That weekend he surprised Diane by popping in at her favorite hangout, Wyler’s teen bar. He sat at another table and watched her talk with friends until the end of the night, when he approached her table and asked her to dance. A slow song. “Are you sure you want to dance with me?” she asked. “Well, you’re my little sister, aren’t you?” It was their first dance together. Diane felt awkward at first, but Danny reassured her. He gave her advice about how to deal with boyfriends and what to do about their father and their new stepmother, and together they remembered the smell of their mom’s homemade soups. Back when Danny was born, his father had planted a pine tree by the side of the house on Eighth Street. Now, when the young soldier took a trip back to the old neighborhood, he noticed that the new owner had cut the pine tree down.
Diane started getting migraine headaches after Danny left, and she worried about their father, who would sit in his chair for hours and stare into space. She prized the letters her brother sent home, but no matter how cute he got about it (one letter ended with “G-O-T-S-A-S-T-B; Get on the stick and send the booze”) that was one thing she would not do.
WHEN CLARK WELCH took command of Delta Company on the beach at Vung Tau, it meant that officers who came over on the ship would find different assignments at Lai Khe. To Lieutenant Grady it seemed at first almost like Fort Lewis all over again, with no one knowing quite what to do with him except show him a bed. He stood around the Black Lions headquarters until nightfall, and then it washed over him how different this was from any place he had been. Staring into the darkness, knowing nothing about what was out there, he grew anxious and wondered to himself, Where are the bad guys? Nearby, under mosquito netting, Captain George sat on his bunk and wrote home that he had found a weapon and “the nearest bunker to get in” if they got hit. The next morning at five Grady and George were awakened by the sound of artillery. What’s going on? Grady asked. Wakeup rounds, he was told. H and I firings—harassing and interdiction—which involved having the big guns fire into the countryside at predetermined spots without knowing whether enemy or water buffalo were roaming around out there. H and I’s were popular at Lai Khe and other American base camps, so much so that they would soon become an issue with the generals in Saigon, who were catching flak from the Pentagon for spending too much money on ammunition.
On the second day in camp Grady was getting ready to attend combat indoctrination school, and looking forward to a gradual transition to his new workplace, when he and George were told to hop on a supply helicopter and join the battalion command and two companies out in the field near Phu Loi. Grady had his new assignment, S-2 for the battalion, which meant chief intelligence officer. Looking back on that posting with his self-deprecating humor, he would call himself “the worst intelligence officer in the history of the U.S. Army,” which he certainly was not, but he was on the mark when he called himself “green as grass” and “an intelligence officer who didn’t know a thing.” That was part of the reality of the United States Army in Vietnam in the summer of 1967, when men were pouring in faster than seasoned officers could be found to lead them, a situation greatly exacerbated by the Pentagon policy of rotating not only enlisted men but officers out of Vietnam after twelve months. Grady was fortunate that as soon as he reached the field that day, he ran into Big Jim Shelton, the battalion’s S-3, or operations officer, a former football lineman at the University of Delaware who had been in Vietnam only a few weeks himself but radiated confidence and could outtalk anyone in the division. “Look, you work for me, and this is what you do,” Shelton began, and Grady was more than glad to listen.
While Grady stayed back at the night defensive position (NDP) that afternoon, George went with the two companies and command unit on a search-and-destroy mission, which proved uneventful, though the day did not. When they returned from the march, the battalion commander directed George to go tell the Alpha Company commander to pack his gear and report back to headquarters, he was being fired and replaced by George. “The commander I’m replacing has only had the company for four weeks and is being relieved, so I really hope I can cut it and put the co. squared away,” George wrote home to his wife. Serving as a battalion or company commander in the Big Red One during the Vietnam years was a hardship unto itself, the more dangerous equivalent of trying to manage the New York Yankees under George Steinbrenner during the early years of his ownership. Officers were constantly being moved and fired. In eight months, since the beginning of 1967, the Black Lions had already been through three battalion commanders, three Headquarters Company commanders, three Alpha commanders, three Bravo commanders, and two Charlie Company commanders. It was, said Jim Shelton, “the ass-chewingest place you’ve ever seen.” In any case, George thought the Alpha commander hardly seemed surprised, as though “he knew that the axe was coming.”
