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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In late March, during a rare lull in his job as operations officer for the Black Lions battalion, the position he held during his first two months in Vietnam, he wrote a long letter to his young wife. "Dearest Jean," it began. "I was thrilled to receive three letters from you while on this last operation. The first letter arrived on the 19th and it was postmarked from El Paso on the 14th. This was the first letter I had received—if you had written before and included any information requiring an answer etc. please let me know. I read the letter so many times the handwriting would rightfully have come off the paper. Any break I had I would pull them out and reread them—I do miss you terribly." Jean had in fact written him almost daily in the first few weeks after his departure, loving letters in which she talked about how fortunate they were "to have such a strong bond." She was beside herself to hear that he had not received them.
The next paragraph was equally warm, and it seemed apparent that he was thinking of Jean as his soul mate as he described life at the base camp. "It's good to be back to our base camp to clean up and sleep in a bed. This is the fourth night we've been able to spend here since my arrival in the battalion. It's a little relaxing and the one place I can use a fan (which I intend to buy shortly). We will be here six days before leaving on another operation. Tomorrow is Easter so I will be able to go to Mass. Our battalion chaplain is a Catholic—a Jesuit and a very fine soldier priest. We had some interesting discussions over a drink after our Junction City Operation. We both agree on so many points—wish you had been there to join us."
The remainder of the letter was all military, nothing personal, describing in great detail the last operation 35 miles north of Saigon as though he were filing an after-action report to headquarters. If its intended purpose was to familiarize Jean with his environment, it did the opposite, only making him seem a million miles away.
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. She had three small girls to look after, and no one in El Paso to whom she felt close. 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 hair. 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. In the spring of 1967, The Jean Allen Show was born.
Airing 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 when a dairy manager bragged about his best-producing cow, pulling out a picture of the cow and, in a deadpan voice, discussing 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 anti-war 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," she would say later, and she embraced it as naively 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 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.
"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., had led through Europe and that nothing in hell could stop. She was in a state of mind in which she felt no embarrassment. 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 Junior a letter telling him what she was doing and how she felt. Terry called from Vietnam, but the connection was bad, figuratively and literally. Soon he was getting emergency leave, flying back to El Paso, calling Bebe Coonly and making her shriek with surprise.
He drove over to 5014 Timberwolf in the pink Cadillac and tried to win back his wife. She felt a need to defend her position and overstated it, calling him a baby killer. She remembered him saying that he had grown to understand a lot of things that he didn't 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.
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.
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, riding the elevator up to fifteen, the top floor, finding 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 the general's son now, 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—a retired Army officer who had told Mary Fran about the affair. 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.
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."
On the morning of October 17, 1967, as he led his Black Lions battalion on a search-and- destroy mission in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone, northwest of Saigon toward the Cambodian border, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen, Jr., and sixty of his men were killed in an ambush.
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