Marine Mom: ‘Mother Never Told Us About <i> This</i> , Did She?’

Everywhere there is talk of war.

Perhaps, by the time you read this, the killing may have started, leaving body bags to be stacked in the sand.

People are afraid, and there is reason to fear.

Whoever thought that it would come to this?

A woman I’ll call Jean is asking that question right now, looking off over my shoulder as we talk, momentarily lost in a haze of doubt.

Quickly, however, she snaps back. Her voice, strong and straight, booms again. Tough is what you’d call her, with little room--or patience--for the vagaries of self-doubt.

That is how she is supposed to be.

Jean is a high-ranking officer of the Marines, stationed, for now, at the air base in El Toro. She has 18 years with the corps. Her husband, a Marine officer too, has close to that himself. He has been in Saudi Arabia since the start of Operation Desert Shield.

Jean may soon be there as well.

“I’m mentally ready to deploy,” she says. “I’m a Marine 24 hours a day.”

That, of course, is duty talking, discipline and pride. That’s what takes over when the emotions start to swell, inching up from the heart before they get caught somewhere inside the throat.

If only duty could take away the ache.

“This is my little girl,” Jean says, handing me a color photograph of a smiling cherub seemingly fascinated with her own toes. The baby is coming up on 7 months old.

“And this is my son,” she says. Beaming up from the photograph is a 5-year-old towhead, happily taking his bath.

Then Jean lets the pain flash across her face, clouding it just a bit with the beginning of a laugh.

“I wouldn’t do this,” she says. “But I feel like taking the kids and going to Canada. . . . Mother never told us about this , did she?”

No, back then, mother didn’t tell us anything even close. Mother had no idea that one day both her sons and her daughters could be heading off to war.

“There’s an old saying in the Marine Corps,” Jean says. “ ‘If the Marine Corps meant for you to have a wife or husband, well, they would have issued you one.’ Now, it’s a totally different story. Things have really changed.”

For better and for worse.

Women in the military are, at last, being given a chance to show that they are just as good--if not better--than the guys.

Many of them say that, if given a chance, they would fight at the risk of their own lives. Women soldiers in Panama taught some of the doubters a lesson or two there.

But modern reality moves very fast. Our minds, with their messy emotions, sometimes have trouble keeping pace.

Do we really want to send mothers to war? The question is heard time and again.

The answer, of course, is an earth-shattering no . But, then again, who do we really want to send?

Is the death of a daughter any worse than that of a son? Do we value husbands any less than their wives? Is a father’s life any less important to a grieving child?

Jean, too, has thought about these questions, and the implications leave her chill. Theory into practice has never been more rough.

What if she, too, must leave her children to join the troops on the front lines? More and more, she says, it appears to be just a matter of time.

“About a week before Christmas, they were making noises about needing me over there,” she says. “So I told (my son), ‘Your mom may have to go.’ Of course, he started crying.

“It’s going to be real hard on him. . . . I’m just trying to worry him the least I can. . . . I’m just lucky to have been able to keep along as well as I have been. If I start dwelling on it, I’ll just be a nervous wreck.”

Eighteen years ago, when Jean joined the Marines fresh out of college, she says she couldn’t imagine even thinking about the dilemma that confronts her now. Would it have made a difference?

Jean pauses, then says that she thinks she would have acted in the same way.

“It probably would have made me think again, or maybe two, or three times more, but I think I would have joined in the end,” she says.

And three years ago, all Marine couples with children were asked to sign a statement acknowledging the possibility that both parents could be deployed. They were to list a person who would be responsible for their children if that should take place.

Still, few thought that would come to pass; certainly it wouldn’t affect them. Many couples didn’t even bother to sign. Jean says she and her husband listed a neighbor. They’ve sinced moved away.

But now, on top of 12-hour days at the base, Jean says she’s been forced to make unpleasant plans. Her best friend, who lives in Oregon, will take the children and care for them as her own. The kids will give her an instant family, Jean says.

And then she tries to smile.

Jean and I keep talking, about life in the military--her father was in the Navy for 30 years--and how it’s been good and how it’s been bad. Thank God for her friends, she says. They’ve been helping whenever they can.

Before I know it, more than two hours have passed and I am about ready to leave. I ask Jean if I’ve overlooked anything, and she comes back in an instant with something weighing on her mind.

“What if both of us are killed?” she says.

And so I ask, “What if?”

It’s then that Jean gets back her business voice, confident and loud. There’s a will she must formalize that will turn over her children to her best friend. Jean thinks that will be best.

“I have to think about this because it’s very possible,” she says. “It is very possible.”

Then she stops, as if to put those words to rest.

Nobody likes to hear them said out loud.