Sergeant Robert Jemison, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, would spend thirty-two months in Army hospitals. PFC James Young of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, would check out of the Army hospital in Denver with a bullet hole in the side of his skull, borrowed clothes on his back and discharge papers in hand, and make it home to Missouri in time for Christmas, 1965. Specialist 4 Clinton Poley of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, wearing the terrible scars of three separate bullet wounds and judged seventy percent disabled, got home to Iowa in plenty of time for spring plowing and planting.
But on November 18, 1965, in the sleepy southern town of Columbus, Georgia, half a world away from Vietnam, the first of the telegrams that would shatter the lives of the innocents were already arriving from Washington. The war was so new and the casualties to date so few that the Army had not even considered establishing the casualty-notification teams that later in the war would personally deliver the bad news and stay to comfort a young widow or elderly parents until friends and relatives could arrive. In Columbus, in November and December 1965, Western Union simply handed the telegrams over to Yellow Cab drivers to deliver.
The driver who brought the message of the death in battle of Sergeant Billy R. Elliott, Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cav, to his wife, Sara, was blind drunk and staggering. As Mrs. Elliott stood in the doorway of her tiny bungalow, clutching the yellow paper, the bearer of the bad tidings fell backward off her porch and passed out in her flower bed. Then the Army briefly lost her husband’s body on its journey home.
When a taxi driver woke up the very young, and very pregnant, Hispanic wife of a 1st Battalion trooper at two A.M. and held out the telegram, the woman fainted dead away. The driver ran next door and woke up the neighbors to come help. The new widow could not speak or read English, but she knew what that telegram said.
The knock on the door at the home of Sergeant Jeremiah (Jerry) Jivens of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry came at four A.M. Betty Jivens Mapson was fourteen at the time: “I have told the story before to friends about how the taxi drivers used to deliver the telegrams to families who’d lost loved ones over there. Today it almost sounds unbelievable. Luckily, my Mom’s sister lived with us and was with her when the knock came at our door at 4 A.M. My Mom collapsed completely as this stranger handed the telegram to us. How cold and inhuman, I thought.”
In Columbus that terrible autumn, someone had to do the right thing since the Army wasn’t organized to do it. For the families of the casualties of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry that someone was my wife, Julia Compton Moore, daughter of an Army colonel, wife of a future Army general, and mother of five small children, including two sons who would follow me to West Point and the Army.
Julie talks of those days as a time of fear; a time when the mere sight of a Yellow Cab cruising through a neighborhood struck panic in the hearts of the wives and children of soldiers serving in Vietnam. As the taxicabs and telegrams spread misery and grief, Julie followed them to the trailer courts and thin-walled apartment complexes and boxy bungalows, doing her best to comfort those whose lives had been destroyed. Two of those widows she can never forget: The widow of Sergeant Jerry Jivens, who received her with great dignity and presence in the midst of such sorrow, and that frightened young Hispanic widow, pregnant with a boy child who would come into this world in March without a father.
When the coffins began arriving home, my wife attended the funeral of all but one of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry troopers who were buried at the Fort Benning cemetery. The first funeral at Benning for a 1st Battalion casualty was that of Sergeant Jack Gell of Alpha Company. Julie turned on the evening news, and there on television was the saddest sight she had ever seen: one of my beloved troopers being buried and Fort Benning had not notified her. She called Survivors Assistance and told them in no uncertain terms that they must inform her of every 1st Battalion death notification and of every funeral for a 1st Battalion soldier at the post cemetery.
Julie recalls, “I was so fearful when I began calling on the widows that I would be very unwelcome, because it was my husband who ordered their husbands into battle. I thought of a million reasons why I should not go, but my father called me and told me to go, so I went. They were so happy to see me and they were so proud of their husbands. That was a little something that they still had to hang onto. There were thirteen widows from the 1st Battalion still living in that little town.”
The same duty for the dead of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry was done by Mrs. Frank Henry, wife of the battalion executive officer, and Mrs. James Scott, wife of the battalion sergeant major, since the battalion commander, lieutenant Colonel Bob McDade, was a bachelor at that time.
