War Widow’s Book to Look at Survivors : Woman, Who Met Challenge, to Tell Story of Others Who Lost Husbands in Vietnam

When Jean Blankenship opened the door and saw two Marine Corps officers standing stoically on the front steps of her Costa Mesa home, she knew instantly that her husband had been killed in Vietnam.

On that April morning in 1969, she sat in stunned silence in her living room as they told her that Maj. Leroy Blankenship, then 40, had been killed the day before when the helicopter he was piloting was shot down near Da Nang.

Blankenship said her life was shattered. The man she had married at 16 and shared her life with for 22 years was gone. At 38, without even a high school diploma, Blankenship was left alone to support herself and her two children.

“My ‘June Cleaver’ days of being a housewife were over,” she said, referring to the mother in the television series “Leave It To Beaver.”

Blankenship, now 56 and living in Fountain Valley, is one of 17,169 widows of American men killed in the Vietnam War, a National Archives spokesman said.

She has made what she said has been the difficult transition from being a homemaker, who daily baked cookies for her children to snack on after school, to being a busy career woman, whose current cooking is limited to “throwing bread in the toaster and using the microwave.”

Now Blankenship is embarked on what she says is her most ambitious project: She’s writing what is believed to be the first book about the widows and the mothers, daughters, sisters and girlfriends of the 58,123 American men killed in the Vietnam War.

No books have been written about Vietnam widows, according to the Library of Congress. Spokesmen for the Society of Military Widows, the National Assn. of Military Widows, the Vietnam Veterans of America and similar organizations say Blankenship is the only person they know of working on a book about women survivors.

Only recently have Vietnam veterans received much recognition for their efforts, they said, and, therefore, there wasn’t any interest in writing about their widows.

To overcome this oversight, Blankenship said, “I want to write about the quiet courage these women showed in trying to put their lives back together again with no fanfare and little support.”

The working title of her book, “Women With Folded Flags,” is derived from the folded American flags given to widows at the conclusion of military funerals.

“What happened to these women after the condolences were given, the flowers died and the flags were folded?” Blankenship wondered aloud in an interview in her Foutain Valley condominium.

The 100 letters she has received from these women since she bagan her research 18 months ago have yielded some surprises:

- Mothers of teen-age sons killed in Vietnam were particularly devastated, sometimes suffering nervous breakdowns, sometimes slipping into alcoholism.

- Most widows were in their early ‘20s when their husbands were killed and have remarried, but Blankenship has found that “they’ve never forgotten their first husbands, whose loss remains an open wound.”

- Because of the war’s controversy, women survivors have shied away from joining organizations for veterans’ families and have tried to blend unnoticed into society; they feel the country does not appreciate their loved one’s sacrifices and fear anything they say about their own grief will be misunderstood or subject to renewed controversy.

All the letters, Blankenship said, “show that there are a lot of unresolved feelings (among female survivors) about the war. I’m not talking about politics, but about emotions . . . the anger and grief that burn just as intensely in their hearts today as it did when their men were killed in Vietnam 15 or 20 years ago.”

Blankenship believes that these feelings exist because neither these women nor society knew how to react when men were killed in Vietnam.

Neither War Nor Peace

“It wasn’t the political controversy surrounding the Vietnam War,” Blankenship maintains. Rather, she believes it was because “the country was neither at war nor at peace.”

Blankenship’s experience as a Vietnam widow may be representative of that of women survivors of men killed in Vietnam.

She recalls that during the two weeks she waited for her husband’s body to return from Vietnam “everybody rallied around me.”

Relatives came from the Blankenships’ native state of Washington. Neighbors in Costa Mesa, where she had lived for six years, dropped by with food or volunteered to do errands. Similar help came from Marines and their wives assigned to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, where her husband had been stationed before his departure for Vietnam in January, 1969.

A “wonderful” Marine casualty assistance officer took a dazed Blankenship to government offices so she could learn about her benefits as a military widow.

“But he was limited to helping me with paper work,” she said. “He couldn’t help me with personal things, like how to deal with my grief. I had a lot of anger because nobody seemed to understand how much I was hurting.”

Soon after her husband’s funeral “people kind of disappeared.” Her despair deepened, but she said she hid her grief from others.

Controlled Dignity

“I was trying to hold it all in,” she said. “All the women have written me that while they were seething inside, they kept up this front of controlled dignity because they didn’t know what else to do.”

