Two wars, family and a shared bond
By Malcolm Garcia
Knight Ridder News Service
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The clean, sparsely furnished living room where Frances Sevick sits is as spare as her memories of the day her son, John, died.
"He was a lieutenant. Tet Offensive. Vietnam. February 1. 1968. That was it. When the Army guy parked outside, when he walked in, I knew what happened. He told me, 'John's dead.' That's something you never forget. Twenty-five. My son was 25."
Sevick, 84, dabs beneath her glasses with a tissue. She pats her hair and looks out the window of her Kansas City, Kan., home, past the television where an anchorwoman delivers the latest news on Iraq.
"I know what they're feeling," Sevick says of families with sons and daughters in the military. "Every day they're over there it's torture. And like Vietnam, there're some dying every day, isn't there?"
Three decades after the war ended, families of Vietnam veterans are reliving those years as they follow the conflict in Iraq. These families, better than most people, know what war means.
While comparisons of the two wars are controversial politically, both conflicts share stark similarities: a tenacious foe and an inability to quickly root out insurgents despite overwhelming military power.
But striking differences exist as well. Volunteers make up today's American army, not draftees. Combat in Iraq occurs in desert cities and towns, not the jungles of Southeast Asia. Returning American soldiers haven't confronted the war protests of the Vietnam era.
Beverly Kennedy's son, Martin, was 19 when he joined the Marine Corps in 1967. He didn't tell her. He just came home one afternoon with his head shaved.
"I thought, 'Oh, he's not going to do this!' But he did," Kennedy, 78, recalled as she laughed on the porch of her son's Lawrence, Kan., house, across the street from the family's business, Kennedy Glass.
"I knew I was going to get drafted anyway," Martin Kennedy, 56, said, looking a little sheepish beside his mother. He patted her hand and she held his. Thoughts of those days still make her cry.
"I wondered what he was doing every day he was over there," she said. "Knowing he was in so much danger. Never a day went by when I didn't wonder how he was. He'd write and tell about a fellow who had been killed right next to him."
The Kennedy family would unfurl a map of Vietnam on their living room table to track Martin's movements. They rolled it up when they were done, only to take it out the next day. He telephoned only once from Australia when he was on leave. He wrote regularly. The letters took about two weeks to reach Kansas.
"There were long spells we didn't hear from him," Kennedy said. "I didn't like that. Oh, it was very scary."
These days, as she follows the news from Iraq, she is shocked by the number of women being deployed.
"The mothers have to leave the kids with their husbands, oh, my," she said shaking her head. "It didn't seem like so many families were being split up then. At least it wasn't as obvious."
"I hate seeing the ones going back for a second tour," said Martin's wife, Patty. "We don't have enough trained to relieve the ones over there."
Fears of redeployment haunt Overland Park, Kan., mother Kathy Donegan, whose son Mark returned from Iraq in May. Signs welcoming him home still decorate the front of the house.
"I just try not to think about it," said Donegan, 48. "It could happen again down the road. I know a mom whose son had to go back. She was so upset it made her physically ill."
Mark, 23, joined the Army Reserve in May 2001 after his first year in college. He had always been fascinated with the military. In the living room, photographs of Mark dressed in the blue uniform of a Civil War soldier decorate the wall. The family has a long history of military service. Donegan's father and two uncles enlisted in World War II. A cousin and an older brother served in Vietnam. Another brother joined the service but was not sent to Vietnam.
"When that second tower went down on September 11, I knew my son was going to war," she recalled. "I hadn't even heard about the Pentagon. It was pretty overwhelming that day."
Mark landed in Iraq in April 2003.
Saying goodbye "was the hardest thing I've been through," Donegan said. "It was just, there's nothing you can do to control what's happening. I couldn't help him."
Today, Donegan thinks about Vietnam constantly. She was 12 when her brother joined the Navy Reserve and went to Vietnam. She was scared and worried; she saw war protesters and wanted to scream, "What are you doing? My brother's over there!" He returned a year later.
Sometimes, when she hears about the death of a soldier in Iraq, she sits on her living room couch, rests her chin on its back and looks fearfully out the window. She expects a military vehicle to park outside the house at any minute with a sad, self-conscious officer prepared to tell her some tragic news.
It hasn't happened yet, and for that, she thanks God every day.
