Charlie Company's Journey Home: The Forgotten Impact on the Wives of Vietnam Veterans

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family – to my wife Jill Wiest and our wonderful children Abigail, Luke, and Wyatt. Without them, nothing would be possible.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Prologue

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Women of Charlie Company

Chapter 2: Marriage and Training

Chapter 3: Wartime

Chapter 4: Days of Terror

Chapter 5: Loss

Chapter 6: War’s End and Homecoming

Chapter 7: Living with Vietnam

Conclusion

Afterword

Cast of Characters

Photographs

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Author

PROLOGUE

It was like a scene from a movie, but it was all too real. Noemi Sauceda stood transfixed, as the sights and sounds of her home slipped into background obscurity. The soft whir of the ceiling fan as it struggled against the Texas heat; the ubiquitous pictures mounted on the wall with infinite care that chronicled married life – images of the important moments in the lives of her children Jose, Omar, and Belinda. Elementary school graduation. Vacations. But the familiar sights were momentarily forgotten in a moment of blinding, transfixing terror.

Noemi had seen handguns before. In Texas, guns, from handguns to heirloom hunting rifles, were everywhere. But she had never seen the barrel of a gun look so big; so big that it seemed to swallow the entire room. That barrel seemed to melt her very soul. The gun was a pistol, she didn’t know the brand or make, and it was held in the hand of her husband Jose. The sweat from a hard day of work played around Jose’s features as his brow furrowed in a deep, black anger mixed with a look of confusion. The hand clutching the gun shook and trembled. She absently wondered if shaking so badly could cause the gun to fire, ending her life. Maybe Jose was talking, perhaps even yelling. But whatever words passed his lips were ignored, meaningless – sucked into the void created by the cold blue steel of the pistol barrel.

Living along the Mexican border, the residents of Mercedes, Texas were familiar with and wary of violence. As a police officer, Vietnam veteran Jose Sauceda was something of a connoisseur of physical threat; he had it down to a science. Coyotes – smugglers of people, with their desperate human cargo often tightly packed in the sweltering heat of a van or the nearly airless trailer of an 18-wheeler – usually preferred to ditch their freight at the first sign of danger. Flight – abandoning their hapless customers as a diversion, leaving the American cops to clean up the human mess – let the Coyotes live to smuggle another day. Drug smugglers were another matter. There were those smugglers, maybe high on their own product, who ditched and ran. But to others – the smuggling professionals – their shipment was worth more than their lives. Those smugglers were dangerous. Deadly dangerous. Sauceda knew the risks and was good at his job. But the stress was palpable. On this particular summer evening the stress had been too much. There must have been a proximal breaking point. A word out of place – the onset of an argument. Perhaps the worn and rehearsed arguments that become commonplace in a marriage that has endured the decades. The causation, though, would be forever lost in the event itself. Jose had drawn his weapon and had it trained on his own wife.

Noemi had lived a guarded childhood. Her father Luiz drove an 18-wheeler delivering Jax Beer across southern Texas, while her mother Viola worked for the local water department and did her best to raise their three children. Even though she was the eldest, Noemi had always felt a bit left out. As an asthmatic she remembered sitting in the window watching wistfully as the other children played and romped through the neighborhood. But everything had changed when she was 15 – everything changed the day that she met Jose Sauceda. Noemi had long known that there was no such thing as fairy tales, but it had been love at first sight. She knew that he was the one pretty much from the first moment he strolled into her field of vision. As a migrant worker Jose had a strong build, wiry but with just enough muscle to draw her eyes for a second, lingering look. Jet-black hair that hung down near his eyes framed his face perfectly – a face that was almost always smiling. It was one of those honest smiles, the smile of a true friend. It was that smile, the ready humor, the constant willingness to help that had won Noemi over in the end. Jose Sauceda was a good person – the kind of person you can trust with your life. The kind of person you want to marry.

