Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  “I think now because of laws like the Freedom of Information Act, you probably could,” Trudy said. “If it’s important to you and you’d like us to, we’ll help you find out.”

  “Well, let me think about it,” Suzanne said, but she never pursued the matter.

  They then asked Stephen if he wanted help learning about his own origins. “Why should I want to know who my original parents were?” he said. “I’m happy with you.”

  Suzanne was a high school sophomore when Stephen left home for college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, continuing as the academic star he had been in high school. He intended to major in fine art. By the end of his first year, he decided he was more interested in commercial art than fine art, so he decided to transfer to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, whose program was more heavily oriented toward commercial art.

  Jack thought this was a terrible idea, moving away from such a challenging and nationally prestigious university, but felt it was Stephen’s decision to make. He became more actively involved when Steve went down to Texas over the Christmas break to visit a friend, and then announced he had decided to stay there, drop out of school, and look for a job in the oil and gas industry.

  Jack told him, “You’re making a bad judgment and you’re going to be on your own if you do that. We will not bail you out.”

  Suzanne became extremely upset that Jack and Trudy seemed to be abandoning and throwing out her beloved brother.

  “No, Suzanne, I’m not throwing him out,” Jack replied. “It’s his choice. If he stays in college, we’ll do whatever we can to help and support him. But he’s making a bad choice and I can’t encourage him or support it.” They were never sure whether Suzanne approved of Stephen’s move or not, but regardless of how she felt and regardless of the conflicts she herself had had with her parents, she couldn’t bear the idea of Stephen being estranged from the family.

  But the bottom had recently fallen out of the oil market and jobs were scarce. And Stephen started to feel subtle pressures from his friend’s family; they were concerned that he intended to live in their house forever. In the meantime, though, he’d met a girl who offered to let him live with her. He got a job working in a local supermarket to help support them. He wrote to Suzanne about her. saying she was blond and pretty and just like his sister.

  Interestingly, while Stephen stayed in Texas, his Texas friend decided to go to school in the Washington, D.C., area and stayed for a while with the Collinses. At one point, Stephen decided to come home for a visit and announced he was bringing his girlfriend home with him. Upon meeting her, Suzanne quickly decided she was nothing at all like herself.

  Stephen returned to Texas and got a job in the construction business. Jack and Trudy were beside themselves.

  “Eventually he called us.” says Jack. “He’d been in a car accident, his relationship with his girlfriend had ended, somebody had stolen his wallet with his driver’s license, he’d fallen off a building, he’d broken his glasses, and he was out of money. He’d about hit rock bottom.”

  Jack had foreign service business he couldn’t postpone, so Trudy flew down to Texas alone. “I never thought much about the devil and things like that, but when I got down there and saw what was happening, I thought, The devil lives in Arlington, Texas.’ All these young people who had run away from home. They were merely existing; their lives were terrible. All these young girls would come over to talk to me—you know, I was their mother figure—and tell me their sad tales: how they went with this man who was married but he loved her so much he was going to leave his wife. And they all believed it. It was very sad.

  “Anyway, I finally said to Stephen. ’This is your last chance. This is it. You come back with me or you stay here.’ And I got him new glasses, we got him a new driver’s license, and I just said, ’We’re not funding any more of this. If you want to come back, you come back now.’ So he did.”

  He came back home around Christmas of 1983. This time, Jack said Stephen could not start college right away. “You’re going to work for a year and show that you’re going to do something with yourself.” After that, he was able to get back into the University of Virginia, where he once again excelled in his course work and then graduated with honors in economics in 1987.

  Looking back on the experience in Texas, Stephen comments, “I got about ten years of immaturity out of the way in two years.” He also admits from this vantage point that his blond and blue-eyed girlfriend there was “nothing like Suzanne.”

  The way Jeff Freeman sees it, “Suzanne was an anchor for him. When things were tough with their parents, they bonded even closer with each other. And the older Suzanne got, the more advice Steve got from her. It was really incredible how much he loved her.”

