They Marched Into Sunlight (79 page)

Sewell left to a thunderous standing ovation.

At the research lab at Oscar Mayer, where Dave Wheadon began another week of work, he was introduced to a new colleague and locker-mate, Dennis McQuade, an army veteran who had just returned from Vietnam. When McQuade opened the locker, he noticed a poster of the October 21 March on the Pentagon. What was that doing there? he asked. Wheadon said he had taken the bus to Washington to march against the war, and with that they began a daily conversation about the meaning of war and peace. McQuade would go on to become coordinator of the Madison chapter of Vietnam Veterans against the War.

In a nationally syndicated sports column distributed that day, Red Blaik, the retired army football coach, criticized the March on the Pentagon. “What these demonstrators failed to comprehend is that the career soldier does not commit this country to war—war is the judgment of our civilian leaders elected and appointed. The Pentagon implements this judgment and the career soldier is the one whose duty it is to answer the call of his country—and not to question why…. Military men abhor war as they know it in the raw and to them the action of the belligerent demonstrator is incomprehensible.” Blaik made this argument in a column paying homage to a former player who had just been killed in Vietnam, the end turned quarterback who led his team to victory over Navy in 1955. No player he ever coached, Blaik said, served as a better example of his favorite axiom: Good fellows are a dime a dozen, but an aggressive leader is priceless. “The priceless leader is now the late Major Don Holleder.”

In Milwaukee two soldiers returned to the Sikorski house that Monday, carrying another telegram. It was about Danny’s return and burial.

The Army will return your loved one to a port in the United States by first available military aircraft. At the port, remains will be placed in a metal casket and delivered (accompanied by a military escort) by most expeditious means to any funeral director designated by the next of kin or to any national cemetery in which there is available grave space…. Forms on which to claim authorized interment allowance will accompany remains. This allowance may not exceed $75 if consignment is made directly to the superintendent of a national cemetery. When consignment is made to a funeral director prior to interment in a national cemetery, the maximum allowance is $150; if burial takes place in a civilian cemetery, the maximum allowance is $300…

“Three hundred dollars,” Edmund Sikorski muttered when the soldiers left, the figure from the telegram sticking in his head. “They say my son is worth three hundred dollars.”

Chapter 28

Until the Angels Came

A
T EIGHT ON THE
Tuesday evening of October 24, it seemed that all of El Paso filed into the Harding-Orr & McDaniel funeral home to pay last respects to a favorite son. The chapel pews filled to overflowing for the rosary, and the crowd spilled into the hall. It was a closed casket; the U.S. Army had declared the disfigured body unviewable. Five-year-old Consuelo participated in the ritual, fingering her beads and murmuring in unison with the multitude of strangers: ten Hail Marys, one Our Father. Her sisters were too young to understand. It had been a week since word arrived in front-page banner headlines. Even in El Paso, with sprawling Fort Bliss and its community of military retirees, the war in Vietnam felt distant, unreal, a world apart. But the death of Terry Allen struck hard. The Allens were considered El Paso royalty. The old general and Mary Fran and their officer son had constituted the perfect military home.

Or so it had once appeared. Now the cataclysm of Terry’s death had accelerated General Allen’s mental disintegration. Family friends Bill and Bebe Coonly had reported to the house on Cumberland Circle as soon as they heard that Terry was missing and had stayed with the Allens the entire week until the body arrived from Vietnam. Hour by hour they had watched the general’s condition worsen and his hold on reality slip. “Terry is a good soldier,” he would say, using the present tense. “Terry is a good soldier. Terry would never get ambushed.” General Allen’s mind was stuck again on the Second World War and the little infantry booklets he had written long ago. Friends who came to console him were startled as he reached into his back pocket, took out a booklet, and proceeded to offer instructions on the advantages of night fighting. When he looked at his granddaughter Consuelo, who was the mirror image of her father—the eagle eyes, the sharp nose, the gentle curl of the lips—he thought he was seeing his own boy. He called her Sonny, invited her into his den, showed her old battle maps on the wall, and talked to her about his booklets.

