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.
Terry Allen, Jr., with his father in Colorado Springs in 1945.
IN FROM THE ABOVE-NINETY heat of the El Paso sun on a mid-June afternoon in 1967, Genevieve Coonly picked up her ringing telephone and shrieked with surprise as soon as she heard the first words from the caller. "Hello, Bebe." It was the unmistakable voice of Terry Allen, Jr., who was not only her nephew-in-law but also one of her and her husband Bill's closest friends. What was he doing home? It had been only a few months since family and friends had gathered in Hart Ponder's back yard for the farewell party when Terry left for Vietnam, and now he was back even though he had been scheduled to be gone for at least a year. Bill Coonly jokingly accused his wife of "getting out the fatted calf for the favorite son" as she prepared a luncheon feast for their surprise visitor, who had asked if he could stop by to talk. But as soon as he arrived, it was obvious that he was in no mood to eat heartily or laugh about old times.
He had come home from Vietnam, Terry Allen said, because his wife, Jean Ponder Allen, the daughter of Bebe's sister, had written him a letter announcing that she was disillusioned with him and the military and the war and had left him for another man. This other man, literally a clown—Terry had heard that he was a rodeo clown who had appeared on a show produced by the local television station where Jean worked—had moved into the Allen house with Jean and his three little girls while he was fighting for his country on the other side of the world. Terry hoped to save the marriage but was unsure about the prospects. He thought that his mother and father, who also lived in El Paso, were unaware of the situation, so he did not want to stay with them. The Coonlys invited him to sleep in a guest bedroom at their house while he tried to work things out with Jean, and they lent him one of their old cars for the week, a pink Cadillac.
The sudden way his life had veered off track left Terry disoriented. Not so long ago it had seemed that things were perfect, he said. His mother's family, the Robinsons, and Jean's family, the Ponders, had known one another for decades, two branches of the El Paso establishment with former mayors on both sides. The fact that Jean was thirteen years younger had never given him reason for concern. How could it, when there was a twenty-year gap in the ages of his own parents, the retired general and Mary Frances, who had precisely the sort of marriage he sought to emulate? His life had followed a straight and clear path from childhood, but now here he was, out of place in his hometown, confused and lost. The first time he got behind the wheel of the pink Caddy, he drove through the streets until he ran out of gas.
TERRY DE LA MESA ALLEN, JR.,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 December 8.
"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 $20 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 specially by a staff officer heading back to the States on emergency leave. It was a flag of the Big Red One, as the infantry division was called, that his assault units had carried 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."
The war relic was an expression of a father's love but also served as a reminder 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 or fear of being a 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 42 years as an artillery officer in the regular Army and who was married to Conchita Alvarez de la Mesa, of Brooklyn, the daughter of a Spanish colonel who came to the U.S. to fight 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 his son, Terry, 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 the Catholic University of America, 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.
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. 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 Junior learned the game before he was ten and later became team captain at the New Mexico Military Institute, his career fostered by Terry Senior from afar.
General Allen's passionate interest in his son's polo development was surpassed only by the zeal with which he pushed for Terry Junior's appointment to West Point. He lobbied virtually nonstop starting in August 1944, when his son was only fifteen and he was in Colorado Springs organizing the 104th Infantry Division, known as 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 Junior's qualifications. Letters went out regularly to influential friends and politicians in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Washington, all the way up to Vice President Truman. First Lieutenant Alfred 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 took all of that lobbying and cajoling, plus a year of remedial tutoring at another military prep school, but Terry Junior finally made it to West Point on a senatorial appointment in 1948. As a cadet in Company H-1, he became known for "his good nature" and "burr-head 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."
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