Families Are Waiting to Pop the Cork

In this dusty enclave of military families, parades and billboards are still in the planning stage. For the time being, the wives and children of 7,000 Marines enforcing a tentative peace in the Persian Gulf have greeted the cease-fire with an unsettled quiet, holding their emotions in check.

The craft store has all but sold out of yellow ribbon and, on Thursday, the barber set out for Palm Springs to get a “we’re proud of you” sign. Even the woman who runs the seed store was spelling “welcome home” in big letters on a chain-link fence.

But at Twentynine Palms High School, home of the Wildcats, Thursday passed with barely a mention of the war that has taken so much from this desert base town.

“How do we feel? Guarded optimism, I suppose,” said Barbara Lee, whose husband has been in Saudi Arabia for the last 195 days. The President may have announced a halt in combat, but all that Lee is telling her kids is that the shooting has stopped.

In some towns, the final days of war might be a cause for jubilation. But here, hard against the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, the joy was as measured as the loneliness and anxiety had been in the hard, early days of the fight.

“There’s the general feeling,” said Karen VandenHout of the town’s Chamber of Commerce, “that until the guys are home and their feet are firmly planted back in Twentynine Palms that this is kind of too good to be true.”

Gina Hathaway, for example, did nothing but “maybe sigh in relief” when Bush announced the combat stopped Wednesday night. Home with her two children, listening to a pounding rain rattle her windows, the wife of Marine Capt. Robert Hathaway didn’t shout, didn’t cry, didn’t even change the channel.

“I’ve been tense for so long I can’t even remember what it’s like to relax,” she said quietly.

On Thursday, the possibility of her husband’s homecoming began--just a little--to sink in. By late afternoon, she was browsing in a craft shop downtown pricing poster board for a big welcome home sign and looking carefully at a length of star-spangled ribbon to deck the homes of her fellow military wives.

“We’re going to have a get-together and do some big-time decorating,” she confided. “It would be just us, the wives of Alpha Company, Battalion 17.”

But not just yet. She left with only a few yards of ribbon and the price of poster board filed away in her head. Months may pass, she reasoned, until her husband comes home.

Lee likewise has restrained her anticipation, trying not to watch the calendar too much. An ex-Marine herself, she knows well the patience demanded of a military spouse.

“I’ll wait as long as I have to,” said the 33-year-old mother of a son and a daughter. “Of course, the children don’t feel that way.”

In fact, 5-year-old C.J. had only one question about the end of the war: “Do you know when my daddy is coming home?”

The fact that no one yet knows the answer to that question partly explains the reticence at Twentynine Palms. This war has been tough on this desert hamlet, both emotionally and economically, and not everyone has been able to take it like a Marine. Thousands of men and women have been deployed from the base and many young wives left town in the early days of conflict.

Combined with the recession, the loss caused shop closures and layoffs to add to the stress that comes with knowing a loved one is in peril a world away.

“People might be critical of us because we’re not all festooned today with yellow ribbon, like, say, Big Bear, or places like that,” VandenHout said. “But they haven’t lived with the war the way we have. They haven’t been on this roller coaster, where it’s happening not just on the news, but to your best friend, your secretary, the guy next door.

“We’re a little more guarded,” she said, “because it’s closer to home. There have been tears and there will be joy, but it’ll be behind closed doors.”

Still, it wasn’t all stoicism and calm as the war wound down this week. Here and there, there was an upturn in the stiff upper lip. VandenHout let out a giggle of excitement as she described community plans for a big parade--complete with a homemade Statue of Liberty and a billboard saying, “Welcome Home.”

All over town, everybody, it seemed, was telling the same proud little joke.

“Did you hear they caught Saddam Hussein?” went the deadpan line. “He was in a phone booth dialing 911.”