It was left to the general’s wife, whose life had been devoted to her family, the military, and the social protocols of El Paso, to hold things together, and Mary Fran Allen showed the steel and poise the task required. Not that she could reconcile herself to her son’s death, she told friends. Terry was “such a wonderful young man. He never caused us a moment’s worry in his entire life. He was everything that his father and I could ask for,” Mrs. Allen wrote in a letter to one of Terry’s friends. She was devastated but felt compelled to remain strong, if only for the sake of her three granddaughters. She was dealing not only with an addled husband and a son killed in combat but also with the humiliating situation created by her daughter-in-law, Jean Ponder Allen, who had been living and sleeping with another man at the house on Timberwolf Drive while Terry was in Vietnam. Mary Fran lamented in a letter that Jean’s “sadistic behavior” was “a nightmare” for her. “I don’t believe there was ever a worse scandal in El Paso. People were so angry at her and the man involved that had he not left town upon hearing of Terry’s death I do believe that he would have been tarred and feathered.”

The man was gone, but Jean remained. She and Terry had been on the path of divorce, but were still legally man and wife when he died. She came to the rosary and sat there with her three fatherless girls, feeling the scorn of society.

The next morning a letter from Washington was dispatched to Timberwolf Drive. “Dear Mrs. Allen,” it began:

The loss of your husband, Lieutenant Colonel Terry D. Allen Jr., in Vietnam has grieved me deeply. Please accept my personal sympathy.

Our nation is grateful for your husband’s selfless and honorable dedication to duty and his country during this conflict to preserve freedom. He shares a revered heritage with other brave men who have fought to achieve ultimate freedom and the blessing of a free society. I pray that you will be comforted by the deep and lasting sympathy which we have for you and your family.

Sincerely,

Lyndon B. Johnson

Deep and lasting sympathy rarely came Jean Allen’s way. One of the few voices of comfort was that of Kiko Schuster, the psychiatrist she had seen that summer during Terry’s emergency leave. Schuster, an old friend of Terry’s and an honorary pallbearer, thought he understood her mental state after several counseling sessions. “Jean, I think I might be the only person who knows how you feel,” he said to her in a phone call after Terry’s death. The comment made her weep because she knew he was right. What she had done, she understood, was “horrible for the Allens, horrible for my father, it was tough for a lot of people.” She felt that she had no friends. Most of her childhood girlfriends had left town. She was the ridiculed outsider, and from that perspective, beyond the bounds of her prescribed social position, she saw things that she would not otherwise notice, pushing her even further outside. Inattentive to the effects of her own public behavior, she became observant of the private contradictions in the lives of others. She saw clearly now into the double world of El Paso businessmen “who were living this sort of façade and had girlfriends on the side—and who said things about the war that had a lot less to do with what they really thought about it than what they thought they ought to say about it.”

Her alienation was nearly complete. She distrusted the United States government, waging a war that she did not believe in. She hated the military, fighting that war. She renounced her faith in the Catholic Church, which to her now seemed part of the establishment and hypocritical. She had been unfaithful to her husband, the fallen soldier. She had shocked El Paso society. One matron approached a Ponder relative and asked how “the family whore” was doing. An old military man who lived next door to Jean on Timberwolf Drive became so enraged that he perfected his golf swing by whacking Titleists against the side of her house. She was the scarlet-lettered woman of El Paso.

The funeral was Wednesday morning, the twenty-fifth, at Fort Bliss. Mass at Saint Michael’s Chapel was followed by the burial at Fort Bliss National Cemetery. The black hearse stopped near a fresh hole in the earth dug in section A, row O, not far from the roadway. Allen received full military honors, with taps and a twenty-one-gun salute. The American flag that had draped the coffin was folded with slow-motion precision and handed gently to Terry’s mother. The sorrowful scene was bathed in warm desert sunlight. Jean felt more like observer than participant. At the gravesite she looked at her three daughters, who seemed “still and very sad and strikingly solemn for such young children.” General and Mrs. Allen showed a “bravery and dignity” that she found heart-wrenching. Jean witnessed everything yet felt cut off from it and the people she loved, including her daughters. She felt she had “no right to even share their grief,” enveloped as she was in “a cocoon of shame that seemed quite dark and without any possibility of relief.” Yet at the same time she found herself feeling “very angry at the senselessness of Terry’s death.” From her perspective it was an outrage that no one made mention of the needlessness of the tragedy. It was a hero’s burial, and the eulogies were in the vein of LBJ’s letter, about a brave man fighting for a free society.