  Suzanne didn’t have her brother’s academic options. As smart as she was, her grades had never been good enough for UVA, or any other college with any kind of meaningful scholastic standards. And she made it clear she didn’t want to go to a local community college or settle for some “rinkydink job,” as she put it; she wanted to go somewhere away from home.

  The decision to join the Marine Corps came as a surprise to everyone. Recruiters from all the services had visited her high school and one day in March of her senior year she came home and told her parents, “I’d like to join the Marines.” Jack doesn’t remember ever having heard her mention the military before that.

  He was tring to figure out how he felt about this, so he said, “Well, gee, Blue Bell, I’m really curious. You know how proud I was of being a naval officer and you’ve heard all my stories about serving on ships. I can’t imagine why you’d want to go in the Marines rather than the Navy.”

  She looked at him squarely and said, “Because, Dad, the Marines are the best.”

  “What could I say to that?” Jack recalls. “So I answered, ’Well, you’re the best, Suzanne, so that’s fine.’”

  When Stephen found out about her decision, he was as surprised as his parents. “I expected her to go to college. I never thought about her not going to school. But I didn’t question her decision. The main thing I remember is that I was very, very proud of her.”

  Jeff Freeman says, “I was surprised. I thought it was a pretty ballsy thing for a woman to do. She said she wanted the challenge and I had no doubt she’d be successful at it.”

  Jack still had to come fully to terms with it in his own mind. “I’d say to Trudy, ’Is this a good idea? Should we discourage her?’ And then I thought, well, let’s analyze the whole thing. She hasn’t studied well enough to get into college. If she didn’t go in the Marine Corps, she won’t want to continue living at home. She’d want to get an apartment with another girlfriend, get a job. We’d be nervous wrecks worrying about where she was, where she parked the car, was it dark, would she be alone? I thought, at least I know she’ll be safe in the Marine Corps. Someone will be watching her and looking out for her all the time.”

  Even after Suzanne committed to the Marines, in some ways Jack could not help being a typical father. When she came downstairs to model her prom dress—very bright red and very short, accentuating her splendid figure—Jack said, “Are you sure there’s nothing missing?”

  “It was definitely not a dress I would have chosen for her. But every time I made that sort of comment, she’d say something like, ’You are going to cut your sideburns, aren’t you, Dad?’ So we would end up laughing about it.”

  Suzanne graduated from high school on June 4, 1984, and went into the Marines on June 27. She did her basic training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina.

  Those of us who did their service in the Air Force, or any branch other than the Marines, know how tough by comparison Marine basic training is. The concept is to break each recruit down and then build him or her up in the Marine mold. Suzanne thrived in basic training, pushing her mind and body to each new challenge. She had her long blond hair chopped off short and spent all day long drilling
in a uniform. All of the discipline she couldn’t accept at home, she accepted willingly and enthusiastically in the Corps. The drill instructor seemed to have it in for Suzanne, perhaps because she was so pretty and from an educated, upper-middle-class background. But Suzanne accepted this as part of the challenge. During the eight weeks of basic training, a number of the women in her platoon washed out, some on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Suzanne knew she needed this kind of structure in her life and loved the sense of direction it gave her.

  The letters she wrote home would detail how tough the training was, but never expressed any doubts or reservations. And when they came down to Parris Island for boot camp graduation, Jack and Trudy couldn’t have been more proud. She took Jack to the huge rappelling tower and said, “Dad, I did that! Isn’t it cool? I did that!” She took almost equal pride in demonstrating to her mother that this daughter who could barely get it together to keep her room from being a total wreck could now make a bunk bed so tight that a quarter would bounce off it.

  When recruits enter basic training, they’re given their uniforms and caps. When they graduate, they’re given the Marine eagle, globe, and anchor insignia to put on the cap. There is a photograph of Suzanne receiving her insignia from the drill instructor who gave her such a hard time. Suzanne has a beaming grin on her face, as if to say, “You said I couldn’t do it and I did it!” For her, that was perhaps the proudest moment of all.

