On the Home Front--Waiting and Worrying

When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his army into the tiny nation of Kuwait on Aug. 2, a world that had suddenly seemed on the verge of a relatively peaceful age was even more suddenly thrust into a new crisis.

Far from the lines of confrontation, the largest mobilization of U.S. forces since the Vietnam War has created thousands of personal crises. There are small children who wonder where daddy or mommy went. Spouses who pray they won’t be left to raise families alone. Parents who feel profound anxiety and pride at the same time. Reservists who, pressed into duty, find themselves separated from their families and worrying how they will pay bills on a military salary.

These are five stories from the home front. They are the first in an occasional series of articles on how these Southern California families are coping with the crisis.

Zachary and David Taylor threw cans of chili sauce, a few candy bars, popcorn, a stick of deodorant and a book of jokes into a box the other day. “This is for our dad,” Zachary announces. “He’s on a ship. It’s classified.”

Terry Taylor is a petty officer third class aboard the Prairie, a repair and supply vessel on standby in the western Pacific, poised to steam to the Persian Gulf in case war breaks out.

“I’m scared it might blow up,” says David, 10.

“Yeah,” Zachary, 5, adds. He puffed his cheeks out, threw his hands in the air and mimicked the noise of an explosion: “Baroom!”

Zachary is too young to understand. Sometimes the notion of war seems like the Nintendo video war games he and his brother play--games in which the characters are immortal.

Yet at night Zachary sometimes wakes up crying and crawls into bed with his mother.

“I dream about stuff,” he says. “Like his boat sinking.”

David watches the TV news with his mother and tries to figure out where his father is on the family globe.

“Will Daddy be going over there?” he keeps asking. “Is it dangerous?”

Betty Taylor doesn’t know what to say.

The day after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Taylor learned her husband’s ship would be rerouted to the Indian Ocean to be nearer the conflict. Since then, however, the Navy dispatched the ship to Korea and put it on standby.

The boys don’t understand much about the Middle East conflict, but they play war games with their pals in the San Pedro complex of Navy housing. They call it “the gun game.”

They say they want to be soldiers when they grow up--but don’t want to fight in a real war. “I wouldn’t want to get my butt blown up,” David says.

Since the crisis began, the boys have been bickering and whining more than usual, Betty says. Still, she almost dreads when they are in bed at night. That is when she can’t stop worrying about Terry.

Betty’s father, a Methodist minister, married the high school sweethearts in 1978 in Elwood, Neb. It was farm country, flat and grassy, with dirt roads going nowhere. The young couple decided Terry would join the Navy.

They were sent to Hawaii. “I was only 21, and I was seeing the world,” says Betty. “I thought it was pretty glamorous.”

The glamour has worn off, but Terry is still proud to be a Navy man. “We’re doing the right thing, babe,” Terry told his wife during their last phone call.

Betty wonders. “I support what we are doing. But sometimes I just think we should let them fight their own wars over there. I want my husband home.”

Zachary wants him to come home too. He has just written his father a letter boasting about a recent home run and how “I can swim in the pool without floaters.”

Besides, Dad promised to bring home new toys.

Robbie Muir has grown up and gone away, but in the comfortable home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Fullerton, reminders are everywhere. Robbie’s dog, Cody, trots into the dining room, tongue dragging from the heat. The family parrot, B.J., squawks his name every other minute, as though Robbie, always popular with the girls, is still home: “Robbie! Telephone, Robbie!”

But Army Pfc. Robbie Muir is now somewhere in Saudi Arabia. He is, as his father puts it, “the line in the sand that President Bush has drawn. My son.”

He is only 20 but he has grown up fast. A member of the 82nd Army Airborne based at North Carolina’s Ft. Bragg, Robbie Muir was among the commando units that parachuted into Panama to oust Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Robbie’s parents say that in the tone of his letter and his last phone call home, shortly before his departure for Saudi Arabia, two things were clear: He has graduated from innocent teen-ager into a man, and he is, in his own way, prepared to die.

“He said, ‘Dad, I love ya, I’m OK, tell Mom I love her,’ ” his father, Ronnie Muir, recalled tearfully. “ ‘And if I’ve ever done anything wrong to hurt ya, I’m sorry.’