That same person now stood in front of Noemi with a pistol. The ready smile had been replaced by something that looked more like a grimace of pain. His nightmares had begun soon after he had returned from Vietnam – the kind of nightmares where he yelled and punched in his sleep. More like night terrors. Sometimes he dropped to the floor at loud noises. Noemi never asked him about the war, though, and he never offered information. The experience of war, whatever that was, was a part of his past, not of his present. The present meant the hard work of raising a family and holding down jobs. Once, though, things had gotten so bad that Jose had gone to the Veterans Administration seeking some kind of help. But they had told him that he was fine. No help was needed. But here he stood, with the nightmares of sleep having overtaken his waking mind. Here he stood with a gun pointed at her. That smiling teenager was gone. The jokes and good humor had fallen silent, stilled by the demons that haunted Jose’s memories. Even as her thoughts focused on that barrel and how to remain alive, Noemi couldn’t help but wonder what kind of bloody past had reached into the present to transform her husband so fully and so frighteningly.

Jose had never talked about Vietnam. It had always been there, and Noemi knew that the war had been a powerful and transformative experience. But she never knew why. Jose had guarded her from Vietnam and what had happened there. He had built a wall between his memories and his family – a wall that he hoped would keep his family protected from what he had seen and done. There had been good times in Vietnam, good times of camaraderie and the boozy fellowship shared with young men at war, especially with his best friends Forrest Ramos and Jim Cusanelli. But those good times were nowhere to be found on this night.

His eyes weren’t quite focused, more as if he was looking through Noemi instead of at her. Jose’s consciousness didn’t stop to make specific note of the visions that flickered through his mind, to grab at the memories of Vietnam that flowed past in a torrent. Amid the mental frenzy, the tropical sun bore down on a forlorn rice paddy in the Mekong Delta. It was 1967 and the small-unit war was slowly ripping Charlie Company to pieces, one day, one sniper, one booby trap at a time. Suddenly fire erupted from seemingly everywhere at once. Jose’s 3rd Platoon of Charlie Company, 4th Battalion of the 47th Infantry, was caught in an L-shaped ambush. Machine guns and small arms roared their greeting as Charlie Company faced its first test of battle. Jose dove face first into a small canal, the type used to irrigate the rice paddies, crashing down near his friend Jim Cusanelli. It was a symphony of fear, adrenaline, and activity. The world had shrunk down to just two men, Jose and Jim. What was going on 20 feet away might as well have been happening on Mars. Their attention was fixed to their front, to the incoming fire, to the Viet Cong they could see in nearby bunkers. Their attention was fixed on survival. The war and the world had narrowed to a stark focus on the few square feet that mattered in what was a moment of life or death.

Suddenly a Viet Cong soldier stood up. Actually stood up – a suicidal action in a battle where bullets buzzed by from all directions. The movement barely had time to register in Jose’s consciousness. His focus narrowed to a single point. Even the harsh sounds of battle seemed to still. The Viet Cong had a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher aimed directly at him. In a burst of fire the rocket grenade left the tube and sped toward him. It seemed like time had stopped. How could something so fast move so slowly? The grenade split the air between Jose and Jim Cusanelli and impacted the side of the canal just a foot or two away. He was dead; life was over. Did his eyes close waiting for the roar of the warhead’s detonation? Did he stare at the hole in the bank of the canal to see the flash that preceded the white heat of the explosion that ended his life? It all happened too quickly for accurate memory creation. But the warhead didn’t explode – perhaps because the bank of the canal was a soupy, muddy mess. He and Jim were alive, a fleeting moment of transcendent joy that he couldn’t even pause to register. The desperate fighting continued, and Jose remained in mortal danger.

Jose looked up from his moment of life-altering good fortune just in time to see his platoon mate James Smitty Smith get hit by a machine-gun bullet. It was the first time he had ever seen a bullet slap through the flesh of a human being. And it did slap through the flesh, making a sickening sound unlike any that Jose had ever heard. Smitty was down, and the bullets were still flying everywhere. Jose wasn’t a hero. He was just a young man who had happened to be drafted. It was only by outlandish happenstance that he was here with these men on this field on this day. But he knew what he had to do without it ever truly permeating his consciousness. Jose left the cover of the little, muddy canal that had already saved his life and crawled out onto the battlefield to help his buddy. As bullets ripped and popped through the high rice and kicked up puffs of dirt around his feet, Jose moved forward and helped to pull Smitty to safety. His mind didn’t have time to make note of the incredible danger of what had just happened – the battle lingered on and was no less deadly for several hours until US artillery and airpower forced the Viet Cong to flee. Then it was the Americans’ turn. Hundreds of Viet Cong were jumping up from their fighting positions and running in all directions. Jose and the rest of Charlie Company poured fire into them, littering the ground with 150 corpses. The human refuse of a defeated foe. Having cheated death twice that day, Jose had become a killer.

