They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss Page B

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.
     
    T HE 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: Directive 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