They Marched Into Sunlight

by David Maraniss

  Part of the old man’s motivation surely was to have his son succeed where he had failed and enjoy the long-range benefits of West Point connections that he had missed. But if Terry Jr. was more handsome and exhibited some social skills that Terry Sr. lacked, they shared an unease with math and a boredom with schoolwork. The general was at once understanding of his son’s academic disposition and relentless in his gentle prodding that he strive for higher marks. In a February 1945 letter wishing Sonny luck in his high school midterms, Terry Sr. offered heartfelt advice about tests: “Above all—do not let them worry you, as you are capable of doing well if you do not get nervous about them. I just wanted to let you know that I am very happy over your progress and the fact that you are trying hard is satisfactory, insofar as I am concerned.” Two months later he wrote a letter to the headmaster at NMMI expressing concern that Terry had been “dropped” from plane geometry—a course that he needed in preparation for the math heavy curriculum at West Point. When Terry Jr. sent him a strong report card at the end of that semester, the father gushed praise and noted sympathetically that studying was “a terrible bore, but is very necessary if you want not to have too hard a time when you go to West Point.”

  It took all of that lobbying and cajoling plus a year of remedial tutoring at another military prep school, but Terry Jr. finally made it to West Point on a senatorial appointment in 1948. As a cadet in Company H-l, he became known for “his good nature” and “burrhead 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.”

  Lieutenant Allen reached Korea with the Fifth Infantry Regiment at the end of the conflict there in 1953 and then returned home to Fort Lewis and began an ascent that paralleled his father’s four decades earlier. Terry Sr. was watching his son’s progress with more than casual interest, as attested to by a letter he received on December 20, 1955, from John C. Schuller, a life insurance agent in El Paso who had inside sources at the Pentagon and was able to obtain Terry Jr.’s personnel records. “Terry has an OEI (Officer Efficiency Index) of 132 as of now. This is a numerical evaluation now being given officers based on their efficiency reports. 150 is the max. 132 places him well up in the upper ONE-SIXTH of all first LTs in the army. In other words, he is highly outstanding among officers in his grade. It is relatively rare for a LT to get as high as 132.” Schuller went on to assess Terry Jr.’s prospects for getting into advanced officer training courses and promotion to captain. (“Here again no worry because he has such a fine record.”) All of which surely pleased the old man, who was by then retired and living in El Paso. The family ambition, shared as well by Mary Fran, was for Terry Jr. to exceed his father and someday wear the three stars of a lieutenant general or four stars of a full general.

  After reaching captain, he served as a staff officer for the Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and then was sent west to Colorado Springs as a junior aide to General Charles Hart at the U.S. Army Air Defense. That is where he met Bebe Coonly and her husband, Bill, who was Hart’s senior aide. General Allen had stayed in Colorado Springs in 1944 while establishing the Timberwolves and was put up at the Broadmoor Hotel, where he became friends with the managers of the resort, the Tutt family. The Tutts were now quick to find Terry Jr. an apartment near the ice arena. The dashing young bachelor captain drove around town in a 1957 Thunderbird convertible with his polo boots and mallets in the back seat. He stopped over at the Coonlys’ almost every day, or night, sometimes as late as two or three in the morning, knowing that he could bang on the door at any hour and feel welcome. On his way home from a party, he might “come in smiling expansively” and pronounce to the groggy Coonlys that his father had always told him never to drink alone. The life that his father had helped shape for him looked fine indeed in those final days of the fifties, and on the first of April 1959, Terry Sr.’s birthday, the loving disciple sent home a telegram that read, “My best wishes from the luckiest son in the world—Sonny.”

  There was one unsettling episode during his stint in Colorado Springs. Terry Jr. had fallen in love with the attractive young widow of a fallen Air Force pilot and was eager to show her off to his parents, but when the time came it proved disastrous. Pleased ta meecha, the woman said when she was introduced to Mary Fran, and the dignified El Paso matron, a woman who never left her house without hat and gloves, was so distraught over the coarseness of her son’s lady friend that she announced that she had a terrible headache and retreated to her room. Terry Jr. was even less likely to disappoint his mother than his father, and the romance with the widow soon faded.

