A Story of Love and War, Death and Pain, and Widow’s Courage : Gulf War: Land mine killed Army Cpl. J. Scott Lindsey. In his pocket were a letter from his wife and a poem he had written her.

When Army Cpl. J. Scott Lindsey died in a final, fatal spasm of the Gulf War, he carried in his pockets the two small books of Scripture his father had taken to war in Vietnam, two dollar bills, a pocketknife, a letter from his wife, and a poem he had written her during desert guard duty.

This girl of my dreams.

Her feelings are strong

They hold me together

Like notes in a song. . . .

I awake in a spin

My head’s in a swirl

For this is my love

My wife, my girl.

These few cherished things were packed in a small cardboard box. They reached Debi Lindsey a month later when America was in a self-congratulatory mood, jubilant at the end of a whirlwind war.

“There were so few lost--hurt and killed--that it was one big friggin’ picnic,” she said as she knelt before a hope chest filled with the legacy of her husband’s death--newspaper articles, medals, books on the Gulf War. “By July 4th, I thought, if I have to see another parade, I’ll scream.”

Because for Debra Ann Strain Lindsey and her three children--for the surviving spouses and children of the 293 U.S. servicemen and women who perished in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91--this was no painless engagement.

Nor was it brief. For them, the war goes on, an ongoing struggle to adapt to a world without their loved ones--a world that is suddenly, startlingly civilian, outside the military cocoon.

Debi tries. Energetic and lively at 29, a patient mother, her days fold one into the next, between laundry baskets and sandwiches, growing her elaborate garden, trying to dodge probing questions that bring her pain.

Most weekends, she is visited by the young soldier who tried to save her husband’s life when he was felled by shrapnel.

Two or three times a month, she drives alone to J.’s grave in nearby Fayetteville, never staying. Just to check.

This year, for Memorial Day, she planned a camping trip in the Grand Canyon. She used to like the holiday. Before J. died, Memorial Day meant flying the flag and welcoming summer on the beach.

“I was young and stupid,” she said. “Now, it breaks my heart.”

*

The cease-fire was declared on Feb. 28, 1991. On the night of March 3, a Sunday, Debi Lindsey was at her kitchen table in Germany, happily turning a sheet into a welcome home banner, when she heard the knock at her door.

The military procedure for handling deaths is set down in precise detail and, per regulation, Debi’s casualty assistance officer arrived Monday morning to offer condolences and information.

Debi would need to learn about benefits and about burial. She was about to be sent home--wherever that was.

“I lost everything,” she said, her voice breaking. “My friends and my family. My house.”

A casualty assistance officer can do many things, but he cannot stop the pain. When a soldier dies, family members feel the embrace of the military go slack. Fingers that clutched the security of the fenced life, the certainty of eventually moving on, the lingo, the purposefulness, the pride, are pried open. The family goes skidding away, thrust back into civilian life on a loose tether of regular checks and access to the post commissary.

Despite the enormity of her losses, she seemed to absorb it only in tiny pieces.

Four days later, when Debi flew back to America, the horror of the outside world rushed in. A flight attendant asked, in front of her children, whether her husband was in the cargo hold. She did not answer.

*

This love story’s sad and complicated ending seems all wrong. When they were teen-agers, living in the lush rural foothills of California’s Sierra, J. and Debi’s future brimmed with adventure and promise.

He was the youngest of three children in a military family; his parents named him simply J. Scott. She was the elder of two children; her father was a letter carrier, her mother a housewife.

J. stopped by one day with his new midnight-blue motorcycle and offered her a ride. Debi was 15; he was almost 17. “It was love,” she said. “I was the first to ride on his bike, and it went on from there.”

They married in 1983, as the tulips were coming up. Then, Debi graduated from high school and, in August, J. left for Army basic training in Ft. Benning, Ga. When Cole was born that October, his father first saw him in a photograph.

All along, Debi had been enchanted with his choice of the Army.

“Who doesn’t want to leave Placerville, California?” she said brightly. “It was a way to see new and exciting places.”

The road map of their eight-year marriage is dotted with tiny apartments and years when they were eligible for food stamps but declined out of pride.

