The Hopes of Those at Home Survive War

Months in the making, the buildup to war was agonizing.

Outrage, then fear, sadness and a bite-your-lip resolve to get things done, come what may, come what you dread most. These were some of the emotions that held our nation in sway.

The home front was anywhere and everywhere, USA.

Then we won. To me, it seemed like overnight; somebody please wake me up. It was as if the other side simply didn’t show up. It was a rout.

For most of us, all of this is just now sinking in. We faked them out, sucker-punched them, boom, boom, good and hard. Bully for us and shame on them. We gave that SOB what he deserved.

President Bush needed to remind the nation not to gloat.

Tens of thousands of people, no more evil than you or I, were killed. A land, and its people, were raped. No one can offer even an educated guess as to when the smoke over Kuwait will clear.

Our slam-dunk victory is tempered with other people’s pain.

I have written a lot about the war, mostly about how it was playing in the lives of those at home.

A woman I called Susan, a mother, a professional, the wife of a Marine officer, told me she was falling apart while her husband was away in the Persian Gulf. Her 12-year-old daughter was hospitalized for intense psychiatric care.

The war seemed to be unraveling Susan’s life, even as she struggled like hell to stay in control, to be a strong Marine wife. Yet with each pull on a dangling thread, Susan seemed to wince in pain.

Jean is the name that I gave to another mother. Jean understood much better about what being a soldier can mean. Jean is a high-ranking Marine officer herself. She’s been in the service for 18 years; her husband is serving in the Gulf.

Jean feared that her own orders to deploy would come soon. She would go, of course, because she must. Her children, a 5-year-old boy and a baby girl born this past June, would stay with a friend. That would be forever, Jean said, if both she and her husband were killed.

Then there was Linda Dunlap, a mother too, who felt this war as intensely as did Susan and Jean. Linda prayed, fervently, day and night, for the killing to stop. She is a pacifist; she believes war is wrong.

Linda moved into the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Fullerton on the evening of Jan. 16, within hours after the first Allied bombs rained from the Baghdad sky. Her vigil, unplanned and uncomfortable, lasted 21 days. She was hoping to stay in the church until peace broke out, but her health intervened.

Linda has a brain tumor. Her doctor ordered her home.

Earlier this week, I talked to each of these women again, since the official Iraqi surrender and since they’ve heard that it will be only weeks, not months, before the troops begin coming home.

Here, in part, is how our latest conversations went.

Jean is talking so fast that I’m having trouble taking notes. Peace feels absolutely great. Gone is the edge of fear and stress that had shrouded our earlier talk. Jean is eating a burrito and reading the Navy Times. Life’s not so crazy at the El Toro air base anymore.

Jean never did get her orders to leave her children behind. She thanks God for that. If the Iraqis had launched a chemical attack, Jean says, her deployment orders would have come. She had expected as much. Like most of us, she had expected the worst.

“I talked to my husband the other night,” Jean says. “He was with the 1st Marine Division, moving so fast, with the ground forces. It was amazing! . . . They got into Kuwait City and the Iraqis were literally running, hungry, thirsty, with no will to fight. . . . It was the mother of all retreats, just like the President said. Honest to God!”

Jean says her husband is bringing back a souvenir from his days on the front. It is a framed portrait of Saddam Hussein, with glass intact.

“They are going to hang it in the office and put a target on it,” Jean says.

Then she catches herself, coming down a bit from her adrenaline high. What if a troop transport crashes on its way home from the Gulf? Some of those planes have seen better days.

“For heaven’s sake, Lord, please bring them back safely, to put things back together again,” she says. Her words are a cross between hope and a prayer.

Like thousands of other military families, Jean and her husband need time. Their daughter won’t even recognize her daddy’s face; she’s not even sure what a man is. Their son? The news hasn’t quite sunk in.

Immediate homecoming plans, however, have already been made. Jean’s husband will eat at Pizza Hut for about a month, and he’s planning on guzzling, oh, say, 10 cases of Coke.

And, of course, there is one other thing. Support for the troops. By God, does that feel great. There’s absolutely no kidding here. If she hadn’t seen it herself, Jean says, she would have never believed how much love the country could show.

“I just hope that there’s not just a ticker-tape parade in New York City,” she says. “Give them a day at Disneyland too! If there ever was a time to do it, it is now. . . . All of this has meant so much, since Vietnam. Its been a total 180-degree turn. . . . I guess it’s always been there. These guys are really good. . . . So wow! It’s just amazing. . . . I guess I have to write a letter to America. We thank you from the bottom of our heart.”

When I called Susan, she asked if it was because my ears were ringing. She’d been about to call me, too: Good news, no scratch that, great news , for a change. Her husband is alive and well, coming home soon.

Susan’s been given a new lease on life.