Just over a month later Charlie Company faced its sternest ever test, engaging a powerful enemy force in a day-long battle. Charlie Company had ten men killed on June 19, 1967, along with 40 badly wounded, while killing 250 Viet Cong. While the enormity of the day’s tragedy was not lost on Jose, for him the memory of June 19 will always be intensely personal. In the opening burst of fire Forrest Ramos had been wounded. Sharing a language and a common Hispanic heritage, Forrest and Jose had been especially close. The injury was perfect. A clean penetration of the right arm, shattering the elbow. Forrest Ramos had a million-dollar wound; the kind that was bad enough to get you sent home, but not bad enough to disable or disfigure you forever. The war had deepened, matured and had taken so many members of Charlie Company – had taken so many of Jose’s friends. But Forrest had survived, and was only a helicopter ride and a hospital stay from being home with his family.

Spraying water in all directions a dustoff helicopter thundered in – rotor blades still blasting at full speed. The landing zone, though, was incredibly hot, with fire coming in from all directions. Facing such great risk, the chopper was all business, landing, the wounded being tossed on, and taking off in seconds. Forrest was on that chopper, wearing a beaming smile. He waved goodbye to his friends. Vietnam was over for him, and Jose was happy. His friend had made it.

After rising to nearly 60 feet, the chopper suddenly lurched as it was struck by machine-gun fire. For an agonizing moment or two it spun wildly in the air. The pilot somehow managed to regain control and the machine lurched forward. Then the impact of more machine-gun bullets. The chopper rose and stood on its tail – something that helicopters can’t do, but this one did. The stricken craft then rolled over on its side, and Forrest Ramos came tumbling out. He dropped to the rice paddy below and the helicopter crashed down onto him. Jose and others from 3rd Platoon rushed to the scene. They were oblivious to the heavy incoming fire and the risk posed by the smoldering chopper, which could explode in a ball of flame at any moment. They could see Forrest. The skid of the chopper had forced him down in the deep mud. Whether he was alive or dead, nobody knew. Some tried to dig, others to lift the massive chopper. But Jose Sauceda and his brothers-in-arms of the 3rd Platoon couldn’t do anything to help. Forrest Ramos was dead.

Two days later, in a war that had transformed into a fog of mental anguish, Jose gathered up Forrest’s belongings to send home to his grieving parents. He also wrote them a letter telling them how dear Forrest had been to him, how he would cherish his memory, and how he would work the rest of his life to make himself a better person to honor the loss of his friend.

Even with all of that, the events of the day and the battles really didn’t register yet – the war went on. Survival went on. Killing went on. It was only when Jose got home, when he reached the safety of his family, that he had time to deal with the memories – the haunting memories of friends lost, of a life altered, and of men killed. Of all of the memories, it was the loss of Forrest Ramos that weighed Jose down almost physically. In his nightmares he could see his friend smiling and waving from the departing chopper. Then the sickening thud of the bullets impacting metal. The sight of the helicopter rising to stand on its tail. The dreams were so real; just like being back there in Vietnam. His sleeping mind recreated everything in agonizing detail, even the sound. Who knew that engines straining beyond their breaking point and the scream of tearing metal could have combined to make such an unearthly wail? Then the hopelessness of not being able to rescue Forrest from underneath the crushing skid. The memories were Jose’s burden, a burden he could not share with his family. They were the events that had changed his life.

Was it the moment of death in the rocket grenade impact, the killing of the Viet Cong, Forrest falling, or some unholy combination that played on a loop of pain in Jose’s mind that night as he stood there clutching his pistol and staring into the distance beyond Noemi?

