by Vicki Cody
We spent Thanksgiving in Atlanta with our old friends the Lesters. It was the perfect road trip for us, not too far away but just far enough for us to feel like we were taking a little vacation. It was wonderful to be with old friends.
Dick called the Monday after Thanksgiving. “How was your trip?” he asked. “I’m glad you and the boys got to go, but I was worried about you on the road, especially over a holiday weekend.”
“We had a great time, Dick, but we missed you. Why were you worried?”
“You have no idea how hard it is to be so far away. If anything ever happened to you or the boys, I couldn’t help you or get to you. We all worry about our families.”
“Wow, I’ve been so busy worrying about you, I haven’t thought about you worrying about us.”
That phone call came at the perfect time, as Clint and Tyler had not talked to their dad since August, when he had left. He usually called in the middle of the night, and I didn’t want to wake them on school nights. They were outside playing, and I called to them that their dad was on the phone. They came rushing in and each took a turn on the phone. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I listened to them talk.
“Dad, we went to a basketball game between the Atlanta Hawks and the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers!”
“And, Dad, we got to meet some of the players after the game, and we got pictures and autographs! We got to meet Dominique Wilkins and Charles Barkley!”
They talked about school and soccer, and after a few minutes they handed the phone back to me and ran off to play with their friends.
Dick hinted again about something he was working on, something he had been trying to tell me about in his letters.
“Vicki, think about what Ned and I trained for back in 1980-81. Remember that in the coming weeks.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me, and I don’t dare ask you any questions.”
“Just watch the news.”
I told him of our plans to fly up to Vermont for Christmas, and he said he would call on Christmas Day. With no e-mail, very few phone opportunities, and ten-day-or-more mail delivery, we had to plan way ahead for our calls.
Unbeknownst to me, Dick was planning the mission of a lifetime, almost the exact mission that he and Ned had been part of in 198081, the mission they had never gotten to execute. I was confused, because based on what I remembered about the Iran mission in 1980, it involved rescuing hostages. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how that applied to what was going on in Kuwait and/or Iraq. There were no hostages that I knew of. While I made plans for the holidays and busied myself with all the usual seasonal tasks, Dick had the difficult job of choosing the flight crews that he would send into battle.
The boys and I were glad to have the trip to Vermont to look forward to. There was nowhere else we wanted to be that Christmas, but it was also a reminder that everyone else lived normal lives and that my husband, Clint and Tyler’s dad, was in a combat zone. Dick’s phone call on Christmas Day was the highlight for everyone. We passed the phone around Dick’s large family, and everyone got to talk to him. I had a long and satisfying cry that evening.
When the holidays were over, back at Fort Campbell, we entered a new stage in the deployment. January 15, President Bush’s deadline for Iraq to pull out of Kuwait, was looming in the very near distance. Dick called on Saturday, January 12, in the early evening. He talked to each of the boys. They talked about their basketball games, school, and ordinary things. I got back on the phone, and we chatted about the usual mundane things, but I could sense something in Dick’s voice, and then he said, “I might not be able to call for a while. I think it’s time to take the motorcycle out of the garage.”
He pulled out those code words from the past as if we used them every day.
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. “Okay. I figured you might want me to do that, I just wish I knew why.” “Just watch the news.”
“Hey, Dick, you don’t have to prove yourself to me; I’m already proud enough for a lifetime. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Don’t worry about me, Vick. You know I always am.”
And then, because the conversation was getting too serious, I said, “Dick, you better not let anything happen to you, because if you do, I’ll kick your ass when you get home!”
We both laughed. There wasn’t much else to say after that, even though I knew it was more than a typical good-bye, so I just told him, “Fly safe, Dick. I love you!”
“I love you, too, Vick.”
I hung up the phone, and, as scared as I was, I actually felt a strange sense of relief. Things had been building and brewing for so long, I was tired of the suspense. Whatever he had to do, I just wanted him to get it over with. Maybe it was Dick’s ever-optimistic voice, maybe it was his confidence, or maybe it was the fact that I knew without a doubt he was doing exactly what he was meant to do, but just talking to him made me feel good, and I slept well that night.
January 15, the day we had all been obsessing about, came and went without anything happening. My phone rang constantly, people wondering what I had heard from Dick. It meant a lot to me that we had so many good friends who cared about us, but I felt like I was spending too much time on the phone and not enough with Clint and Tyler, so I tried to keep the calls brief.
I busied myself doing what I always did when I got scared: I cooked elaborate meals, baked cookies, cleaned closets, mopped floors—anything to occupy my mind. It was my way of hunkering down, and our house was the cleanest it had been in months. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with some nervous energy.
On the night of January 16, while I was making a chicken-and-broccoli casserole, all hell broke loose as the United States began bombing Baghdad. Gail called me and said, “Put the news on—it’s started!”