  GENERAL ALLEN AND MARY FRAN lived in a comfortable but un-pretentious house of limestone and wood at 21 Cumberland Circle within a mile’s jog of the Fort Bliss front gate. On the living room wall, above a long row of polo trophies and wartime photographs, were the battle flags of the Big Red One and the Timberwolves, along with the original painting of Terrible Terry that Time had used for its cover. The rest of the house, with the exception of the retired general’s den and Terry Jr.’s old bedroom, was painted in Mary Fran’s favorite shade of art deco pink. Terry Sr. sold insurance in his retirement, though he never made much money at it, and he spent much of his time corresponding with old soldiers, coaching the polo team at Fort Bliss, and trying to keep in shape. Long before running became a fitness craze, he could be seen jogging through the residential streets in a loop that took him to the military base and then around toward the fashionable stucco homes on Pennsylvania Circle where El Paso’s social elite lived. He was an unforgettable sight, decked out in army sweats with a wool wrap around his neck, carrying a medicine ball that kept his wrists supple for polo. When Jean Ponder, looking out from the backyard of her home at 230 Pennsylvania Circle, first saw this old man running down the nearby alley in the noonday heat, she went inside and asked her mother who it could be, and was told that it was General Allen.

  There are conflicting accounts of when she first met the general’s son. As her aunt Bebe Coonly remembered it, she and Bill threw a party for Terry when he came home from Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, a training ground for future colonels and generals that the near-goat of West Point had become the first member of his class to attend. Bebe’s sister Alice called and asked her to invite her daughter Jean, a gorgeous coed who had been moping around the house, depressed about being dumped by the young man who had been her escort the previous year when she was named the lady-in-waiting at the Sun Carnival. “And Jean walked in and looked like a million dollars, and Terry had been laughing, drinking, and talking and then just froze at the sight of her and that was it,” Bebe Coonly recalled. Jean remembered it differently. She was home after her freshman year at the San Diego College for Women, and her mother came up to her room and said that Terry Allen Jr. was downstairs, would she like to meet him? Jean
said no, her mother insisted, and Jean relented, but said that she would not change out of her Bermuda shorts. So she went downstairs and the introductions were made, and from there “a whirlwind romance” began. They were both on the rebound, both Catholics. His family was revered in El Paso, and she felt safe around him. To him Jean represented the second coming of his mother, a young debutante socialite who was beautiful and much younger than he was. He was 32, she was 18. It was as though they had no choice but to accept the social scripts that were handed to them. He proposed in July 1960 and they were married in October.

  Always on the lookout to help his son, Terry Sr. intervened in a minor fashion to ease the way for the wedding. Terry Jr. had been shipped to Germany as an operations officer with the Eighth Infantry Division by then and needed permission to return for the wedding, which was to be held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with a breakfast reception at the Waldorf-Astoria. The old man wrote a memorandum to Major General Robert W. Porter, deputy chief of staff for personnel at the Pentagon (and, not coincidentally, his old G-2 intelligence officer in the Big Red One during the North Africa campaign), explaining that Terry Jr. had to get married before October 5 for his bride to qualify for official dependent travel accommodations when they left for Europe. The proper arrangements were made, and the wedding was held on October 2. Jean wore a gown of candlelight peau de soie and lace, with a scoop neckline and a Victorian-style skirt with a chapel train. Her face was covered by a butterfly veil of illusion held by a small crown of orange blossoms. As her father, James Hart Ponder, escorted her down the aisle, he whispered, “If you don’t want to do this, it’s not a problem.” She kept walking toward Captain Terry de la Mesa Allen Jr., who awaited her in his dress blues. At his side stood the best man—his father.

  After a honeymoon on the Riviera, Jean Ponder Allen found herself in a quaint place called Bad Kreuznach in an alien country where she knew no one and barely knew her own husband, who worked long hours in any case and usually took the car. She was utterly ill prepared for the life she faced, a beauty queen from upper-class El Paso accustomed to nothing beyond the privileged society of her youth. Her landlady, Frau Schmidt, whose husband had fought for the Nazis, took pity on her and taught her some German. She made daily strolls around the village. And in less than a year she had a baby daughter. Terry wanted to name her in honor of his Spanish grandmother, but he somehow confused the name, so it came out Consuelo instead of Conchita. In a letter to her mother-in-law in September 1962, Jean seemed to be adjusting as well as could be expected. “Terry is in the field again—for 10 days,” she wrote. “Everyone is a little nervous around here, as in four days five Eighth Division people were killed. Two in an auto accident, one jumping, and a sergeant shot a captain and then killed himself! All of this took place in Mannheim—is B.K. next? Last night I played Bingo—and won ten dollars. I thought of you all night—playing with six cards! Colonel and Mrs. Peevely Rury are here and know you quite well. She says you gave a party for them when they left Fort Bliss…. Oh, Mary Fran, if only you could see your granddaughter now. She is cute enough to eat. She has discovered her hands now, and spends hours looking at them. This house has been blessed with a wonderful maid. I’m so delighted.”