Their first home, in Hawaii, was a filthy two-bedroom apartment where Debi thought she heard termites gnawing at night. J. departed for training in South Korea two weeks after she arrived with Cole.

A second baby, Cassie, was born Jan. 2, 1987. Then came a detour into civilian life, an airline job, and more struggles to make ends meet. J. returned to the Army.

“I was glad,” Debi said with a sigh. “It’s a nice life. This is going to sound strange: It’s predictable in its unpredictability.”

Military life, among so many different kinds of Americans, had opened her mind. She was proud of her husband, her friends, herself.

J. was accepted back at his old job of mortarman, in charge of a cannon. Given a choice, they picked a posting to Germany.

In the fall of 1988, he shipped out alone. For a year, they lived apart until he could move his family to base housing. She moved with the children to Colorado Springs, handy to an Army base, its stores and friends from Hawaii.

When at last she reached Gelnhausen, an enchanting medieval town, she found herself in a spotless three-bedroom apartment with friends grouped around a stairwell. After all their hardships, the Lindseys had found happiness.

“We finally had a plan and a family, and knew what we wanted to do,” she said. “It was one of the best years of my marriage.”

But when Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, a sliver of worry crept into the Lindsey household.

Troops went, and then more troops. Soon after the birth of April Janine--now called A.J.--on Sept. 19, 1990, J. said he wanted to stock up on desert gear and avoid the rush. He needed sunscreen and a collapsible water canteen. Debi chided him, saying he should be thinking of baby clothes.

She began to fret.

The orders came around Thanksgiving. He would be leaving Dec. 20.

Christmas arrived early around the stairwell. Debi remembers the crumpled wrapping paper piled up ahead of schedule in the trash cans.

A night or two before J. left, Debi voiced her doubts. “I didn’t think they should go. There was so much, ‘It’s oil, it’s oil, it’s oil,’ and it doesn’t seem something worth dying for.”

His tart, hurt reply: “Would you be proud if I died doing my duty?”

*

Less than a month after J.’s death, Debi Lindsey landed with her children in Springdale, in Arkansas’ northwest corner. She came here because the cost of living was low, because her in-laws live here, and they had bought J. and Debi an 80-acre farm, though it eventually was sold. And, of course, because this is where she buried her husband.

“And for lack of a better idea,” she added.

Springdale, population 33,000, is one of those protean boom towns not yet sure what it will become--strip shopping centers and malls alternate with farms and feed and grain lots, and housing developments bump up against millionaire spreads.

“You just feel very isolated, alone,” Debi said. “Nobody understands. Nobody’s in the military. I felt very conspicuous at first.”

Everyone seemed to know her. A visit to any store in town exposed her to curiosity. “Everybody . . . and their mothers, and their mothers-in-law. They just asked what happened. A short, curt answer just wasn’t enough.”

News reports had thrust Debi into the hot light of unwanted celebrity. Knots of reporters greeted her at airports. Then came the deluge of sympathy cards and letters from strangers, in nearly every one a check. Thousands of dollars, about $8,000 she thinks, paid for a car and two pairs of bunk beds for the kids.

The money astonished her.

“At first, I couldn’t fathom why they were doing it,” she said, “until I realized they wanted to do something to help and this is what they could think of.”

Her family now lives in a four-bedroom, ranch-style house of yellow brick and blue-green shutters near the bottom of a cul-de-sac. It was a steal at $69,000. Debi is filling it with found furniture and modest antiques. The front and back yards bloom with flowers and children’s toys, a slide and wading pool.

In all that space, Debi has not found a good place for the flag she was given on March 11, 1991, the day she buried her husband at Fayetteville National Cemetery, 10 miles to the south.

“I haven’t found a home for it where it doesn’t leap out at me,” she said.

At first, she wrapped the flag in a baby blanket and stuffed it deep in a closet. Last year, she put it in a triangular wood-and-glass case. First, it hung in her bedroom. Then, in the hall. Now, it’s on a living room wall, above a construction-paper flag her daughter Cassie made in kindergarten.

Pictures of J. are displayed on nearby bookshelves. They show a handsome, mustachioed young man with a taut, wiry build.

He seems self-conscious, almost stern, even when tenderly cradling one of his babies. It’s only in uniform that he smiles, actually glows. Here, grinning in a face smeared with camouflage paint; there, carefree in his battle helmet.