And just like that, on the six o’clock news, Operation Desert Storm officially began. I told the boys there was no need to worry, because it didn’t look like the Army was involved yet—it was the Air Force doing the bombing—but when I tucked them in that night, they each had some concerns that somehow the war might change our lives.
Tyler asked me, “Will we have school tomorrow? And what about basketball practice?”
I reassured both boys that the war would not affect things for us at Fort Campbell, but when I went to bed that night, I had a nagging feeling that Dick was involved in the initial strikes; I just didn’t know how.
I would find out later that at approximately 0237 hours on January 17, 1991, eight Apache helicopters from the 101st Airborne Division flew deep into Iraq and destroyed all the early-warning radar sites leading into Baghdad. Task Force Normandy opened an air corridor that allowed the Air Force to fly into Baghdad undetected. Dick and his Apaches fired the first shots of the war.
The next morning, I waited until the boys left for school before I put the news on. As I watched the Pentagon briefing, my ears perked up the minute I heard General Colin Powell mention something about Apache helicopters. I wasn’t sure exactly what he said, but then the phone started ringing. First it was Dick’s parents, then mine, and then a host of other calls from so many people, and everyone was saying they had heard something about Apaches from the 101st Airborne Division going into Baghdad before the Air Force began the bombing. I told them I had heard the same thing but wasn’t sure what it meant.
When the phone rang at noon, I was completely surprised to hear Dick’s breathless voice. I had never dreamed he would call me so soon.
“I’m fine, Vicki, and all my pilots are fine. We’re back at King Fahd Airport. All is well.”
Somehow I just knew that he was grinning from ear to ear.
“I’m so glad to hear your voice! I’ve been worried because I heard on the news something about Apache helicopters from the 101st being involved in last night’s bombing.”
“I cannot confirm or deny anything. But I will tell you I am so proud of my pilots. We flew over thirteen hours and ‘it’ was great!”
“You sound so official!”
“I’ll try to call again, but I didn’t want you to worry about me.”
“Whatever you did, I am so proud of you!”
Then a friend, Lynn Carden, called and said she had just talked to her husband, who told her to call me and tell me, “Dick Cody just made history.”
“Vicki, those were his exact words,” she said.
When the boys came home from school, I relayed what I knew, basically what had been on the news and in the paper. Since there was only one Apache battalion in the 101st, I was pretty sure it was Dick’s that had flown into Iraq; I just didn’t know to what extent. A few days later, an article appeared in the Nashville Tennessean newspaper that said the same thing I had been hearing—“Apache helicopters from the 101st fired the first shots of the war”—but made no mention of Dick’s name or his unit. The following week at our commanders’ wives meeting, our brigade commander’s wife told the group, “Dick Cody fired the first shots of the war.” That was all she said, but it was the first time I had actually heard Dick’s name in connection with the mission. I thought my heart would burst with pride, but I would have to wait until Dick got home to hear all the details of Task Force Normandy.
We went from the excitement of the initial stages of the war, thinking that it put us that much closer to the end and our husbands’ returning, to the doldrums of a four-week air campaign. We all knew that the 101st Airborne Division would not return until after a ground war, so we found ourselves anxiously anticipating that, just to get it over with. We tried to stay busy, but with no communication with our husbands during that time, we had a hard time not worrying. We wives counted on one another more than ever.
The highlight of February was First Lady Barbara Bush’s visit to Fort Campbell. She came to show her support and to rally our families. I was selected to be part of a small group of spouses who got to meet with her privately, before the rally. I had never met a First Lady before, so that in itself was mind-blowing to me. We chatted nervously while we waited in a room at Campbell Army Airfield Base Operations for her arrival. I had no idea what to expect, but when Barbara Bush, wife of the president of the United States, walked into the room, my eyes filled with tears—something that happened frequently that year.
We sat in a circle of chairs, and she was like a grandmother, very sincere, when she asked the group if there was anything she could do for us. Someone immediately asked if she knew when the ground war was going to start. We all laughed, including Barbara. It broke the ice. She went around the circle, asking each of us to tell who we were and what our spouse did, things of that nature. She was gracious and she listened. She posed with each of us for a photo, and as she put her arm around me, I thought, In this moment, she seems to genuinely care about each of us, out of all the millions of people in our country. I will never forget that. I am grinning from ear to ear in that photo. I wrote every detail to Dick, but it took a while for the letter to get to him because the ground war began the very next day.
The actual ground war, just one hundred hours long, was short by any standard, but, amid news coverage of every move the 101st Airborne Division made and talk of the Apache helicopters leading the way for the largest and longest air assault in military history, I had a hard time remaining calm. And there was always the threat of chemical weapons being used against our soldiers. Even after the president declared the war over, Dick’s unit was still in Iraq, providing cover for the infantry units.
Those weeks after the end of the war were actually more stressful than any other time. It was mid-March before I heard from Dick. It was a short phone call, and he sounded exhausted, but it meant the world to me.
