Stories We Tell: Jeannie Puckett
(Installment 9 of 14)
Collected and arranged by
Amy Uptgraft
Edited by
Audra Edwards
“When Ralph returned home from Vietnam, he was assigned a job at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. I could not have been happier with this assignment, for I knew it was an ideal place for the children. Ralph had never wanted to be stationed at West Point and had managed to avoid previous orders there, but this time the job was not a teaching position. Instead, he would be working with the cadets for their military training. Ralph had just been promoted to full Colonel and was given the position of Regimental Commander. Ralph has always preferred to be with his “men” in the field, so I knew that West Point might not be a good fit, but, nevertheless, I was thrilled. The Corp of Cadets is divided into four Regiments, so four Colonels were assigned to each Regiment. Ralph would be one.
When he came back, we had many deep discussions about our country’s role in Vietnam. When I asked why he had felt so committed to going, he said, even if he disagreed with our involvement there, that ‘If I can save American lives, then that is where I need to be.’ He thought it was a huge mistake on America’s part to have ever become involved in Vietnam. He felt we had no clear strategy going in and we lost that war and many young men because of it. Ralph had become disillusioned with the Army before Vietnam, and, upon his return, it only increased. He talked of early retirement. I was against this idea because I knew him better than he knew himself. I knew he would not be any happier anywhere else. The Army was his life. I talked him into staying in and told him we could talk more if he still felt that way after being in an assignment he liked, giving him a fresher view of the Army.
However, the tour at West Point did not change his mind. Ralph has always thought that the education a Cadet receives at West Point is the best available anywhere, but he has also thought that not enough emphasis was placed on military training to prepare the Cadet to enter “the real Army.” He felt the Academy did not put enough individual responsibility on the Cadets to help them mature and become leaders of men, but rather treated them as “kids” to be locked down by restrictions and rules. The “real Army” part felt especially important now that we were a country at war. Ralph felt very disillusioned between what he had just seen in Vietnam and what he was now seeing at West Point. The country, the war, the Army—it all just seemed so disconnected.
Every year, West Point assigned somebody to go down to Washington Square Park in New York City on George Washington’s birthday to give a speech, so they chose Ralph. We all made the trip to the city and went to Rockefeller Center at the same time with the children, to make a day of it. We were all dressed up, and Ralph, of course, was in uniform because he had to give the speech. There was a line in the park as things were getting underway, and, when we got in the line with Ralph in his uniform, everybody was looking at us—just staring at us—and it was so uncomfortable. Then, finally, a gate guard noticed us standing there and marched all the way back toward us. We could see him coming, and it was really unnerving because we weren’t sure what he was going to do. He came up and said, “Come with me.” And he took us in before everyone else because he could sense and see it too. It wasn’t that we were glad to [skip the line], but it was reassuring that we had somebody looking out for us because there were so many feelings on edge.
Now it feels like the country is very supportive of the military, because, honestly, they don’t have to be directly involved in fighting our wars anymore, but back then it was very different. The draft made it all very different; nobody wanted to be drafted. It was sad and just this overwhelming feeling. It seemed like it was all a mess, like everything was falling apart. And you did. You really, really felt that. You really felt like you were out there alone—just alone.”
Reflections from Amy:
Such a similar experience, almost 40 years later. Jamie had come back from a hard deployment in Iraq. He lost a lot over there, and he came back . . . different. He came home, and we, too, moved to West Point three weeks later, and he struggled, just like Ralph. “How could things like physics matter when 20-year-old soldiers were being killed in roadside bombs half a world away?” I couldn’t answer those questions. I felt so helpless. He felt so helpless, and we, too, just felt so disillusioned. To know that people we loved were walking through such horrific hardship while the rest of the country just carried on. We, too, felt alone. Supported, but at a distance. So many other options on TV now that it was easy to turn the channel when the war reporting came on from Iraq. The public not staring but reminding us that “we knew what we were signing up for” when we would start to share our realities. Alone.
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