  Before taking up her first temporary duty assignment at Cherry Point, North Carolina, Suzanne came home on leave. Her parents noticed a difference right away, and so did Steve. She was totally confident, utterly sure of herself. “When she came back,” Stephen says, “her attitude was, ’Hey, this is my life. I’m on my own now. You can make suggestions, but I make the decisions for myself now.’”

  She also finally got her driver’s license and bought herself a car—a used red Pontiac Firebird that had a tendency to break down. But now she could go where she wanted, when she wanted.

  Stephen drove her down to Cherry Point and they had a lot of time to talk along the way. At the Marine Corps Air Station there, she was assigned to the Second Marine Air Wing, a Harrier jet squadron, for five weeks of on-the-job training while awaiting the next scheduled start of avionics technician class. By this time, Suzanne had begun giving serious thought to getting her higher education in the military and trying to become among the first female Marine aviators. The avionics training would be the first step. She set her sights on a fleet appointment to the Naval Academy and began writing letters asking for advice and recommendations. She was convinced that a strong military performance would overshadow her lackluster high school academic record and show she had gained the maturity and leadership capabilities to take on anything the Marine Corps had to offer.

  Private First Class Suzanne Marie Collins reported to MATSS-902—Marine Aviation Training Support Squadron 902-at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee, on October 20, 1984, to begin Class A avionics school. As proud as her parents had been of her physical prowess and mental toughness at boot camp, they were even more impressed that she seemed willing and able to take on such technical subject matter as wiring diagrams and circuits and flight theory. “Had she had to take that course at Robert E. Lee High School, she would have flunked it; I’m sure of it,” says Jack.

  At Millington, Suzanne was hard to miss—a tall, blond beauty with a striking figure honed by constant exercise. One of her fellow Marines, James Brunner, wrote, “She had a manner about her that was always so graceful and beautiful. I remember her walking through the mall, turning all the heads, wives nudging husbands and men tripping over themselves. Lord knows, the first time I saw her I walked into a pole.”

  In March of 1985, Suzanne met the person who soon became her best friend: Susan Hand, who had arrived at Millington on March 11. In fact, the similarities between the two women were remarkable. Aside from their first names, they’d bought similar model cars without knowing each other. Both women were tall, blond, and widely considered to be knockouts; there are photographs in which Trudy can hardly tell them apart.

  Though they didn’t go through boot camp together, they both entered basic training from comparable backgrounds that were different from those of just about anyone else around them. “Almost everyone else there was either a Southern hillbilly or from a military family,” Susan explains. “Neither one of us knew much about the military going in, so we were viewed as being prissy and stuck up, even though we weren’t.”

  Susan was exactly a year and a month older than Suzanne. She was the oldest of five children from Lisle, Illinois, and after two years of college at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, her parents couldn’t afford to continue her schooling. So Susan went into the military to pay for her education. “The Marines were a way out for both of us, a way to get far away from home and be on our own.”

  Like Suzanne, Susan chose the Marines because she perceived they were the best. She was at Millington for air traffic control school and lived downstairs from Suzanne in the same barracks building.

  Life at Millington was only slightly less spartan than boot camp. The barracks held two to four women per room, sleeping in metal rack bunk beds. The floors had to be polished and waxed daily. Suzanne decorated her part of the room with posters of the Chippendales male strippers.

  Before too long, the pair of Susan and Suzanne became well-known throughout the base. “Everyone on base knew us,” says Susan. “We were always in the spotlight. When we’d wear our bikinis to the post pool, everyone would stare at us, but we didn’t care.” Both women were five foot seven and 118 pounds with the same build. Suzanne’s eyes were greenish blue and Susan’s are greenish brown and Suzanne’s hair was slightly lighter in color. But they could easily—and did—swap clothes, which gave Suzanne particular satisfaction.

