Waiting: One Wife's Year of the Vietnam War

Epilogue

Epilogue Thus we began our post-Vietnam lives together, each with our own perspectives , needs, goals, and expectations that we melded into a fourdecade marriage. In December, 2007, Lee and I celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary—a benchmark of life that the Linda of this book would hardly have believed possible at any point during the year’s vigil. Amazingly, there was a life after Vietnam, and we have lived it to the fullest . Our second daughter, Meridith, was born in 1972 when Reveilee was three. Together we took on the world. To no one’s surprise, Lee made the Army his career, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel before retiring in 1988. While he again commanded troops—the next time in Germany—and served in various field and rear positions throughout his time in uniform, no experience ever came close to challenging the impact his time in Vietnam had on him and his life. He chronicled his Vietnam experiences in the first two books he published, The Only War We Had: A Platoon Leader’s Journal and Vietnam 1969–1970: A Company Commander’s Journal. These personal narratives have recently been re-released by Texas A&M University Press. I made a career of having careers. First, I threw myself into the role of officer’s wife where, mimicking Mrs. Sheldon, I learned the art of entertaining , polishing silver, and whipping out checkerboard cheese sandwiches at a moment’s notice. I hosted teas, served as the president of the officers’ wives club, and volunteered where needed. I did all this with good cheer for the first several years until Uncle Sam sent us to Germany in the mid-1970s, where I chafed under the complete control the Army had over my life, including where I lived, what goods I purchased, what I ate. My attitude toward the military at that point made Susan’s displea- [312] Epilogue sure with it during Vietnam appear as child’s play. My experiences there led me to reconsider what I was doing with my life; Lee’s experiences during this time led him to write Battles of Peace. Finally coming to grips with the fact that the Army was not the villain so much as it was my need to follow my personal ambitions that was causing the friction, I reprioritized so that I accommodated the army wife’s requirements while focusing my real energies on my own goals. I earned my Master’s Degree and taught college English, speech, and communications . I wrote several textbooks, and then I released Breaking the Myth: The Truth About Texas Women. I kept my career goals flexible and mobile enough to move nine times in the fifteen remaining years of Lee’s army life. When Lee retired, I took a position at the University of Phoenix, where I became one of the institution’s first woman vice presidents. Following that, I flew all over the country as a business consultant before buying my own business in Phoenix, which I have now owned for eight years. Throughout my changing of hats in the workforce, Susan monitored my progress. We saw each other every few years when she and Tom came back to the States for home leave from the Philippines where they lived for almost two decades. She, who was not allowed to work in foreign countries, said she never had to have her own career—she could simply experience lots of different ones vicariously as she watched me rotate from being the officer’s wife to the professor and then to the author. She continued to follow my progress as I evolved into the university administrator and then the business woman. In 1994, while the Hargroves were living in Colombia, Tom was kidnapped and held captive in the mountains of South America by guerillas forces for a year. Susan had her “second Vietnam” with this ordeal while she worked unrelentingly to get him freed. Their saga became the “based on a true story” scenario for the movie Proof of Life. Had I only known I was living with the inspiration for the Meg Ryan role all those months in San Francisco! If I was amazed that there was life after Vietnam, I was astonished to learn that there would be another whole set of experiences in the civilian world. Lee and I settled in Phoenix in 1988, where we enjoyed the desert climate for nineteen years while he wrote another fifteen books and I tried out yet another...