The surprise came a few hours later, when a squad of Viet Cong guerrillas slipped past the listening post and the ambush squad and launched a surprise attack on the NDP with machine gun fire and claymore mines, killing one soldier, who had been sitting atop his bunker rather than inside it, and wounding eight others. It was George’s first test. “Well, I earned my CIB (combat infantry badge),” he wrote afterward. “I assumed command of the company at 1900 and at 2200 had an attack…. It was really something. I coulda reached out and touched the live tracer rounds. Thank God I didn’t freeze and was able to make the right decisions. We had a dust off (med evac) which was hairy. I conducted it and had to help the wounded to the copter. The company did OK. The battalion CO was there but didn’t do much.”
The next morning the field operation was moved to a new location north of old Dog Leg Village. It was a dispiriting day, with soldiers exhausted, stung and angered by the surprise attack, the ground a mess of mud, a monsoon rain drenching them, and in the midst of this scene here came Major General John Hancock Hay Jr., the division boss, who swiftly fired the battalion commander. Two officers canned in two days. The resupply helicopter that night brought in the next leader of the Black Lions. He was a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate named Terry Allen Jr., who had served briefly as the battalion’s operations officer earlier in his tour. “He should be real good,” Clark Welch wrote to Lacy. Allen was steady and appeared seasoned. He had been in Vietnam five months by then, minus an emergency leave in June when he had returned to his native El Paso to heal an unexpected wound.
Chapter 4
El Paso, Texas
EL PASO, on the verge of a boom, had a population of three hundred thousand in 1967, about a third of its census count at the end of the century, but it remained a small town in the more traditional sense, a place where the surnames were familiar, where families were defined by their histories, and where everyone in the same social set, especially the established Anglos who ran the banks, businesses, and government, seemed to know or want to know everything about everyone else. There were secrets, undoubtedly—small towns incubate secrets—but the secrets were not always as private as their originators assumed; often they were known but unspoken as part of the cultural code. El Paso took its name as the place where the Rocky Mountains parted, offering an easy valley pass from east to west. The culture of the town was a curious mix of order and disorder, shaped as it was by the Rio Grande, which ran along its southern border, separating it from Ciudad Juarez, its exotic big-sister city in Mexico, and by Fort Bliss, the U.S. Army base that sprawled across a million acres of barren beige landscape to the northeast. Sitting in the basin of the Chihuahuan desert, El Paso thought of itself as the city of the sun. It boasted of more than three hundred days of sunshine a year. Its baseball team then was the Sun Kings. Its football stadium was the Sun Bowl. Its annual Sun Carnival was ruled by the beauty of a Sun Queen and her court. All of this was enough to send some people looking for places in the dark.
In from the above-ninety heat of the sun on a mid-June afternoon that year, Genevieve Coonly picked up her ringing telephone and shrieked with surprise as soon as she heard the first wo
rds 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 backyard 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 the local television station where Jean worked—had moved into the Allen house and was living there on Timberwolf Drive 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 lived in El Paso, were unaware of the scandal, so he did not want to stay with them. The Coonlys invited him to sleep in a guest bedroom at their double-winged ranch house in the upper valley 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 Allen 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 than he was 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 8 December.
“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 twenty-dollar 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 especially by a staff officer heading back to the States on emergency leave. It was a flag of the Big Red One carried by his assault units 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.”
After urging Sonny to pay attention to his studies so that he could enroll at the New Mexico Military Institute the following year, General Allen closed his letter home with a copy of the verses of a new First Division song. “I don’t know exactly what the tune is,” he confessed, “but the soldiers seem to sing it to any tune that comes along.”
No mission is too difficult, no sacrifice too great
Our duty to the nation is first we’re here to state
We’re a helluva gang to tangle with
Just follow us and see
The Fightin’ First will lead the way from hell to victory.
