Familiar Voices Find Way Home Amid the Static

When the telephone rang at 5:30 a.m. Christmas Eve, Mary Albrecht didn’t have time to guess who might be on the line.

She picked up the phone. Then there was silence.

“At first, you wonder if it’s a wrong number. For a long time there was nothing,” Albrecht said.

Through a crackling phone line came a word in a faint but familiar voice: “Mary?”

She answered: “Bruce?”

For the first time in a month, Mary Albrecht got a chance Thursday to talk to her Marine husband, Maj. Bruce Albrecht. Their Mission Viejo home was linked by phone to the amphibious assault ship Tripoli off Somalia, where Bruce Albrecht, 40, is a CH46 helicopter pilot and the executive officer of the 164th Marine helicopter squadron, a Tustin outfit on duty in Operation Restore Hope.

Albrecht is one of almost 20,000 American troops--about 9,600 on the ground and another 9,000 on ships offshore--who are spending the holidays on a humanitarian mission to ensure that food and other critical supplies reach starving Somalis.

For most of the U.S. soldiers, Christmas will be spent eating prepackaged meals, dodging land mines and patrolling streets in the sweltering heat. As one American relief agency worker in Somalia said, “Famine doesn’t take holidays.”

From Thursday through midnight Jan. 1, AT&T; is providing free, three-minute phone calls for the forces deployed on ships off Somalia, said Lt. Karen Jeffries, a Navy spokeswoman.

It wasn’t hard for Mary Albrecht to wake up the three children when their father called Thursday. “Whenever Bruce is away, the kids get their sleeping bags and all sleep in my room,” Mary Albrecht said.

Quick pleasantries are exchanged by all in a now familiar pattern. After 15 years as the wife of a Marine Corps officer, Mary Albrecht, 35, knows how these phone calls go.

“He never wants to talk about what he’s doing; he just wants to hear everybody’s voice,” she said.

Welcome to a morning in the life of a Marine Corps family. The five Albrechts of Mission Viejo include Amanda, 9; Meredith, 7; and Brian, who, with a little Marine training already showing, quickly corrects everyone, insisting he is “Brian Craig Albrecht, 4 and a half.”

But, of course, this was no usual morning. It was Christmas Eve and Daddy is halfway across the world in Somalia, a struggling country the children have lately learned lots about.

So has the rest of Amanda Albrecht’s third-grade class at Castille Elementary School, where she “shares” her father’s military experiences.

“I’ve shared about him, maybe 100 times,” said Amanda. “My entire class knows he’s in Somalia.”

“They’re constantly bragging about him,” said Mary Albrecht. “The kids are real proud of what their dad is doing. We show them the Marines on TV and explain about the problems in Somalia. It’s good for them to see their dad doesn’t just go in and shoot things up, that he goes in and helps people.”

Marine life at bases all over the country also has taught Mary Albrecht what it’s like to take on a major burden of raising three children, to being without her husband for six months at a time, to taking care of the car when it breaks down or the plumbing going out “always when he’s gone.”

During his military service, Bruce Albrecht, the second ranking officer at the Tustin base, has had five long overseas stretches, four of them during the holiday season.

“We have missed four Thanksgivings together, four Christmases, four New Years and four anniversaries,” Mary Albrecht said. “You marry into this life. . . . You don’t get used to it, but you learn to tolerate it.”

But this mission is different from all the others, she said. The Marines, and their families, are “90 to 100%” behind the humanitarian effort in Somalia.

“Bruce says the morale is way up,” Mary Albrecht said. “It’s a good mission, and the guys are proud to be there. And, my gosh, it’s Christmas. What a Christmas present for the people.”

A Marine wife also learns that her husband can be rushed off at any time. Bruce Albrecht was in Washington during Desert Storm but would have rather been in Kuwait.

“Civilians don’t understand it, but when something happens they want to be there,” she said. “There weren’t enough ships to get all the Marines to the Gulf who wanted to go.”

Mary Albrecht’s own current mission is helping preserve the morale of other wives whose husbands are overseas. She is an active member of a support group called the Key Wife program, which actually is a telephone “tree” of information.

“I can’t say enough about that program; I don’t know how the Marine Corps ever existed without it,” she said. “We make sure every wife gets a call at least once a week to share news, even if there’s nothing new, there is some contact.”

The wives also share another method of support: keeping busy. For the Albrechts, Christmas Day will be spent packing in a day at Disneyland.

“We go all over when he’s gone, to Knott’s Berry Farm, Disneyland,” she said. “It’s a great diversion. It doesn’t allow much time to think about who’s not here.”