Mercifully the couple’s three small children were in the next room and did not witness the evening’s events. But the youngest was crying. The sound cut through Noemi’s mental haze like a scalpel, snapping her back to true awareness. She wanted to leave, needed to leave. But Jose stood between her and the door, blocking any thoughts of flight. And her children needed her; the crying only reinforced that. She just stood there frozen, eyes locked on the blue steel of the gun barrel. Even if she could get words out, what would she say? Jose, her beloved Jose, wasn’t there. The smile, the joy, the wonderful father – they simply weren’t there. This Jose was lost; lost in a past that she didn’t know and couldn’t guess. She could only wait for the real Jose to return, for the past to lose its grip over Jose’s present.

Like the severing of a taut wire, a knock at the door snapped the tension with a startling abruptness. The smells, heat, and fear of Vietnam receded back into the dark corners of Jose’s subconscious and lost their power over his immediate actions. The gun disappeared like it had never been there. One of Noemi’s brothers had come to visit. To this day she cannot recall which brother it was, but his appearance had reset the evening to a semblance of normalcy. The real Jose was back, sporting a smile and offering her brother a hearty welcome. Noemi had to blink and shake her head a few times to clear her thoughts because the change was so dramatic. Like walking out of a darkened room and into the light, it took a few minutes to adjust. In the back of her mind it also registered that the baby had even stopped crying.

Noemi loved Jose. She was no longer the infatuated 15-year-old who had fallen for Jose’s ready smile. The love was more mature and had been tested by the buffeting winds of a long marriage. Jose loved her and was fiercely devoted to their children. He was both a good man and a good father. In the coming weeks, months, and years the couple would reaffirm their devotion and come better to understand the events of that most difficult night of their marriage. It was in coming to grips with that terrible night, with the image of her own husband pointing a gun to her head, that Noemi Sauceda reached something of an epiphany.

The Vietnam War – a war that she had never served in or been to – was the single most important event of her life.

PREFACE

In some ways this work follows on from my book The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam. In others, though, this work – from its impetus, to its characters, to its conclusion, is entirely separate and new. The Boys of ’67 told the story of a unique combat company and its wartime experiences in Vietnam – it was a book of camaraderie, battle, postwar readjustment, and humanity. As I struggled to weave the written tapestry of a combat company at war, though, something was always tugging at my writing consciousness, like an insistent background voice that is always there but you somehow succeed in ignoring its pleas. In my rush to focus on the lives of the men of Charlie Company at war, I missed what gave those lives meaning – their wives and families. The men of Charlie Company didn’t fight for themselves; they fought for something greater. They didn’t survive just for themselves; they survived for their loves and futures as husbands and fathers. As the men of Charlie Company boarded the troopship for Vietnam they simultaneously looked toward an unsure future and back toward the relationships that would define that future. War loomed, but the Boys of ’67 remained forever connected to the world they left behind – their loved ones, their lives, and their hope. After a year of death, camaraderie, and adrenaline, the Boys of ’67 dared to hope that they could return to the shards of their lives and leave the war behind as they boldly strode into their futures. Such hopes, though, were in vain. The war left behind stubbornly refused to be relegated to the past. In many guises and forms Vietnam would remain with them always. War would become a part of their lives, and those of their families, forever.

INTRODUCTION

So many wives and families were left behind for war. Between 30 and 40 percent of soldiers who saw service in the Vietnam War were married, with just under 20 percent having had children. With roughly 3 million serving in theater during the conflict, this ratio means that there were over 1 million wives and more than 600,000 children on the home front who awaited the return of a husband or father from war. Narrating the collective story of over a million women is, of course, impossible. The question was, how best should I attack this daunting topic even to reveal the barest tip of this historical iceberg? Facing this dilemma I chose a narrow focus to allow for the fullest recounting of war’s complex interplay with family and married life. In writing The Boys of ’67 I became about as close to the story of a single infantry company as an outsider can ever hope to get. Nearly 100 original oral interviews,* combined with a wealth of corresponding documents from personal collections and the National Archives, allowed me to recreate the lives and times of Charlie Company, 4th of the 47th Infantry with a depth and level of completeness never before achieved. Given that base of historical understanding, I decided to approach the subject of combat wives through the same focus. For this project I undertook extensive additional interviews with the 24 Charlie Company wives who were married at the time their husbands went off to war.† I was also entrusted with eight major letter collections, which allowed an unprecedented look at how the lives of these new families unfolded while the soldier was away in Vietnam.

