A Trust Betrayed
Page 2
The Townsends’ second child, Aimee, arrived at the Sandia base hospital in 1962. Two years later, Tom was shipped to Okinawa, Japan, to take over as logistics officer at the division headquarters there for the 3rd Marines. The Vietnam War was starting to escalate, and he ended up being sent to Da Nang for the last few months of his thirteen-month tour overseas.
In August 1965, Townsend was sent back to Camp Lejeune to be a logistics officer, training Marines in the art of establishing field operations and keeping things running even under the duress of war. His wife and two children were thrilled to have Tom with them again. Their new home was a three-bedroom “cracker box,” but it was located in the special area called Paradise Point that was reserved for officers and their families. The following summer, when Tom was promoted to major, they moved to even larger quarters near the Officers’ Club—“the best housing we would occupy in our more than twenty years in the Marine Corps,” Anne later recalled. Mark and Aimee loved hanging out at the club’s swimming pool and had many friends on the base—life was good at Camp Lejeune.
Within a few weeks of their move into the “double-decker” that was designated as Quarters 2509, Anne discovered she was pregnant again, “an unexpected but most welcome condition,” she said. Christopher Thomas Townsend was born on March 16, 1967, a small baby at five pounds, ten ounces, who needed assistance to start breathing. When he was brought to his mother’s room two days later, Anne noticed he had a high-pitched cry unlike any she had ever heard from a newborn, and he seemed to have problems feeding. But the doctor insisted all was well, and mother and son went home to Paradise Point on March 20.
Despite the reassurances from the medical staff at the base hospital, Anne had lingering concerns about Christopher’s health. He was a passive baby and didn’t retain formula well, often vomiting after his feedings. At three and a half weeks, the baby’s color suddenly turned dusky while he was in his seat, but it returned to normal within a few minutes after Anne picked him up and moved him around. It was a frightening moment that Anne described to a pair of visiting nurses who came to check on the boy a few days later, but they looked at his records and said there was no reason for concern.
The worries about Christopher subsided somewhat as the family prepared for Tom’s latest TDY, or temporary duty. On April 26 he was to head to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to take command at Camp Garcia, a Navy training base on an island just off the Puerto Rican mainland. The TDY was expected to last four to six months, which left Anne, still recovering from Christopher’s birth, with the unenviable task of looking after three children, including a newborn, all on her own.
Still, there was some comfort in remembering the drumbeat about “the Marine Corps family” that Anne had been hearing since she married into it thirteen years earlier. “During the early years there was one underlying message—do what’s expected and the Corps will take care of you,” Anne wrote later as she looked back on her family’s time in the Corps. “There was solace in this dictum because the husbands—our reason for being where we were—were most frequently gone. Never fear, even if your partner was ‘in the field’ for several weeks, or TDY for several months, you were safe—looked after by the Corps. The husbands and fathers—the Marines—relied on this tacit understanding, knowing that their loved ones were, if need arose, looked after by a cadre of support personnel. This knowledge allowed them to concentrate solely on the mission at hand.” The slogan of the service, Semper Fidelis—Latin for “Always Faithful”—seemed to extend to the spouses and children of Marines, who shared the same bonds as the enlisted men and women, officers, and veterans.
Tom left for Vieques at 5 a.m. on April 26, the same day Christopher was scheduled for his six-week checkup at the Camp Lejeune hospital. Eleven-year-old Mark would be in school, but five-year-old Aimee had a cold and would have to stay home alone for a couple of hours while Anne took Christopher for his 9 a.m. appointment. “Knowing I would be gone for 2 hours or less there was no worry—she was a very trustworthy youngster,” Anne wrote years later. There was comfort, too, in knowing Aimee was at home on a Marine base, with neighbors always available and ready to assist.
The baby was given his DPT vaccination (combining the vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus) before the doctor conducted the exam, which seemed to take forever. After a long time probing, feeling, and listening to the boy, the doctor turned to Anne and said, “Sit down, Mrs. Townsend, I have something to tell you. Your baby has a serious heart defect and pneumonia. We need to admit him to the hospital today.”
“I thought I was prepared for nearly anything, but I certainly was not ready for this,” Anne recalled later. A hospital volunteer accompanied mother and son to the lab for blood work, X-rays, and paperwork. Anne called a neighbor across the street to ask her to take care of Aimee while Christopher was being admitted and given initial treatment. It wasn’t until late afternoon that Anne left her son at the hospital and in a daze made her way through heavy traffic on the base back to Paradise Point: “I prayed the Chrysler station wagon past the intersection, with the MP standing on a barrel [directing traffic], to home,” she said.
