These GI Parents Bear a Triple Burden in Gulf War

Donna Wishmire dreads answering the door for fear she will see a military sedan in her El Cajon driveway and two officers on her doorstep. Then she imagines a horrifying question.

“Which child is dead? Which one?”

All three of her children--two sons and one daughter--are on the front-line in the Gulf, probably in the thick of the ground war.

About 20 miles away, David Caywood, Wishmire’s first husband and father of the three children, watches television news. Caywood, paralyzed by a stroke, cannot articulate the emotions he feels. Caywood, 58, understands the danger his children face. He cannot write to them because he lost the use of his arm. Sometimes, in the privacy of his room, he cries. “Three. All I have is three,” he said haltingly. “Now all three. There.”

Wishmire, 53, copes by reading everything she can about the war and watching the news. She plans her day so she can be home when the mailman comes, just in case he brings tidings from one of the three. She tries not to be out of the house too long so she won’t miss a call from her children. It broke her heart to learn recently that her youngest had ridden four “internal organ re-arranging” hours in a truck to get to a telephone and reached her phone machine.

“I don’t have a career. I spent my life raising my children. I was hoping I’d have grandchildren, reunions, family dinners. Now I think maybe I won’t, maybe none of that will happen,” said Wishmire, carefully folding her hands.

As the United States moved towards a ground war, Wishmire’s anxiety mounted. She had trouble sleeping. If she went to a movie, she worried that she ought to be home.

“When you let your imagination have full throttle, you have all these pictures of your children in your mind. Your son stepping on a land mine, saying, ‘Ma, Mama.’ Your son burning in a tank. The chemical gas--you try not to dwell on that,” she said. “You push it from your mind, but it’s a battle, a daily battle.”

Lt. Shelley Robertson, Wishmire’s 23-year-old daughter, is in the Army’s 327th Signal Corps, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C. She was married three months before she was deployed in August with the 82nd Airborne Division. Robertson had joined the Army to get financial assistance with college tuition.

Two weeks after her departure, Wishmire’s youngest, 20-year-old Thomas, shipped out.

Thomas Caywood, a military intelligence specialist with the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 69th Armored Division at Ft. Benning, Ga., is charged with following tanks into battle. His older brother, Lance Cpl. Jess Caywood, 25, a tank driver with the First Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, departed Feb. 4 for the combat zone.

Their letters indicate that the three siblings are miles apart on the front-line. Thomas Caywood saw his sister once shortly after he arrived, but none has seen either of the others since.

The Pentagon has no regulations forbidding siblings from serving in the combat zone, but some families are pressing for a new policy that would allow only one family member in battle at a time. Under the existing policy, parents may have a child reassigned to a safer area only if they have had a child killed in battle.

Rep. Toby Roth, R-Wis., introduced legislation last week that would enable a family member to request a transfer to a noncombat area if he had an immediately family member already serving in the war zone. The bill does not relieve family members from active duty.

“It’s heart-rending enough if one family member passes away, but to have an entire family wiped out is too much to ask,” Roth said. “We can’t ask for that type of sacrifice.”

Wishmire, however, fears that these efforts will not be successful in time to help her. And she also doesn’t believe that any of her three would shirk what they saw as their duty.

“My children are patriotic; they don’t complain,” she said.

And she tries to match their bravery. She tries to dodge her own fears. But her anxiety grows when she is unable to talk to her children or no letters arrive. Accustomed to chatting regularly with each, weeks at a time have passed in which she heard nothing. For two months last fall, she got neither letters nor calls from her youngest. When she called the Pentagon to inquire, an official told her that moving the men to the front line is more important than fetching the letters home.

“I try very hard to believe this war is necessary, but I find it very hard,” she said.

Wishmire tries to imagine the day that her children come home. It’s a dream she tries to wrap around herself like a warm shawl.

“I visualize going to the airport. They’re coming down the ramp, and they are whole,” she said. In this dream, she, the kids, and her husband, Harry, sit down in the living room. The three are laughing, bursting with the war stories they want to tell.

But it takes little for her to crash from this dream. As President Bush expressed “serious concerns” about the peace proposal announced by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Wishmire’s hopes plummeted.

“I am scared now because we are down to the nitty-gritty,” she said. “I saw the Vietnam war on TV. I know how serious and hard this is going to be. You try hard to think positive but sometimes you can’t. It’s like you are on the verge of the precipice.”

In the weeks since war broke out, letters from the three have trickled home. Only one had arrived so far from Jess Caywood, and it was sent from Germany before he flew to Saudi Arabia. For the parents, each letter brings a surge of energy and hope.