“We’re all fine, Vick. I’ve been working with Tommy Greco and his battalion, and we’re trying to finish things up here. It’s still dangerous, but I think the worst is over. My guys have been doing great. If I can keep them safe a little bit longer, I can bring them all home.”
“I’ve been so worried. You have no idea how much news coverage we’ve seen. We would be better off not knowing everything that goes on.”
He went on to say that if all went well, he and his soldiers might be returning in April. That was all I needed to hear.
April 1 was a psychological milestone for Clint, Tyler, and me because it meant we were almost through the deployment. But we were all about to find out that the redeployment phase was every bit as stressful as the deployment. Everyone wanted their soldier home and wanted to know when that would happen. The rumors ran rampant, and everyone turned to me for answers. I felt as if I spent every waking minute on the phone with concerned family members, not just spouses but also parents and grandparents. What I wouldn’t have given for e-mail back then! It would have made my life so much easier.
There are things that we carry with us throughout our lives—a thought, a conversation, a moment, a person or place, an experience—that, for whatever reason, stay with us. There are things from that year that I carry with me even now, that are so clear to me it seems as if they happened only yesterday: a beautiful Saturday morning in April, the boys and I, Dick’s parents, his two brothers and a sister, standing in a crowd of hundreds of family members, all of us on our tiptoes, scanning the horizon for that first glimpse of the plane carrying our loved ones home from combat; flags waving; a band playing; people cheering. I had never felt such excitement and anticipation, and I will never forget the thrill of seeing Dick emerge from the huge plane, watching Clint and Tyler run up to hug him, the butterflies in my stomach, feeling like a sixteen-year-old when he kissed me.
Dick had never looked more handsome to me than he did that day. My love was mixed in with the pride that I felt for him. It was the greatest feeling in the world.
The local news was there to interview Dick about his unit and their mission. I was pacing up and down while the boys were trying to contain their nervous energy. I understood the significance of what Dick had done, but I resented the media for taking him away from us just after we had greeted him. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him. Finally, the interviews were over and we family members got back on the bus to head over to the battalion area. The soldiers had to turn in their weapons before we could be with them, and it was like torture to be separated again.
When we pulled into our driveway, Dick was surprised to see the white Corvette with a big yellow ribbon tied around it and “welcome home” written on its windows. After having spotted it at the family Chevrolet dealership, I had decided he deserved a Corvette when he got home. It was used but in great condition, and he was as excited as a little kid when he saw it.
We waited another week and then loaded up my big Caprice Classic with all of our ski gear and began the two-to-three-day drive to A-Basin and Keystone, Colorado—just the four of us, and nothing but the open road in front of us and the best spring skiing in the world awaiting us. We had much to be thankful for and so much ahead of us. We talked nonstop, sometimes taking turns and at times all four of us vying for center stage. More details about Dick’s mission emerged during our cross-country journey, and I was amazed at the historic significance of what he and his guys had done.
Skiing in the Rockies was just what we needed: warm, sunny days, the most brilliant blue skies, and tons of packed powder. Most evenings after sunset, Dick took a cigar and went out for a walk by himself. I sensed he needed some space and alone time, but I didn’t mind—I was used to being on my own.
I would like to tell you that it was a smooth transition, that we didn’t miss a beat, that it was pure bliss and like something out of a movie, but that is not reality. We definitely went through a honeymoon phase and had the best sex we’d had in years, and because the stress of worrying about Dick was over, I went to bed every night feeling peaceful and content. But, as with all the other times we had been separated, we were a little out of sync.
PS: In spite of everything that happened back then—the fear, the worries, the loneliness, the reunion blues, and
so on—I remember the good times that came out of it: how close the boys and I became and what good company they were for me; the fun the three of us had by ourselves and with our fellow Army families. I will never forget the undying support of our parents, siblings, and close friends. Above all, what stays with me most is the love that Dick and I shared. When I read the letters that Dick wrote me, I am struck by the fact that in every single one he told me how much he loved me and how proud he was of me. I keep the letters in a box, tied in bundles with red, white, and blue ribbons, so I can read them whenever I want to. I look at his handwriting, and suddenly I’ve been transported back in time. I don’t believe phone calls and e-mails can do the same thing, and I don’t believe many couples today express themselves like that nearly enough.
Thoughts on Reintegration
Separations are a way of life for Army couples and their families. Soldiers go far from home to do what they do, and not just across town or to another city, but oftentimes halfway around the world and to a very dangerous location, for months at a time. It’s just one of the realities of Army life that, over time, I learned to deal with. Still, my separations from Dick were like big chunks of time missing in our marriage. Each time we were separated, it made us work that much harder at our relationship, at communicating with each other, and at staying connected. Each time we were pulled apart, it was entirely up to us to put us back together.
The length and the nature of Dick’s deployments often determined how difficult or easy the reintegration period was. I learned from each reunion, and just when I thought I had it all figured out or what to expect, something would upset my sense of order. In the end, there was no rhyme or reason to our reunions; each one was unique.