  Another daughter, Bebe, named for Jean’s aunt, arrived fourteen months later, and within a year of that came Mary Frances, named for Terry’s mother. Jean was barely twenty-two, the mother of three little girls, overwhelmed and overtaken by postpartum depression. She was also now without the help of Frau Schmidt, the family having moved to Stuttgart and then Augsburg following Terry’s assignments. His mind was very much on making it to the top. Without saying it aloud, he and Jean worked on the common assumption that someday he would be a general. His father, of the same mind, was always willing to offer advice on how to get there.

  “Your considered counsel has always been a great deal of help to me,” Terry Jr. acknowledged in a letter to his father in September 1963 from Seventh Army headquarters. “I agree with your present evaluation of the situation in Vietnam as being more politically oriented. It seems to be coming even more so. My choice selection now would be to try to receive an assignment as an infantry battalion executive officer although not necessarily limited to Germany.”

  The old man, delighted to get that letter, fired off a reply. He recommended that his son make the move from a staff position to command duty because “extensive practical experience in troop leading is an essential basic need for any combat officer.” And he concluded with a few bits of advice on the characteristics of good commanders. They “must be able to call the signals with clarity and foresight. And they must be able to imbue in their soldiers the will to fight, and the will to get the job done come hell or high water.” The dutiful son moved up to become executive officer for a tank battalion of the Seventieth Armor, where he seemed to meet his father’s standards of leadership. He was known as “a regular guy” who, without shouting or forcing himself upon the troops, could get men to do what he wanted out of a natural desire to please him, according to Ed O’Brien, an officer who served under him during that period.

  After two years with the tank battalion, Allen was transferred to the States for a post with the U.S. Strike Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Jean was depressed and emotionally drained by the time they got back from Europe. She was drinking to medicate herself in the evening, though that fact was hardly noticeable in a family of habitual drinkers. Terry Jr., like his father, rarely let the cocktail hour go by without two scotch and waters, which he sipped while puffing on an aromatic cigar. He was a lively storyteller and had a natural brightness to him, some called it a twinkle, that perhaps made it harder for him to see Jean’s inner despair. In tandem with her drinking, she was taking amphetamines, one tablet of speed a day to help her lose weight. She was also distraught over the condition of her mother, who was in the final stages of inoperable cancer. Her mother was her emotional mainstay, but now Jean felt unable to express her distress. Jean’s father had issued a family order that no one was to talk about the fatal nature of the disease, especially not in front of the mother. Alice Hicks Ponder died while Jean was in Tampa, and her father quickly remarried, making the young military wife feel even more alone.

  Out of whimsy and desperation, Jean visited a fortune-teller, who put a hand on her and gave her a personal reading. Her life, she was told, was like a piece of cloth that was going to be ripped in two. Her husband might die. Ridiculous, Jean said to herself. That’s what I get for going to a stupid fortune-teller. The orders came for Terry Allen Jr. to report to Vietnam on February 25. He had often told Jean that “the only way a soldier proves himself is on the battlefield.” Here was his chance. Jean, in retrospect, thought she should have asked him to hold off going until she was in a better mental state, but at the time she and her husband were still operating under a different philosophy: in the military, you do what you are told to do. She still wanted to be a general’s wife.

  THE OLD MAN had fallen into a middle stage of dementia by then, a condition that first became noticeable during a trip to the battlefields of Holland with his old Timberwolves in 1965, when he kept wondering where he was and asking in befuddlement for Mary Fran, who had not made the trip with him. For Terry Jr., who adored his father, watching him deteriorate was like “watching the sun fall from the sky.” By early 1967, when his son flew off to lead soldiers in Vietnam, the retired general was virtually unable to navigate outside his home and would lapse into periods of confusion. Holding on dearly to reminders of his glorious past, he became obsessed with the little red instructional booklets he had published during and after World War II. He carried them in his back pocket wherever he went and would hand them out to strangers and children, including little Consuelo. Among the personal items Terry Jr. took with him to Vietnam was a small brown manila clasp envelope that had “For Terry Allen jr. (All you need to fight a War)” written on the side in a palsied scrawl. Inside were three of the booklets: Directi
ve for Offensive Combat, Night Attacks, and Combat Leadership, the final words of which were, “The battle is the payoff.” In a birthday card to his father written from the Big Red One base camp in Lai Khe in late March, Terry Jr. reported that he had given copies of the booklets to the division operations officer, the brigade commander, and General Hay.

  That same week, 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 in fact had 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.