimposed on the stars in the blue-and-white upper-left corner were representations of President Johnson and the U.S. Capitol and a donkey and an elephant. Below that a helicopter was dropping napalm, and a soldier was throwing a grenade, and a medic was looking down on a dead infantryman. On the right side of the flag, amid the red and white stripes, there was a Buddhist monk praying in an orange robe, and a Vietnamese mother crying as she held a naked baby, and an American jet spraying a field with defoliant, and in the upper-right corner a rendition of a photograph Bebe had seen in
Life,
of a group of exhausted GIs. Bebe had sent the picture to an El Paso museum, which was soliciting works from local artists, but they had called her and asked her to remove it, so now it was back in the casita, hidden away among her traditional western art.

Allen studied the painting and turned away without saying a word.

He drove across town to Timberwolf again the next night, when Jean’s sister Susie was babysitting the girls, and said that he just needed a minute. Susie was under instructions not to let him in, but she did. He stood in the doorway outside the bedroom and stared at his daughters as they slept, then he left. The next day he drove downtown to the end of Texas Street, where it meets Oregon, and stepped inside the First National Bank Building. He rode the elevator up to fifteen, the top floor, and found his way to Kemp Smith White Duncan and Hammond, and from there to Tad Smith’s office in the northwest corner, where the picture windows lured the eye up Texas Street and on to the Franklin Mountains in the distance. Tad Smith was not a divorce lawyer, but he made exceptions for people he knew, and everyone in town knew General Allen. He encountered now the general’s son, who was “pissed off.” Terry said that he had staked out his wife’s house and seen the car of this bozo the clown there and that he wanted a divorce and also custody of the children. Smith said that would require the development of more information about Jean’s behavior, and Terry said there was a next-door neighbor who knew some things. That neighbor was a retired army officer who had told Mary Fran about the affair. It was no secret.

And the maids were talking. In El Paso, most Anglo families in the middle and upper classes had maids, and the maids knew each other. Jean’s maid was talking to friends.

After Terry left his office, Smith began drafting the divorce papers and developing what he could. One of the stories the maids told him was of seeing Hart Ponder burst into tears as he tried to persuade his daughter not to do what she was doing.

Near the end of his leave Terry spent an afternoon with his girls. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt when he picked them up in the pink Cadillac, and they went to the Campus Queen for burgers and then to the swimming pool at the Coronado Country Club. When he dropped them off and started to say good-bye, about to return to Vietnam, where he would soon become battalion commander of the 2/28 Black Lions, little Consuelo hid under a three-legged stool and started crying.

“You can’t leave!” she sobbed. “You’re going to die!” Terry Allen pulled his daughter up from her hideaway and held her in his arms. “Be brave,” he said, “and take care of your little sisters.”

Book Two

Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.

—Wisconsin Board of Regents, 1894

Chapter 5

Song of Napalm