Blankenship even hid her anguish from her son, David, then 21, and daughter, Harvest, then 20, who were living at home while attending college.

She remembers that she would go into the bathroom, flip on the fan, let the water run in the sink and “cry in the shower to drown out the noise.” She also felt a great catharis when she would pull her car off the road into an isolated orange grove, where she would “scream and scream until I was ‘screamed out’ for the day.”

Blankenship said her children also took their father’s death very hard because they had been such a close family.

“For quite a while we didn’t want to be out of each other’s sight,” she said. “Whenever anybody was a little late getting home, we’d get concerned.”

Blankenship’s emotional trauma was compounded by financial difficulties. The monthly military widow’s compensation she received wasn’t enough to cover house payments, she said. Two years after her husband’s death, finances forced her to sell her Costa Mesa house and move into an apartment in Westminster.

Savings provided a temporary cushion. “But the real godsend was the GI Bill,” which Blankenship said paid for her college education and allowed her to become self-supporting.

Job in Santa Ana

In 1972, she was graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a bachelor’s degree in speech pathology, and she took a job with the Santa Ana Unified School District as a speech therapist. When she received her master’s degree in speech pathology four years later, she switched to the Fountain Valley district.

Today, she teaches speech-impaired children at Plavan Elementary School. Also, she frequently conducts evening or weekend workshops on effective public speaking for business and civic groups.

When she got her job with the Fountain Valley school system 10 years ago, Blankenship was finally able to afford the two-bedroom condominium she now lives in.

“I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished,” she said, but she still bears scars from “subliminating a lot of the grief I felt. Because the war was controversial, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my feelings with others.

“It was a TV war that wasn’t real to a lot of people. If I said I was a Vietnam widow, most people didn’t know what to say.”

Those who did speak up often were unkind. When her husband was killed in 1969, newspapers routinely carried the names and addresses of Vietnam casualties, causing Blankenship to receive some hate letters and cards.

“It was stuff like: ‘The only good Marine is a dead Marine’ . . . ‘Your husband deserved to die.’ ”

‘Another Grief Period’

When the American POWs were released after the 1973 truce between North Vietnam and the United States, Blankenship went through “another grief period” because her husband was not among them.

“It was irrational, but I was still denying he was dead. Emotionally, all I could think was: ‘He always came home before (when he’d served in the Korean War and a previous yearlong tour in Vietnam). When he didn’t come home with the other POWs, for me, it was like he died all over again.”

In an attempt to find out how similar her experiences have been to other Vietnam widows, Blankenship began researching her book 18 months ago.

She has found that most of the widows her age have remained single. But widows in their ‘20s, especially those with small children, often remarried because “they wanted to have a family unit again.”

Said Blankenship: “The thrust of these letters is that nobody wanted to help them deal with their grief. Everyone expected them to carry on as if their husbands hadn’t died.”

Some wives have had trouble holding jobs, have become alcoholics or have been through several marriages, Blankenship said.

But the majority overcame their loss and went on to lead fulfilling personal and professional lives, Blankenship said. “There was some special spark that caused these women to pick up the pieces and to get on with their lives.”

Research Hampered

Blankenship’s research has been hampered by the federal Privacy Act which prohibits the government from releasing the names of survivors of men who died in Vietnam.

To overcome this roadblock, she has written to organizations for names of veterans or their families and scores of newspapers throughout the country soliciting letters from women survivors.

(Blankenship can be reached through her post office box at 10221 Slater Ave., Suite 103, Fountain Valley, Calif. 92708.)

She has discarded her initial two-year deadline for completing the book because she now realizes that it will be difficult and time-consuming to reach the women. But Blankenship said she has been inspired to continue her quest because of the responses thus far to her requests.

Blankenship, who was 11 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, said: “Vietnam wasn’t like World War II, where there was rationing and everybody had someone in the service. Then we were in a war climate, and everybody’s life was touched.

“But Vietnam didn’t affect that many people directly. Even I went about by daily routine.

“On the day my husband I died, I was living here in comfort and peace.”

Today, Blankenship said she has a “grudging acceptance of my husband’s death. I’ve come to realize that I was very lucky to have known someone with such a positive attitude and love of life.

“Though I’m a different person than I was when he was alive, he shaped the person I became.”