Kornelia Scott’s first visit was to the home of Mrs. Martin knapp, widow of a sergeant in Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, to offer condolences and assistance.
“There was immense grief and bitterness. So immense, that one widow was bitter that her husband had been killed and mine only wounded. Names, addresses and faces became a blur, especially when we started attending the funerals at Ft. Benning in late November and early December,” says Mrs. Scott.
Mrs. Harry Kinnard, wife of the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, and many others went public with their criticism of the heartless taxicab telegrams, and the Army swiftly organized proper casualty-notification teams consisting of a chaplain and an accompanying officer. Nobody intended for this cruelty to happen. Everyone, including the Army, was taken totally by surprise by the magnitude of the casualties that had burst on the American scene at LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany.
But even after the Army teams were formed and the procedure was changed, it was months before a Yellow Cab could travel the streets of Columbus without spreading fear and pain in its wake. My wife remembers: “In December a taxi driver carrying a couple of young lieutenants stopped at my house. I hid behind the curtains, thinking, If I don’t answer the door I won’t have to hear the bad news. Then I decided: ‘Come on, Julie, face up to it.’ I opened the door and he asked me for directions to some address and I just about fainted. I told him: ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again!’ The poor man told me that he understood, that all the taxi drivers had hated that terrible duty.”
Far to the north, in Redding, Connecticut, the village messenger, an elderly man, knocked hesitantly on the door of John J. and Camille Geoghegan. Although the telegram was addressed to Mrs. Barbara Geoghegan, wife of Lieutenant John Lance (Jack) Geoghegan, the messenger knew what it said and he knew that Jack Geoghegan was the only child of that family.
As the Geoghegans read the news, the messenger broke down, quivering and weeping and asking over and over again if there was anything he could do to help them. Before they could deal with their own grief, the Geoghegans first had to deal with his; they hugged and comforted the messenger and helped him pull himself together for the long trip back to town through the deepening gloom.
Barbara Geoghegan was away that day; she had gone to New Rochelle, New York, to stay with her husband’s elderly aunt. The aunt’s husband had died on this date two years earlier and the family thought someone should be there to comfort her on so tragic an anniversary. When the Geoghegans telephoned Barbara with the news, she was writing her ninety-third letter to Jack, a letter filled, as usual, with news of their baby daughter, Camille. The next morning, in the mailbox at home, she found Jack’s last letter to her. He wrote, “I had a chance to go on R and R, but my men are going into action. I cannot and will not leave them now.”
When Captain Tom Metsker left for Vietnam in August of 1965, his wife, Catherine, and baby daughter, Karen, fourteen months old, moved home to Indiana to be near her family. Tom’s father was in the U.S. Foreign Service, stationed in Monrovia, Liberia. Catherine recalls: “I finally got a teaching job to occupy my time and save some money. The first day was to be Monday, November 15. On that Sunday night, November 14, I was sick with a cold and fever. How could I start my new job? The phone rang. It wa
s my uncle: ‘There is a telegram for you.’ Probably a message from Tom’s parents in Liberia, I thought. ‘Open it and read it to me,’ I told him. THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY REGRETS TO INFORM YOU … Tom was dead.”
The pain and grief of that autumn so long ago still echo across the years, fresh as yesterday for many of the wives and children and parents and siblings of those who died in the Ia Drang Valley. Some of them agreed to write their stories of what one death in battle did to their lives, in hopes that their words might somehow comfort other families who have lost loved ones in war.
Betty Jivens Mapson is forty-two and has grown children of her own today, but she has been haunted for years by the trauma of her father’s death on November 15, 1965, in the Ia Drang Valley. She says, “After the initial shock of receiving the telegram announcing Daddy’s death, we kids had to go back to school because it would be two weeks or more before his body would arrive home. It seemed everyone was looking at us and whispering, not really knowing what to say except how bad it was our Daddy died over there.