  “Suzanne was completely open and friendly all the time, and always fun. But I think we were resented by a lot of the other women there,” Susan observes. “We were two tall blonds, more intelligent, better spoken, and better looking than most of the others in the military, especially at Millington. The guys really liked us, and our superiors, too. I know that caused some trouble for Suzanne.”

  She came in for the particular ire of a staff sergeant and a warrant officer who seemed to resent her looks, attractiveness to men, and easy charm with superior officers.

  “These two were really mean to both of us,” says Susan. “They were always calling us into their office. Suzanne made them mad all the time with her independence and free spirit. She’d go off post with friends and not come back when she was supposed to. They’d go after her for anything. She really tried their patience. I would try to stay more within the system. If they said we couldn’t do something, I’d call the captain and get him to fix it, which made them even madder.”

  Another thing that got Suzanne into difficulty occurred early on in her time at Millington when she dated an NROTC university student. Though Susan comments that “The people we had most in common with were officers,” and though she herself ended up marrying an Army infantry lieutenant, of all the services, the Marine Corps took the dimmest view of fraternizing between enlisted personnel and officers. “I think the other girls were jealous,” she says. “It reminded me a lot of high school.

  “We would date a lot, but it was innocent. Suzanne was both innocent and outgoing at the same time.”

  Also, about that same time, Suzanne had been promoted from PFC to lance corporal.

  Actually, it was another woman, a friend of Suzanne’s named Sue Drake, who introduced her and Susan to their boyfriends. Chris Clarkson and Greg “Gonzo” Gonzowski, both Marine air traffic control technicians, were best buddies from their hockey-playing days in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and co-captained the Memphis Naval Air Station base soccer team. They hit it off immediately and soon the two couples of Susan and Chris and Suzanne and Gonzo would go everywhere and do everything together. Suzanne and Susan were just ab
out the only two girls considered good enough to be invited to play soccer with the guys.

  “I never saw her depressed,” says Susan. “She was a really good friend—caring, fun, adventuresome when she wanted to be. I was more quiet and reserved. I always wanted to be more daredevil and spontaneous like she was. The one who was really adventurous was Patti Coon, who was one of her roommates, and I think after Suzanne’s strict high school years, she was trying to be like Patti sometimes.” Next to Susan, Patti was probably Suzanne’s best friend. Whenever she was off duty and wasn’t around Susan, she was often with Patti.

  “She always wanted to go out dancing,” Susan continues. “She liked really upbeat music and she was good at improvising. We went to clubs on Beale Street in Memphis, or in Germantown, a Memphis suburb which was considered a little tamer and safer. We tried every food for the first time.”

  James Brunner, who was stationed with Suzanne at Millington, remembers, “She was such an outstanding Marine, and yet when in civilian clothes and off-duty, she was so charming you couldn’t help but like her—a sense of humor that was very cute. I could be depressed all the way and in ten minutes I’d be laughing. She could be such a lady and also one of the guys, yet always a lady, even take a shot of whiskey that would make my eyes water and choke, and still dance me til I would drop.”

  Being tail and very attentive to their figures, Suzanne and Susan were always worried about their weight. “We didn’t like the mess hall because everyone would be staring at us, so instead we’d go out a lot with Chris and Gonzo. We particularly liked Wendy’s salad bar. We’d starve ourselves all day, then go pig out on their salad.”

  The main thrust of their weight control and fitness program, though, was exercise, and they’d frequently go out running together. Susan could handle seven or eight miles at a time, but Suzanne would often go another two or three after that. The base was divided by a highway with a walkway built over it and Suzanne would frequently run around the golf course on the north side of the base, either by herself or with the guys, when she wanted to go longer distances. Suzanne became fanatical about running and would try to get out for a long run almost every day. She also worked out regularly in the gym, and seemed to like the fact that all the men would always watch her work out. Aside from being flattering, it gave her extra incentive to show them what she could do.