After moving with her unit 400 kilometers closer to Kuwait, Shelley Robertson wrote:

“I know you are worrying. Just remember no news is good news. . . . Mom, I’m doing fine. Mentally & physically. I’m a little dirty, a little tired, a little tense--but doing just fine. There is me & one other female on this site. We look out for each other real well. Modesty has been lost, but I guess this is war.

“The 16th (the day the war began) was crazy. We have gotten dug in now. Our only problem is supplies. They are six hours away so we are rationing MREs. . . .

“Mom, it was really weird hearing war declared & being in it. The middle of the night. . . . It was surreal. I was thinking of you & knowing you’d be worried.”

To Donna Wishmire, it is inconceivable that her daughter will be hurt.

“Maybe I am being a product of my generation--the men go off to war. I know my daughter is a paratrooper, she jumps out of airplanes. I should be used to this, but I am not,” said Wishmire.

Today, Wishmire feels guilty that she did not discourage each of the three from joining the military. Maybe she should have had them talk with Vietnam War veterans. Maybe she should have worked harder, had more money and made her daughter believe that college tuition would have been no problem for the family to afford.

She feels even worse about the boys because they joined when they were 17, requiring her to give her permission. Now she wonders if she should have.

She worries about her youngest, Thomas, who joined the Army after graduating Grossmont High School. Thomas can’t see without his glasses. “What if his glasses get wrecked? He won’t be able to shoot,” she frets.

Each of his letters to her seemed like vintage Thomas. He regaled her with tales of how he made “hooch,” a home brew of sugar, raisins bit in half, yeast and water. The resulting fermented concoction was an “instant acrid, rank tasting but oh so morale lifting fluid,” he wrote.

In recent weeks, Thomas Caywood--not ordinarily a prolific letter-writer--began to write everyone. And Wishmire saw it as a sign that he was saying goodby, just in case.

“I’ve never seen so many stars,” he wrote his aunt. “Their brilliance is stunning, like tiny diamonds on black velvet. I must sound really corny, but I assure you I’m not exaggerating. The desert has its moments. But for the most part it’s just an endless desolate sea of sand shifting with the wind. A tree is long overdue. I’ve not seen one in four months now. Sometimes I think the wind will just erase me as it does our footprints.”

Mostly, Thomas Caywood is playful in his letters. “The last couple of days have been a lull. I don’t want to give the impression I’m bored, but I spent the better part of four hours playing rock-paper-scissors with Master Sgt. Joyner yesterday, “ he wrote his cousin. “I did fairly well, but his rock was positively wreaking havoc on my scissors. I’ve been training hard all morning to put a little umph behind my scissors. I think I’ve succeeded, at least marginally. My rock is unstoppable. I think with a little luck I can kick some serious NCO (noncommissioned officers) butt today.”

Donna Wishmire and David Caywood read and reread their childrens’ letters, scouring them to learn how they are holding up. And the letters circulate, as every family member shares the latest. Mostly Thomas Caywood teases his mother, trying to buoy her spirits.

But recently, his letters became more somber as his unit edged closer to the border. “I am getting stressed out and worried, but I’m doing my best to keep that in check,” he wrote in a letter dated Jan. 22. “I must admit, though, at night those late-night guard shifts bring a noisy cluster of thoughts into my mind. Ah well, can’t be helped I suppose. I just know that my dear old Mommy is handling this with composure. . . .

“If I start getting neurotic and panicky letters it will be impossible for me to focus on my task. Try not to worry you guys because this doesn’t do anyone any good, especially not you or me, ok? Of course I realize emotions cannot be turned off with the flick of a switch, but please try hard to hang in there and take care. I love you.”

And to his father, Thomas Caywood wrote only one letter, expressing his hopes for better relations, and told his father that he appreciated him. As Thomas Caywood tried to look towards his future, he wanted to make sure he reconciled his past.

“Well things have gotten nasty here in the Mideast. I hope we can wrap this conflict up quickly,” he wrote in a letter dated Jan. 25. “The thought of staying here for another five months is extremely disenchanting. I guess all that is out of my hands, though. My role is that of a simple soldier. I suppose I’ll just have to follow whatever course is laid out for me. I look forward to a day when I can again have some say in the direction of my life. But for now, that’s just a daydream. . . .

“Anyway after my unit gets done raining on Hussein’s parade, me and you will have to go somewhere. All those places you took me as a kid went right over my head. But it must have rubbed off on me, because these days I love classical music and enjoy art galleries. Yes, it is me--this is Tom. No . . . . Aliens haven’t placed me under any heinous mind control. It took a while for your teachings to take root. . . .

“At any rate, the dirty business at hand must be dealt with first. It’s bedtime for diplomacy I suppose. I sure wish it could have ended some other way.”