“They mostly left us alone,” Mrs. Mapson continues. “There were no support groups or any of that to help us cope. Our family was left alone in our grief. My brothers did not talk about their feelings at all. My mother was devastated. She and Daddy were sweethearts in school but each went on to marry other people. When both were divorced around the same time they met again and were married. Daddy and I used to take trips together on the Greyhound bus, mostly home to Savannah. Whenever he and my mother went out, he would not be ready until he sat in a chair and had me comb and brush his hair. It was cut real close but he made it seem like I had really done something special.
“I remember when he first told us he had to go to Vietnam. We drove him to Fort Benning. I remember the Army trucks filled with soldiers and hearing Daddy say he might not come back. I was young and didn’t really see the seriousness of it. He was a good, strict father and my brothers and I thought his being away for so long meant we would be able to stay out later and have more fun. I blamed myself for Daddy being killed because of those selfish feelings when he left. My Daddy was a good man, a preacher’s son. His given name is Jeremiah.”
She adds: “Two weeks after the initial telegram we got another one stating when to meet the body at the train station. The hearse was already there when we got to the station and soon a wooden cart with a long gray box was being pulled toward us. My Daddy! This is how he came back to us. And the pain started all over again for us, only more so because now he was home. You could have heard me screaming three states away. At the funeral home I remember looking at him closely and for a long time to make sure it was really him. Then I saw that little mole on his cheek and I knew.
“I am so very proud of my father and wished that somehow he could know that and know that he is still very much alive with us. For a long time it seemed to me that he was just away like he usually was on Army duty, and one day he would come home. For a lot of years I waited and watched our driveway because I wanted so much for him to come home for my Momma and my brothers and me. I would like to visit the Ia Drang. It is something I have to do for my own sake. I have to know, have to see that this place really exists. I need to see and to be where my Daddy died. Then maybe this will all somehow be complete for me. I just wish with all my heart that we had not been so alone to deal with such a monumental tragedy back then. We needed someone to reach out to us, to explain for us, to help us see why. My mother has passed away now. She never remarried. She loved Daddy so.”
Catherine Metsker McCray, now fifty years old, says the story of how she met and married Tom Metsker, her dashing young Army officer, seems to have taken place a lifetime ago. “I didn’t know him in the early days. He absolutely drove his parents crazy—constantly on the go; accident-prone; strong; never sat still. They were especially proud of his athletic feats—on the state championship football team in high school, Southern Conference pole-vault champion at The Citadel. Tom was raised in Japan and Korea. His father, also named Tom, was with the State Department and worked for the Agency for International Development. High school brought Tom, his mother, Zoe, and older sister Ibby back to Indianapolis while his father was on a hardship tour. The parents were originally from Indiana; graduates of Indiana University.
“Tom then left for college at The Citadel. While he was there his family was transferred to the Washington, D.C., area. I was a sophomore at DePauw University. It was spring break and my friend Betty Orcutt and I decided to spend the week at my parents’ home. My father was a colonel in the Air Force stationed at The Pentagon in Washington. I met Tom on a blind date; we were married on October 5, 1962. We eloped. On October 8, Tom left for Germany where he was to be stationed for six months. I stayed home to graduate from DePauw, then joined him when he returned to Ft. Benning, Georgia.
“I remember these days as the most exciting in my life. He was in a combat-ready unit. A phone call would come at 4 A.M. and the troops would assemble and leave Ft. Benning. The wives didn’t know where they were going or whether it was for a day or a month. It was the time of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. I remember sitting in our Camellia Garden apartment with the gray and pink metal furniture and the one plug in the kitchen, behind the fridge. If you moved the fridge out, you could make toast. I learned to be patient and brave, but mostly I just missed Tom. When he was home, I would stay awake at night and stare at him, wondering how I could be so lucky. Karen Doranne Metsker, 9 pounds 9 and 1/2 ounces, was born on May 31, 1964, and Tom was ecstatic. Tom had wanted a boy but he was so happy to have a girl. Ten days after Karen was born we moved to Washington, D.C., for Tom’s language school. We three camped out in my parents’ basement while we looked for an apartment. Sometime during that school, Tom got orders for Vietnam. He was excited to be going to Vietnam. It was what he had trained for. It was his job.