“I was so flipped out on Saturday,” she says of the day that her husband called, at 5:30 a.m., to let her know he was coming home. “My daughter and I were sitting in a restaurant and I just started crying and crying. This blond waitress was just looking at me. I told her I was fine, that I was just so happy. I’d been bouncing off the walls.”

Susan and I had talked several times since I wrote about her and her family last month. She was getting by. Her daughter was released from the hospital, then put back in. She’s out now. Her therapy continues on the outside.

Before the ground war began, Susan’s husband, an officer with the 1st Marine Division, was able to call from time to time. One call, in particular, stopped her cold.

“He was describing to me the screams of the men, over the (field) radio, who had been hit and killed,” Susan told me back then. “My husband is usually so calm, so in control. I’d never heard him like this. He was hyper, really hyper, upset.”

Six Marines, including Cpl. Stephen Bentzlin of San Clemente, died in that attack in Khafji. It was apparently “friendly fire,” one of the most idiotic oxymorons of war.

That phone call was still on Susan’s mind when she talked to her husband after his unit had marched into Kuwait. He told her he was OK, wanting to come home soon. He never wants to see such devastation again.

“He told me one of the most tragic things he saw, as they were riding by the burning oil fields, was a lost herd of Arabian horses, dead and dying, staggering, these beautiful animals, with absolutely no comprehension of what was going on.”

The scene, Susan suggests, brings another message home. Life is too precious to waste.

“One thing we are going to do, shortly after he gets back, is take some time, go to New York and have a party at the same restaurant where we got married,” Susan says.

“We’re going to get all our wedding guests back together, and I’m going to call our chaplain. I want to say our vows again. It’s like God gave us a second chance. I feel like reaffirming everything would be the right thing to do.”

Susan and her husband have been married for less than three years.

“I’m cautiously happy,” Susan says. “I’m allowing myself to give in to this, even though he’s still not home. . . . But we’ve talked. . . . We know we need to spend some time to get reacquainted. There’s a sense of order that wasn’t there before. We’ve done everything so fast.

“We have this house, this mega mortgage, the Volvo, all these things. Now I know it’s meaningless. If he would have died, I would have had all these things, but no time with him and my daughter. . . . We spent a lot of time chasing the American dream . . . . We don’t care about that anymore. The priority is just to be together.”

Then I ask Susan about one more thing: her friend, another Marine wife, who is expecting her first child later this month.

Susan had been her Lamaze coach, but her friend, a teacher, never wanted to practice during class. She would tell her, with tears in her eyes, that her husband would be coming home for the birth of their child.

“I’m not a very religious person,” Susan says. “And I’m certainly not saying that this had anything to do with it, but one night I got down on my knees and I cried and I prayed and I prayed for her to have him with her. . . . They are so deeply in love.”

Susan’s friend got her good news too. Her husband should be home a week before their baby is due.

Linda Dunlap told me she was a bit shocked when she read the column I wrote in January describing her prayer vigil at Emmanuel Episcopal church. The column was so personal , she said. There was her life, in black and white, for anyone to just pick up and read.

Linda says her vigil, strange as it may appear, was something that she did on the spur of the moment simply because it had seemed the right thing to do.

And now Linda is more convinced than ever that it still is.

She went back to church for another round-the-clock vigil, this one for 24 hours, to give God thanks for ending the war. Other church members were there too. The Rev. Paul Edwards opened the service with a Thanksgiving Eucharist.

“It seems sometimes that every time we pray, we are asking God for something,” Linda says. “It’s important to give God thanks in return.”

The quick end to the war, with so few casualties on the American side, was not something that could be laid strictly to military might, Linda says. It was a miracle that only God could give.

“I always look for the pearl in every oyster,” Linda says. “I am against war, but one lives with what one gets. During the war, I saw us, as a nation, realizing that there is somebody over us, who is available to us. Church attendance was way up. That can only be good.”

Still, Linda is wary of euphoria, of glorifying the power of war.

“I’m hoping we’ll find a balance,” she says. “We fought one war, where we spit on the people who fought in it, now we fought another one where the support has been just great. . . . Maybe, just maybe, we need something to believe in and the soldiers, male and female, are tangible, something we can look to. . . .

“What I’m wondering is, ‘Are we going to remember the anguish that we felt when we went into this war, or are we just going to feel the joy that we feel when we come out?’ . . . My fear is we are going to remember all the celebration. We have very short memories.”

Linda, however, is still praying for the best. On Saturday morning, after spending yet another night on the wood pews at Emmanuel Episcopal, Linda told the Rev. Edwards how much she had appreciated his support and that of his church.

“I told him, ‘I really want to thank you for everything,’ ” Linda says. “I hope I never spend another night here again.”

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.