“It was like he was saying goodby.”

The Muirs have fallen into a routine to get through the days of uncertainty. While running their Norwalk restaurant, the couple monitor television newscasts, scanning the screen for their son. They have joined an Orange County support group of families of military personnel sent overseas in the crisis. And they pray.

The Muirs and their 23-year-old daughter, Tamara, describe feelings of both patriotic pride and deep anxiety. The prospect of chemical warfare adds to the tension, they say.

On Tuesday they received their son’s second letter, a four-page chronicle of bravado and humor, loneliness and fear. The Muirs wept as their Robbie expressed his love for God and for them. As a headstrong teen-ager, he had trouble expressing such emotions.

The parents, both 43, proudly show off pictures of their blue-eyed, sandy-haired son, marveling at the changes since his enlistment on Nov. 1, 1988. One photograph shows him in a tuxedo, his arm around his 23-year-old sister. In another he is in dress blues and maroon beret, posing for his graduation from airborne training. A third shows him in a Panamanian jungle, toting a gun, camouflage war paint covering his steely face.

“It kills me that I can’t put my arms around him and tell him it’s going to be OK,” Dee Muir said. “Knowing he’s out there in the desert, the heat, the loneliness, in some foxhole.”

“As a father,” Ronnie Muir says, “your daughter is the pride and joy of your life, and I wear her heart on my sleeve.

“But your son, it’s hard to describe. He’s like you. He is you in many ways.”

Steve Kennedy was talking to some sailors in San Pedro last week who were worrying they’d be sent overseas. “My wife’s over there on a ship,” Kennedy said, proudly--and then flinched.

Sure enough, a familiar look of disbelief and then contempt flashed across the men’s faces.

“What are you doing?” one of the sailors asked. The underlying question, Kennedy knew, was what kind of man are you?

“You can’t know how it hurts,” he said.

No time is more painful than now for the small but growing number of Navy spouses who are men. After 16 years of marriage, Kennedy, 35, is used to being a Navy husband. A former Navy man himself, he’s accustomed to what he calls the “stigma” in a “macho” society of not being the main breadwinner. He’s even used to their two children sometimes calling him “Mom” by mistake, he says.

But suddenly Dorothy Gale Kennedy, a 36-year-old chief petty officer aboard the Prairie, could be in one of the first groups of Navy women involved in actual conflict, and he is scared.

When his wife called after the Iraqi invasion, Kennedy said nothing of his concern.

“I didn’t want her to think I’m scared out of my wits because then her morale would chip away,” he says. “But I’m scared out of my wits.”

Last week, Kennedy went to one of the support groups being held for spouses of Navy personnel. He and a friend were the only men in a group of 20. “The ladies got themselves all worked up talking and asking questions that didn’t do any good,” he says.

Kennedy doesn’t watch the news anymore; it’s too upsetting. Sometimes, he says, he’ll sit in the armchair and become so preoccupied that he’ll speak to the empty armchair next to him.

“Gale,” he’ll begin, before he remembers she’s gone.

They met 17 years ago on a naval base in Florida, marrying a year later. After Steve left the Navy, Gale’s career took the family from Bermuda to Hawaii to San Pedro. Steve picked up odd jobs and took care of the kids, 12-year-old Melisa and 8-year-old Patrick. Now he works as a clerk in a mini-mart and does some typesetting.

Sometimes, he says, the scent of her perfume that clings to her dresser makes him sad. Other times, he finds the children in front of the dresser, touching her things.

Kennedy says he wishes he had more free time so he could escape in a game of golf or billiards. But mostly, he just wants Gale back in her armchair again.

“I’m hoping,” he said, “she gets home for Christmas.”

When the Navy reserves summoned Dr. John Greif, he couldn’t help but wonder what would become of his hard-earned success. What would happen to his medical practice? How could the Greifs pay the $4,000-per-month mortgage on a Navy salary?

Greif, a 45-year-old surgeon at Kaiser Permanente and a Navy reservist, and his wife had been planning to send their 5-year-old son to private school this fall. Now they wonder if they’ll have to sell their La Jolla home.