The campaign had begun already for posthumous awards. Harold Durham, the gutsy artillery liaison officer nicknamed Pinky who died calling in howitzer fire near his own position and warning Sergeant Barrow of an enemy charge, was to receive a Medal of Honor; most of the slain Black Lions were getting at least Bronze Stars; and Allen was nominated for a Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military award. After the fact, in private, Allen’s boss in the First Infantry Division, General Hay, was dismissive of the battalion commander’s performance. Hay told a military historian that Allen precipitated “the debacle” by “allowing his lead company to pursue the VC down the trail” instead of forming a perimeter and cloverleafing at the first sign of the enemy. It was a command decision for which he could not forgive Allen, Hay said, especially since everyone knew that a main force enemy unit was in the area.

Allen had made critical mistakes, but Hay’s analysis was superficial. He failed to take into account the cloverleafs the Black Lions had indeed conducted that morning, and the perfect silence of Triet’s force as it set the trap (not even the extraordinarily observant and cautious Clark Welch saw a sign of trouble until the trap was sprung), and the overwhelming numbers, and the long stretch without artillery fire as they waited for air support, and the pressure that was coming down all the way from Westmoreland to pursue enemy units relentlessly. But Hay placed most of the blame squarely on Allen. “If he would have survived, I would have relieved him of his command,” he told a U.S. Army historian.

Despite this blistering appraisal, Hay nominated Allen for the DSC. He did so, he explained later, “because of the story of Terry’s bravery and because he was General Allen’s son.”

Hay’s criticism of Allen, with his decision to nominate him for the Distinguished Service Cross anyway, takes on a deeper and more troubling significance in the context of his own involvement, or lack of involvement, in the battle, and the way that was described and honored later. Hay was in Saigon until the fight was just about over. The senior officers who were involved that day included Brigadier General Coleman, who hovered overhead and made the critical contact with Private Costello; and Colonel Newman, the brigade commander who arrived at the base camp and took over for the fallen Allen; and Major Holleder, who ignored Newman’s wishes and rushed fearlessly toward the battlefield and his death; and Lieutenant Colonel Paul Malone, the aviation commander, who was wounded in the right foot as he brought his helicopter down through the trees during the rescue; and Terry Allen, who responded calmly to the ambush and kept trying to hold his unit together after he was wounded. For whatever mistakes any of these officers made before and during the battle, they put their lives on the line and responded bravely. Hay, by all accounts, had little to do with it.

Yet according to records at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Major General John H. Hay, in General Orders Number 174, issued on February 24, 1968, was awarded the Silver Star. The orders read:

Major General Hay distinguished himself by gallantry in action against a hostile force on 17 October 1967 while serving as Commanding General, 1st Infantry Division, in the Republic of Vietnam. On this date, during Operation Shenandoah II, General Hay received word that two companies from one of his infantry battalions were heavily engaged with an estimated battalion of Viet Cong. He alerted the crew of his command and control helicopter and flew to the scene of the battle. Arriving over the area, General Hay immediately took charge of the situation. Despite heavy ground fire aimed directly at his aircraft, he had his pilot fly at a perilously low level while he adjusted artillery fire onto the insurgents and pinpointed targets for tactical air strikes. He also directed organization and redeployment of the troops on the ground, who were badly disorganized due to numerous casualties. His cool and calm approach to the situation instilled confidence in the infantrymen, and they regained the initiative over the insurgents…. His courage under fire, aggressive leadership and professional competence were responsible for the complete rout of the numerically superior Viet Cong force.