Going with what I knew best had the advantage of familiarity and depth, but choosing this group also had its limitations. Charlie Company was almost entirely made up of draftees, and served in 1967 at the high point of the war and at a time before the war reached its peak of contention on the home front. The experiences of this sample group cannot pretend authoritatively to speak regarding women in 1965 or 1972 when the wartime experience was very different indeed. Charlie Company was a combat unit in the Mekong Delta, so this sample group cannot pretend to represent the experiences of non-combatant soldiers, or speak for the experience of Marines, or pilots, or advisors. The Vietnam War was unparalleled in its individuality of experience in both time and place. As a result, no study of limited size can truly pretend to represent the whole. Combat, though, has commonalities both great and small. For Marines along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in 1967 and grunts in the Cambodian Incursion of 1970, fear, adrenalized courage, death, wounding, boredom, loss, and camaraderie were all the same. For marriages experienced at long distance in war, loneliness, anxiety, fear, longing, and change were points of commonality. These things are eternal concerns of young marriages at war. Any sample group can speak to them, and this particular sample group allows for the fullest yet investigation of their workings and indelible impacts.

Charlie Company itself was very representative of the heterogeneous nation of the time. A total of 36 percent of the unit’s draftees hailed from the American west, with 26 percent of the company coming from California alone, especially the Los Angeles area. Another 31 percent of Charlie Company came from the Midwest, with draftees from Cleveland accounting for 10 percent of the unit’s strength. Draftees from the south comprised 30 percent of Charlie’s total, with a final concentration of 17 percent of the unit’s men hailing from Texas and Louisiana.

Only 2 percent of the men of Charlie Company claimed a privileged or upper-class background, while 31 percent were members of the middle class – sons of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers. A total of 24 percent of the unit identified as lower middle class, while 42 percent came from poor families. The racial makeup of Charlie Company closely mirrored that of the American military of the 1960s – 68 percent of the unit was white, 15 percent black, and 13 percent Hispanic. Approximately 23 percent of the members of Charlie Company hailed from urban environments; another 42 percent of the draftees came from the country’s societal middle ground of the suburbs and mid-size towns. A final 34 percent of the unit’s members lived in rural areas, on independent farms or tiny villages.

Since relatively so few of the Charlie Company originals were married, only 29 that I have been able to discover, the sample group of wives is by definition more constricted and haphazard. The group is quite varied in terms of military rank, numbering the wives of the battalion chaplain, the company commander, a platoon leader, and the company first sergeant, with the remainder being enlisted men including a medic. As did their warrior husbands, Charlie Company wives hailed from a diverse set of backgrounds, with hopes, dreams, and experiences that varied widely and that were often greatly influenced by their place of origin and upbringing.

My sample group, then, is defined by its very lack of definition. It is a group that on one hand is idiosyncratic but on the other is deep and quite multifaceted. While its limitations mean that it serves only to begin to tell the story of how combat wives experienced war and its aftermath, its strengths allow it to tell a story unlike any other. This is a story of how real lives and dreams were altered by love, happenstance, and brutality. This is a story of how real young women in a transformative age had their lives forever altered by a war that they did not fight, but yet they did fight. Theirs is a story of silent bravery, desperate despair, bitter defeat, and triumphant victory. Wars greatly impact the lives of the families of the soldiers who fight them. For as long as there have been soldiers there have been supporting wives and grieving widows. For as long as there have been veterans there have been wives and family members who struggled to understand, struggled to cope – with some marriages persevering and others imploding.