For Greif, the call-up was no surprise. He had volunteered to work extra hours at San Diego’s Naval Hospital, where he had expected to serve as a reservist. As tension in the Persian Gulf heightened, Greif worked out a tentative schedule to see his own patients during evenings and weekends in case he was activated.

When the reserves were summoned, Greif’s unit was assigned to San Diego’s Naval Hospital. But Greif was assigned away from his unit--and away from home.

To his chagrin, Greif found himself snared by bureaucracy. First he was told he would be assigned to an East Coast hospital. The next day, after appealing for a local assignment, he was told he could work at the San Diego hospital. But the next day--only 48 hours before he was to go on duty--Greif was told that an error had been made. He would indeed be serving in South Carolina.

“It’s emotionally draining,” says Greif, a slim man with salt-and-pepper hair. “It certainly could be worse, I could be going overseas. Well, I guess that’s still not out of the question.”

Greif knew the call-up would hurt financially--as a reservist, he will be paid less than one-third his current salary--but the South Carolina assignment has made matters worse.

Only a few weeks ago, the Greifs had discussed selling their house and getting a bigger one. Now, although they have pared down expenses, Kate Greif wonders whether they can hang on to the modest home with the prime location--across the street from the beach.

“Worse comes to worse, I will sell it,” says Kate Greif, 41. “A couple of weeks ago we were optimistic and foolish. It’s ironic that way.”

John Greif has tried to figure out how to handle his patients, many of whom have surgery scheduled from now through October. He had to inform one patient that he has cancer and that another doctor would tend to him.

But Greif, who was born in a Navy hospital, says he has no regrets about being in the reserves.

He knows he is more fortunate than the men who might require his talents. “The nice thing about being a surgeon,” said Greif, gazing at his blond-haired son, “is you never get too close to the front line.”

Annie Morris, 7, sits on a piano bench in her family’s Lakewood home, fussing with the white gloves she has dressed up in, and talks about her father. “He’s out to sea on a ship,” she says.

“Way out in the ocean,” says her sister Ali, 4, who is curled up in her mother’s lap.

“The Navy says his duty is to get up at night and watch the ship,” Annie says. “In case people are attacking the ship. Right, Mama?” She swung her skinny legs.

Howard Morris is a petty officer first class aboard the Antietam, a guided missile cruiser that left Long Beach Naval Station on June 20 for a routine tour of duty in the Indian Ocean. Within a week after the Iraqi invasion, Navy officials said, the cruiser had been deployed to the Persian Gulf with two other warships from Long Beach.

Last week, one sailor was electrocuted in an accident aboard the Antietam. Annie overheard her mother, Terri, talking about his death on the telephone.

“I worry about Daddy all the time,” Annie says. “I worry he’s gonna get killed, like, you know, there was someone who got killed last week. I keep thinking about if it was Daddy, even though it wasn’t. Right, Mama?”

Terri talks about the risks of Navy life with a stoic reserve. “We always knew Harold might end up giving up his life for our country.” But she always reassures her children that their father will be safe.

Still, the girls sense the tension. They play a game they call shipwreck. “Like there’s a big storm and the ocean gets rough and the ship gets dangerous,” Annie explains.

Neither girl really wants to be on a ship in the Navy.

“I don’t want to have to leave my family for a long time,” Annie says.

“Sharks,” her little sister whispers.

Howard was home on leave when Iraq invaded Kuwait. He had flown in after Terri was found to have multiple sclerosis. Howard was torn by his wish to stay with his wife and his Navy duty. “You get back to where you’re needed,” Terri told him.

They grew up together in Meeker, Okla. Howard told Terri he knew in junior high that he’d marry her. She was a cheerleader, he was a football player. They have been married nine years.

Terri says her Baptist faith helps her cope. Usually the family prays before dinner. Ever since the crisis began, the girls have been trying to help as much as they can, Terri says. The other night, Ali washed the dishes all by herself. “My Dad told us we got to take care of my Mom,” Annie says.

Sometimes the girls ask to watch home videos of their family, giggling as they see the big, red-haired man who calls them “goofbugs.” Almost every night before bed they talk about missing him. “That’s why I’ve been crying a lot,” Annie says.

But sometimes the girls find their mother crying in her room. They hug her and touch her hair the way she does with them.

“It’s OK, Mama,” they say.