“I didn’t share his excitement—not because of the danger but because of the separation. We were sent back to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, to get him ready for Vietnam. I was going to stay there with the baby. Training went quickly. They received a photo of their unit. Tom joked it was ‘so we can X out the guys who get zapped.’ All our friends were also being transferred, I knew no one at Bragg and I was pregnant again. I decided to move back to Indiana to my family during his Vietnam tour.
“Tom left from the Evansville airport in August of 1965. I cried a lot. We wrote each other every day and Karen and I had a routine of going to the mailbox every day to mail a letter to Daddy. Tom’s parents were stationed in Monrovia, Liberia, so I didn’t see them. I had a miscarriage in October.
“The telegram came Sunday night, November 14. Tom was dead. I had to make the arrangements. I had never even been to a funeral before. There was no place for friends to gather, except our motel room. All of our friends from the Army came. All of them had orders for Vietnam. Standing on the sidelines was the wrestling team Tom had coached while we were in Washington. He had meant so much to them.
“I wanted to die but had to stay alive for Karen. I guess she saved my life. I started teaching as soon as I got back from Washington. I was offered tranquilizers. No one knew about counseling back then; it just wasn’t an option. When Tom’s belongings were returned, I threw them all away. That way, I thought, I wouldn’t be reminded of him. It didn’t work.
“I stayed numb for so long a time. And smiled. The pain was indescribable. I kept it all inside for years. Twenty years later I went into therapy. With help, I was finally able to put Tom to rest. I am now at peace about that. When I think about Tom I see a smiling young man. I will always miss him.”
Karen Metsker Rudel, twenty-seven years old, is married and the mother of two daughters and a son. “One bullet of the billions fired in Vietnam changed the path I would follow for the rest of my days. I wonder how many other lives were just as drastically altered as the result of one bullet? My father, Thomas Metsker, was killed when I was 17 months old. I have no memory of him, although I have seen pictures of th
e two of us together. We look alike. He was a career Army man, a 1961 graduate of The Citadel. I have spent much of my life asking, ‘Why?’ Why did he go to Vietnam knowing he might not come back? Why did he have to die? Why would anyone imply that he deserved it for being in Vietnam? Why did it have to be me?
“My mother remarried when I was four. He was a lawyer who was divorced and had two children from his previous marriage. Michael McCray adopted me, so my given name Karen Doranne Metsker was left behind and I became Karen Metsker McCray. Just before my fifth birthday my younger half brother was born, followed a year later by my half sister.
“With the his, hers and theirs meld of our family, I often felt like an outsider. I suppose that how I dealt with it was no better nor worse than any other child. After all, who ever taught me how? I became an over-achiever. I wanted desperately to fit in, but never quite figured out how to do so, at home or at school.
“My father was not discussed. I knew no one else who had lost a relative in the War and sensed at an early age that it was not an acceptable topic of conversation. I would often sneak down to our basement to investigate the trunk where what remained of my father’s things were stored. For some reason, my mother threw away most everything that was his after he died. I remember well the musty smell of the triangular flag which had been draped over his coffin at his funeral in Arlington Cemetery; the scrapbook full of condolence letters from a multitude of meaningless officials; the old musical white Teddy bear my parents had bought for me when I was a baby; a bunch of medals including a Purple Heart; and the handful of photographs that, to me, was my Dad. I once found a card which my mother had given my Dad from me on his first Father’s Day. I don’t recall the outside of the card, but the inside said: ‘ ’cause I’ll always be Daddy’s Little Girl.’ I cried a lot when I went through that trunk. In my quest for family, I married at a young age, by today’s standards. The good that came of this was my children: Alison Elizabeth, born March 1, 1988; Abigail Catherine, born October 11, 1989; and Thomas Alexander, born March 1, 1992. As I had always known I would, I named my son for my father.
We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young Page 43