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From the very beginning of their interviews, every one of these women asked why I was interviewing them. They weren’t the makers of history; that was a distinction reserved for their husbands. Their stories wouldn’t be important; couldn’t be important. Why would anyone want to hear their stories? After their perplexity at being interviewed in the first place, all of the women assured me that their interview would be a short one. After all they were just regular gals who hadn’t done anything other than live their lives the best that they knew how. These women were sure that their experiences did not amount to a hill of beans in the greater scheme of things.

But many of their husbands came back from war changed – changes that had deep impacts on their wives and families; changes that resulted in profound alterations of what these women sought from life and expected of their futures. It took decades before Americans began to grapple with the psychological fallout of the Vietnam War. After such a slow start, though, the subject of PTSD was finally fully broached, rightfully focusing governmental, community, and religious efforts on mitigating the experiences of our long-forgotten fighting men. The situation was far from perfect, but from the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial, to Veterans Administration (VA) counseling groups, to Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) halls American Vietnam veterans began to form communities and work to overcome years of national neglect. There was nothing, though, for the wives and families. Although they rarely put their feelings into direct words, it was plain that these women were still alone. When their husbands had returned the wives in many ways were marooned amid a sea of family, acquaintances, and friends who did not share or understand their experiences. Oftentimes they were even alone in their own home, personally reeling from their own Vietnam experience but with a husband who was silent about that experience in an effort to protect them from it. While history would eventually redeem their husbands, the contributions and difficulties of the wives remained unnoticed, leaving them solitary figures in a crowded world.

When I spoke to these women, they had been alone for so long and their experiences had been invisible for so long, that they were sure that they didn’t have a story to tell. They were sure that nobody was interested in them. The singular loneliness of a combat wife is nothing new. There have always been women who have struggled to come to grips with war and its impact on the love of their life. There are women who deal with these same life-changing events today as their husbands endure multiple deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. They, too, are alone in a sea of friends. They live with husbands who try to protect them from the truth. Charlie Company’s Journey Home is a chance for women like them to be heard. It is a chance for them to know that they aren’t alone.

Charlie Company’s Journey Home is for Jeannie Hartman, and all those like her whose voices need to be heard:

[After her husband Ernie came home from Vietnam] mostly I just prayed a lot. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do. He would not mention it [Vietnam]. He would not talk about it whatsoever to me or to anyone. He held it inside for years. Several nightmares were just terrible for him. He would either punch me or pick me up, not realizing it, thinking he was in Vietnam. Before the war he wasn’t an alcoholic, and he wasn’t violent. He had a wonderful, wonderful sense of humor, just a wonderful all around guy.

Ernie quit believing in God when he was in Vietnam. He does not believe in God, so that has become very difficult for me. I used to go to church every week, and I quit going to church because every time I went to church, he went to a club and drank.

He finally started talking to some counselors about Vietnam, and they had told him he needed to be talking to me. And he told them he didn’t want to talk to me because it was such a bad time in his life he didn’t think that I needed to know it or worry about it. He didn’t want to drag me into it. And I kept telling him he really needed to confide in me because I was married to him and stuck by him all this time that I needed to know something.

I have had a lot of people ask me why I haven’t left him. And I guess, when we got married it was like, you get married, you’re on your own. Don’t come running back home, although, I know they would have taken me. And I really do love him, and he’s a wonderful person. And when he isn’t like this, he is wonderful. And I keep trying to remember that. I keep trying to remember, he is a good person. And he can be a wonderful husband.

Sometimes, I’m not sure how to stay sane. Right now Ernie is terrible. It’s awful. He’s probably worse than I have seen him, depression-wise. And I asked for some counseling, but my insurance won’t pay it. So, I have nobody to talk to, no one. My mother had a stroke four years ago, so I don’t have her to talk to anymore. And I can’t afford to pay for counseling. So, I don’t really have anyone to vent to, so I do a lot of praying.

