The War at Home
The Vietnam War wreaked havoc on lives across America as well as on the battlefield, tearing apart parents and children and husbands and wives—including one military family in El Paso that would never be the same.
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Lieutenant Allen reached Korea with the Fifth Infantry Regiment in 1953 at the end of the conflict there and then returned home to Fort Lewis and began an ascent that paralleled his father's four decades earlier. Terry Senior 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 Junior'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." Schuller went on to assess Terry Junior'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 Junior 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 in 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 and Bill Coonly, when Bill was Hart's senior aide. 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 Senior's birthday, the loving disciple sent home a telegram that read "My best wishes from the luckiest son in the world—Sonny."
GENERAL ALLEN AND MARY FRAN lived in a comfortable but unpretentious house of limestone and wood at 21 Cumberland Circle, within a mile's jog of the Fort Bliss front gate. On the living room wall, above a long row of polo trophies and wartime photographs, were the battle flags of the Big Red One and the Timberwolves, along with a painting of Terry Senior that appeared on the cover of Time in August 1943. The rest of the house, with the exception of the retired general's den and Terry Junior's old bedroom, was painted in Mary Fran's favorite shade of art deco pink. Terry Senior sold insurance in his retirement, though he never made much money at it, and he spent a lot of his time corresponding with old soldiers, coaching the polo team at Fort Bliss, and trying to keep in shape. Long before running became a fitness craze, he could be seen jogging through the residential streets in a loop that took him to the military base and then around toward the fashionable stucco homes on Pennsylvania Circle, where El Paso's social elite lived. He was an unforgettable sight, decked out in Army sweats with a wool wrap around his neck, carrying a medicine ball that kept his wrists supple for polo. When Jean Ponder, looking out from the back yard of her home at 230 Pennsylvania Circle, first saw this old man running down the nearby alley in the noonday heat, she went inside and asked her mother who it could be and was told that it was General Allen.
There are conflicting accounts of when she first met the general's son. As her aunt Bebe Coonly remembered it, she and Bill threw a party for Terry when he came home from Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, a training ground for future colonels and generals that the near-goat of West Point had become the first member of his class to attend. Bebe's sister Alice Hicks Ponder called and asked her to invite her daughter Jean, a gorgeous coed who had been moping around the house, depressed about being dumped by the young man who had been her escort the previous year when she was named the lady-in-waiting at the Sun Carnival. "And Jean walked in and looked like a million dollars, and Terry had been laughing, drinking, and talking and then just froze at the sight of her, and that was it," Bebe recalled. Jean remembered it differently. She was home after her freshman year at the San Diego College for Women, and her mother came up to her room and said that Terry Allen, Jr., was downstairs—would she like to meet him? Jean said no, her mother insisted, and Jean relented but said that she would not change out of her Bermuda shorts. So she went downstairs and the introductions were made—and from there "a whirlwind romance" began. They were both on the rebound, both Catholics. His family was revered in El Paso, and she felt safe around him. To him, she represented the second coming of his mother, once a beautiful young socialite. He was 32, she was 18. It was as though they had no choice but to accept the social scripts that were handed to them. He proposed in July 1960, and they were married in October.
After a honeymoon on the French Riviera, Jean Ponder Allen found herself in a quaint place called Bad Kreuznach in an alien country where she knew no one and barely knew her own husband, who worked long hours in any case and usually took the car. She was utterly ill prepared for the life she faced, a spoiled beauty queen from upper-class El Paso accustomed to nothing beyond the privileged society of her youth. Her landlady, Frau Schmidt, whose husband had fought for the Nazis, took pity on her and taught her some German. She made daily strolls around the village. And in less than a year she had a baby daughter. Terry wanted to name her in honor of his Spanish grandmother, but he somehow confused the name, so it came out Consuelo instead of Conchita. In a letter to her mother-in-law in September 1962, Jean seemed to be adjusting as well as could be expected. "Terry is in the field again—for ten days," she wrote. "Everyone is a little nervous around here, as in four days five Eighth Division people were killed. Two in an auto accident, one jumping, and a sergeant shot a captain and then killed himself! All of this took place in Mannheim—is B.K. next? . . . Oh, Mary Fran, if only you could see your granddaughter now. She is cute enough to eat. She has discovered her hands now, and spends hours looking at them."
Another daughter, Bebe, named for Jean's aunt, arrived fourteen months later, and within a year of that came Mary Frances, named for Terry's mother. Jean was barely 22, the mother of three little girls, overwhelmed and overtaken by postpartum depression. She was also without the help of Frau Schmidt after the family moved to Stuttgart and then Augsburg following Terry's promotions. His mind was very much on making it to the top. Without saying it aloud, he and Jean worked on the common assumption that someday he would be a general.
After two years with the Seventh Armored tank battalion, Terry was transferred to the States for a post with the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa. Jean was depressed and emotionally drained by the time they got back from Europe. She was drinking to medicate herself in the evening, though it was not especially noticeable in a family of habitual drinkers. Terry, like his father, rarely let the cocktail hour go by without two scotch and waters, which he sipped while puffing on an aromatic cigar. He was a lively storyteller and had a natural brightness to him—some called it a twinkle—that perhaps made it harder for him to see Jean's inner despair. In tandem with her drinking, she was taking amphetamines, one tablet of speed a day to help her lose weight. She was also distraught over the condition of her mother, who was in the final stages of inoperable stomach cancer. Her mother was her emotional mainstay, but now Jean felt unable to even express her distress. Jean's father had issued a family order that no one was to talk about the fatal nature of the disease, particularly not in front of his wife. Alice Ponder died in April 1966, while Jean was in Tampa, and her father quickly remarried, making the young military wife feel even more alone.
Out of whimsy and desperation, Jean visited a fortune-teller. Her life, she was told, was like a piece of cloth that was going to be ripped in two. Her husband might die. "Ridiculous," Jean said to herself. "That's what I get for going to a stupid fortune-teller." Then Terry Allen, Jr., was ordered to report for duty in Vietnam on February 25, 1967. He had often told Jean that "the only way a soldier proves himself is on the battlefield." Here was his chance. Jean, in retrospect, thought she should have asked him to hold off going until she was in a better mental state, but at the time, she and her husband were still operating under another philosophy: In the military, you do what you are told to do. She still wanted to be a general's wife.
THE OLD MAN HAD FALLEN into a middle stage of dementia by then, a condition that first became noticeable during a trip to the battlefields of Holland with his old Timberwolves in 1965, when he kept wondering where he was and asking in befuddlement for Mary Fran, who had not made the trip with him. For Terry Junior, who adored his father, watching him deteriorate was like "watching the sun fall from the sky." By early 1967, when his son flew off to lead soldiers in Vietnam, the retired general was virtually unable to navigate outside his home and would lapse into periods of confusion. He held on dearly to reminders of his glorious past and became obsessed with the little red instructional booklets he had published during and after World War II. He carried them in his back pocket wherever he went and would hand them out to strangers and children, including little Consuelo. Among the personal items Terry Junior took with him to Vietnam was a small brown manila clasp envelope that had "For Terry Allen jr. (All you need to fight a War)" written on the side in a palsied scrawl. Inside were three of the booklets: Directive for Offensive Combat, Night Attacks, and Combat Leadership, the final words of which were "The battle is the payoff."
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