In death, J. Scott Lindsey was awarded a Bronze Star and promoted to sergeant. In the Fayetteville cemetery, he lies alone, the only Gulf War casualty, surrounded by veterans of World War II, men who ripened into their 70s and 80s.

*

Cole, now 10 and in a fourth-grade class for gifted children, misses Germany, misses Hawaii, misses his dad.

Freckles may skip across his nose, but he is no light-hearted boy. Soft-spoken, he sits alone plunking on an electronic keyboard, drawing a dragon, cocking an ear to adult talk. “When I go to my friends’ house and they have a dad and they do fun things, I feel kind of left out,” he said.

At 7, Cassie is wary and restless, her long blond hair ragged, like raw silk. Her mother says Cassie gets angry sometimes. “She’ll say ‘How come I don’t have a dad?’ and I’ll explain, ‘He still loves you.’ ”

A.J. is too young to remember her father. The 3-year-old beams; a natural mischief-maker, she interrupts adult conversation by biting her big sister’s bottom on the stairs of their wading-pool slide.

It’s tough rearing kids without their father, but financially at least the family is doing better than ever.

J.’s life insurance was a big help, and Debi manages now without working, on $22,000 a year assembled from a military widow’s pension and Social Security. In Germany, J. supported his family on $14,400 a year.

Debi has seven years left to tap military education benefits and is just now thinking about taking up Spanish, learning horticulture.

Her marriage bed remains in the garage with boxes and boxes of J.’s things, including his drum set. For three years, she slept on the couch until it broke; now, she stays in the master bedroom, on two children’s mattresses.

And now there is Cpl. Jim Starr, who most weekends drives the 487 miles from Ft. Hood in Killeen, Tex. He writes poetry, wants to return to silk-screen printing when he gets out of the military, and maybe start out as a security guard.

He first turned up just before Memorial Day, 1992, to tell the story of how J. died. “I felt the family needed an explanation of what happened,” he said. “Things get tangled up in translation.”

His friendship with Debi became a necessity.

“At first, it was to help me ease the way I felt. I kind of felt guilty. Alone,” he said. Out of uniform, he began to cry. “I just came to see her because I felt that I should. I don’t know.”

The worst day in their lives cements them in a bond they seem not to understand, but they accept it. They may even marry.

“People grow on you,” he said.

“It seems dumb to be lonely the rest of your life,” Debi said, staring at her slender gold wedding band. “If someone makes you happy, it can’t be bad.”

She calls him Starr. Only 25, his face is still boyish. But a look of constant pain pinches his eyes.

J. was his boss in the three-man mortar squad, operating a cannon in an open vehicle called a track. They were in northern Iraq. Despite the cease-fire, they did not relax.

The sun was going down when a vehicle to the right of J.’s ran over a mine, a killer shaped like a small round cookie tin. Starr said it was left by U.S. forces, though the Army could not confirm this.

The other vehicle was shielded by its armored underside, but shrapnel flew at the track.

“My hands were bleeding,” Starr said. “We looked up to see J. He was laying down on the floor.”

Starr swallowed, barely able to speak. Seated at a picnic table in the back yard of Debi’s house, children playing around him, he trembled in the hot Arkansas sun.

“It just looked like maybe he had been knocked out. I’m just holding on to his neck, trying to control the bleeding.” Starr was shaking. “He passed away before the helicopter got there.”

*

In a videotape taken by a soldier in the desert, J. Scott Lindsey stands in a shower stall, a makeshift open-air amenity with a roof and modesty panels. A shower head dribbles water in a slow stream. J. is grinning as he reaches up to the shower head, rubs his wet head, his smiling wet face.

He turns his back to the camera and the desert-browned and muscular shoulders ripple and shimmer. Back still turned, he raises his left hand, and waves.

“On your darkest nights, remember it is the same sky above me,” Debi Lindsey had written her husband on paper trimmed with flowers and lacy loops.

“I will search the heavens until I find your doubts and I will take what I can away to comfort you.

“When you lay down to sleep each night, watch for me in the twinkling stars, I hear they are beautiful in the desert. My love for you will be up there, looking down on you each night. I promise it.

She signed it: “Your girl.”