* Oral histories are central to this study and are sometimes quoted directly. Oral history, in its raw form, does not always make for riveting reading. Interviews are often somewhat conversational in nature, full of asides and bantering between interviewer and interviewee. When directly quoted the oral histories are edited enough to make them readable. The questions from the interviewers are all edited out, while others might be incorporated into the transcript when needed to help the answer make sense. Things not germane to the story at hand, stammers, asides, and interruptions are all edited out. Some colloquialisms, when not central to the story, are cleaned up. Quotes from oral histories will not include ellipses to indicate omissions – or the entire manuscript would be littered with endless dots. In the end, the author had to strike a balance between readability and transcript accuracy. The editing attempted to adhere as closely as possible to the original transcript, with its original meaning maintained intact at all costs.

† There is an entire separate book that could be written on the stories of wives who married Vietnam veteran husbands. But theirs is a very different history than that of women who were married before their husbands went off to war. One further clarification. There are two couples included in this book – the Rademachers and the Hoppers – that technically were not married before the husbands went off to war. However, both were engaged and acted as a coherent couples even while their husbands were away overseas. They married as soon as they could after their husbands’ return; so I included their stories in this work.

CHAPTER 1

THE WOMEN OF CHARLIE COMPANY

I was the middle child. I heard on the radio the other day that your middle child is typically obnoxious and is the one that gives you a lot of trouble because they want attention. But I wanted to get attention in a completely different way; I wanted to be perfect. So I did everything to please my parents. Initially when I was in high school I wanted the typical vision of a 16-year-old at that time – to get married, have kids, and live with a white picket fence. That’s a typical thing that 16-year-olds in my day thought. But as time goes on you realize that the world is not perfect like that and if you want to excel you have to take it upon yourself to do a heck of a lot more. You have to get an education. But I got married pretty young, so my life took a different turn. Everybody has a different triggering point, and there was a triggering point for me where my whole philosophy changed in life.

Iris Sclimenti

My parents died early in life, my mom at 49 and my dad at 52. We lived in middle-class America. My mother only went to school to the age of 16 when she married my father during World War II. My father was raised in a Catholic orphanage. I was closest to my father. When she was seven and I was five my sister and I both got sick at the same time with German measles. She got encephalitis from a high fever, but my fever broke. From that point on my sister has required 24/7 care. My mom was an alcoholic and my dad drank beer all the time. Maybe my sister’s sickness and disability pushed them over the edge. Mom had my sister when she was only 18, which meant she was a pretty young mom to have so many dramatic things to deal with. They never pushed me toward college or to do anything. Any pushing I did on my own. I had to grow up early. Vietnam forced a lot of young people to grow up early.

Susan Reed

America’s Greatest Generation returned home from World War II and quickly settled down to the business of creating a bright future, resulting in the Baby Boom. There were 2.9 million births recorded in the United States in 1945, which increased by nearly 20 percent to 3.4 million births in 1946. Births continued to rise through the remainder of the decade and into the 1950s, peaking at 4.3 million births in 1957. Most historians place the end of the baby boom in 1964, by which time there were more than 76 million boomers, accounting for more than 37 percent of the nation’s total population – the largest demographic bubble ever in American history. With their parents determined to give them a better life in an America that had reached the pinnacle of its mighty power, boomers grew up in an age of unprecedented wealth and personal agency. Boomers were sure that they mattered, that their lives counted, that they could change the world. Although the age range of the women interviewed as part of this study varies, most of them graduated high school around 1965 or 1966, representing the heart of the baby boom. These were the very women that Time magazine had in mind in 1966 when it declared its Man of the Year to be all those in America who were 25 and under.

As the greatest generation got down to the business of having and raising families, a smallish piece of government legislation pushed the US into an unmatched period of unexpected societal transformation that would come to define baby boomers. Officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the main purpose of the GI Bill was to ease the process of societal reintegration for the boomers’ war veteran parents. America’s servicemen and women had done what the nation had asked of them in its darkest military days; the least the nation could do in return was to give them a monetary welcome home. Billions of dollars were made available to veterans for unemployment benefits, for educational purposes, and for home loans. Flush with government cash, veterans flocked to universities, colleges, and technical schools across the country, where they received education and training that allowed them to take their place as newly minted members of an increasingly consumer-crazy middle class.