A battle flag and a battle song—these were not toys or imaginings but the real thing. Terry Allen the younger grew up in a veritable museum honoring the grit and glory of the United States Army. A few months before the battle flag arrived, his father had sent home a pair of special-issue rubber-soled basketball shoes that he and his soldiers had used to exercise on the deck of the transport ship that carried them from England to North Africa. The war relics were expressions of a father’s love but also served as reminders 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 and fear of 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 forty-two years as an artillery officer in the regular army, and who was married to Conchita Álvarez de la Mesa of Brooklyn, the daughter of a Spanish colonel who fought 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 Terry Allen Sr., 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 Catholic University 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.
During World War II, when he was commanding the Big Red One in North Africa, his freewheeling style made him a favorite of the American press. Time put him on its cover with a tribute to the infantry. A. J. Liebling profiled him in The New Yorker. Ernie Pyle occasionally slept in his tent (bedrolls on the ground, no cots for this general) and called him Terry and pronounced him “one of my favorite people”—high praise from the war correspondent who made his reputation writing about anonymous GIs rather than their famous leaders. An old jaw wound made Allen hiss through his teeth when he was riled up, emitting a sound “like a leak in a tire,” as Pyle described it, and the language that came whistling out was often “so wonderfully profane it couldn’t be put down in black and white” in any case. “This was no intellectual war with him,” Pyle wrote. “He hated Germans and Italians like vermin, and his pattern for victory was simple: just wade in and murder the hell out of the low-down, good-for-nothing so-and-so’s.” Hence the nickname Terrible Terry Allen.
How his soldiers wore their uniforms, shaved their faces, and behaved in town while on furlough was less important to him than their devotion to the division and the ferocity with which they fought. While this attitude won him the unswerving loyalty of his troops, his superiors came to believe that his division was too much a separate force, individualistic and undisciplined, operating by its own rules. General Omar Bradley yanked Allen from command near the end of the Sicilian campaign, laying on him the unusual flaw of “loving the division too much.” Allen was nevertheless too valuable to leave on the sidelines for the rest of the war. He returned to the States with orders to form a new division, the 104th, which was trained in time to march through France and Germany with a typical Terrible Terry battle cry leading it on, “Nothing in hell can stop the Timberwolves!”
The general’s devotion to his soldiers, and their loyalty in return, was repeated tenfold in the relationshi
p 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. It was a five-day marathon that took him from the Adolphus Hotel to the Alamo and drew thousands of spectators along the rain-soaked route, inspiring press coverage matched by few sporting events in the Lone Star State outside football. 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 Jr. learned the game before he was ten and later became team captain and one of the best players at the New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI), his career fostered by Terry Sr. from afar. From the war zone in Europe in 1945, the general wrote a letter to Charles Meurisse and Company in Chicago placing a special order of polo sticks for Cadet Terry Allen. “I want four sticks 51" long and three sticks 52" long…. I want cigar-shaped maple heads of about medium weight and I particularly want these sticks to be well balanced and of the best possible grade.”
Nothing but the best for Sonny.
General Allen’s passionate interest in his son’s polo development was surpassed only by the zeal with which he pushed for Terry Jr.’s appointment to West Point. “I have avoided seeking political influence for myself, but I feel that it is quite proper for me to do so for the sake of Terry Jr.,” he acknowledged in a letter to Captain Reese Cleveland of Midland. And lobby he did, virtually nonstop starting in August 1944, when his son was only fifteen and he was back at Colorado Springs organizing 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 Jr.’s qualifications. As the Timberwolves trudged their way through Europe, his lobbying only intensified. Letters went out regularly to influential friends and politicians in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Washington, all the way up to Vice President Truman. He recruited members of his staff to pull strings as well. First Lieutenant Alfred W. 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 is also the boy’s wish…. I would like for you to contact your friends in Washington and have them do their all in laying the foundation for the direct principal appointment…for this young man.”
They Marched Into Sunlight Page 7