Well-paying jobs and rock bottom consumer costs, coupled with the freedom of automobile ownership, placed a huge crunch on the housing market. The new parents and their boomer children wanted to move out of dad’s house on the farm; out of their tiny apartments in the cities. There were loans aplenty but few homes to buy. Sensing a payday, builders William and Alfred Levitt bought up land on Long Island and began to build inexpensive cookie cutter homes in what became the first modern suburb. In their first prefabricated Levittown that included everything from swimming pools to churches, the Levitts eventually built 17,000 homes that housed nearly 80,000 people. Demand for the new homes was through the roof, with the price of a two-story unit listed at $7,900. With the average salary for local families running at $3,000 per year, the down payment of $90 and the monthly payment of $58 to live in a Levittown home was eminently attractive.

Builders and entrepreneurs across the nation seized upon the Levitt’s formula as a path to riches, and suburbs exploded across the American countryside from Chicago, to Kansas City, to Los Angeles. The GI Bill alone allowed 5 million veterans to buy homes at a cost of over $14 billion, and soon good jobs, low costs, and guaranteed financing had changed the living patterns of an entire nation. In the two decades following World War II the number of people living in suburbs nearly doubled, and by 1960 one-third of the American population was living the suburban life.

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I loved the music of the 50s; Elvis and Doo Wop especially. My parents were real active in the church, and the Southern Baptists were firm believers in no dancing. Bob [her boyfriend and later husband] wasn’t raised that way; Bob was in the Methodist Church. At the Friday night dances down at the rec center he was the one dancing. I probably could have gone; I don’t think that my parents would have refused to let me go. But they wouldn’t have wanted me to dance. My friends were friends from church, and they didn’t go either, so we went other places than dances. The only dance I ever went to was when Bob invited me to the senior prom. We went, but I didn’t dance. In college I learned to slow dance and do the twist, but I never really learned much. Bob was the dancer, not me. I wish I really had learned to dance. My granddaughter is 16 and she is out there with them like all the other kids.

Kaye French

Ensconced in their gleaming suburban enclaves and wielding a wealth never before seen by the youth of any generation, boomers and their new world drove seismic cultural shifts and were immersed in and affected by those shifts. From leafy cul-de-sacs to mean inner city streets, the cultural changes of the baby boom were everywhere to be seen, quite literally landing in the family living room through the new medium of television. In 1947, with the lifting of wartime restrictions in the United States, the first batch of 175,000 mass-produced 7-inch black and white TV sets sold out in record time. By 1962 90 percent of the population owned a TV. Along with the increase of TV ownership came a corresponding explosion of programming, much of which was aimed specifically at the boomer market. Smash hits like I Love Lucy, Make Room for Daddy, and Leave it to Beaver depicted a happy country, the one boomers were convinced they lived in, ruled by laughter and home-spun truth doled out in 30-minute dollops.

Henry Ford had once dreamed that very nearly every American would be able to own a car, and his dream was realized during the baby boom. Facing wartime restrictions there had been only 25 million automobiles on the road in 1945, many of which predated the war. By 1958 there were 67 million cars on the road. Sprouting fins and chrome, and boasting V-8 power, cars from Chryslers to Corvettes became a ubiquitous part of youth culture, as did hot rodding and cruising.

All of the technology and entitlement made for an era of boundless optimism for those on the good side of boomer history. The future was theirs, and they were determined to seize it through education. In 1940 the average US student completed just over eight years of school, a number that rose to nearly 11 years of school in 1960. Perhaps of even greater significance is that the number of college students in the United States more than doubled between 1940 and 1960 to 3.6 million. While the overall statistics seem small by modern standards, with just over 11 percent of adult men and nearly 7 percent of adult women having achieved four-year collegiate degrees overall, the gains were still great. College was a real social possibility for men and women alike, opening a brighter future than ever before for an exceptionally educated baby boomer generation.

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Mom had gone to Mrs. Hickey’s Business School in Saint Louis. Dad was a farm boy who had gone to fight in World War II. Mom’s view of success for her was an intact family, even if the outside world just thought that is what it was, that is what was important to her. They knew that I was going to go to college to become a teacher. They were all about it. Came time for school to start and [her boyfriend] Steve came home [from training at Fort Riley], and we talked about