Unable to bear the thought of her baby being alone in a sterile hospital room, and still in shock from the news that he had very serious health problems, Anne set about cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and struggling to make a meat loaf for dinner. Adding to the stress was her inability to reach Tom on that Wednesday evening. That would have to wait until the next afternoon, because personal communications to Vieques were limited to Tuesdays and Thursdays between 2 and 4 p.m. via ham radio.
Anne was able to visit Christopher for an hour each day. That routine went on for ten days until the boy was finally sent home, with instructions for the mother to check on him constantly while he was awake. She had to make sure he was sitting up, because it enabled him to breathe more easily. It was also best for him not to cry too much, because it strained his weak lungs, and he was to be kept away from large groups of people to avoid possible infection. There were weekly checkups at the base hospital, and an appointment was scheduled in late May for Christopher to be evaluated at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Tom was kept up to date twice a week in conversations monitored by the ham radio operator on duty at Camp Lejeune. He desperately wanted to return home to help, but the Marine commanders at Lejeune and in Washington said it would not be possible because they were so short of officers as a result of the steady buildup in Vietnam. So Tom contacted his parents in Florida and persuaded them to go up to North Carolina. They would take care of Mark and Aimee when Anne took Christopher to Bethesda.
The day before their appointment, Anne and Christopher flew from New Bern, North Carolina, to Washington, DC. They were met at the airport by friends from Tom’s tour in Hawaii, Dave and Betty Beach, who had agreed to put them up for a few days at their home in Springfield, Virginia. The next morning, May 26, Betty drove Anne and Christopher to Bethesda, where the boy was admitted to the naval hospital for four days of tests and observation. Anne was told to come daily to feed and help care for the baby, because there was a shortage of support staff at the hospital due to the war.
When Christopher was released on May 30, the doctors told Anne that he had a heart malformation and other birth defects that could not be treated with surgery. The Townsends flew back to North Carolina, arriving at Camp Lejeune in the late afternoon. But by 8 p.m. they, with Tom’s father, were headed to the base hospital—Christopher had come down with a fever and diarrhea, probably from an infection acquired at Bethesda. Later that evening he was admitted to the pediatric ward. Anne and her father-in-law returned home, only to find Christopher’s grandmother being cared for by a neighbor. The elder Mrs. Townsend had broken down from the stress of the long wait, fearing that her youngest grandson might never be coming home. “It was invaluable to have their support, but a terrible strain on them,” Anne said. “There was a strong sense of frustration because nothing could be done but wait.”
“One very frustrating element ran through this very trying period,” she said. “This was the lack of consideration by the Marine Corps hierarchy. It was evident that they would not allow Tom to return home (base personnel was at half-strength because of the demands of Vietnam), but most upsetting was that no one contacted me regarding our ongoing problem.”
Tom was also extremely frustrated. His pleas for leave to return home seemed to fall on deaf ears. “I never heard from anybody in my command,” he said. “I had a boss at Camp Lejeune. But everybody just kept their mouth shut.”
Finally, after he was told that Anne needed to take Christopher back to Bethesda for a follow-up exam on June 26, Tom took matters into his own hands. A few days before the appointment, he knew there was a plane coming into Vieques from Lejeune with supplies and staff, so he went to the airfield, waited for the plane to empty, and climbed on board for the return trip. “The captain said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘My child is dying at home,’” Townsend recalled. “He said, ‘You don’t have orders.’ I said, ‘I’m going—see you later.’ They never said anything about it.”
Tom did not tell Anne that he went AWOL; she assumed he had finally been granted a leave. The long drive to Bethesda—Mark and Aimee were left in the care of neighbors—gave them a chance to catch up for the first real time in two months. They started looking ahead to Tom’s return from Puerto Rico, by which time they were hoping against hope that Christopher might be on a path toward better health. At Bethesda their spirits were lifted a little, too, when Christopher’s evaluation went well. The doctor declared that he was pleased with the boy’s progress.
Tom and Anne took Christopher with them back to the Beaches’ home in Virginia, where they settled down to enjoy a summer evening cookout. Christopher was put down for a nap around 7 p.m. while the men started grilling the steaks outside. But in a short time Anne heard a distressing cry from the baby’s room. When she picked him up to try to comfort him, Christopher suddenly stopped crying and went limp in her arms. Betty Beach, a former nurse, tried putting him in a position that might allow him to breathe more easily, but he remained comatose.
Dave Beach grabbed his car keys and rushed Tom, Anne, and Christopher to the nearby Springfield fire station, where the boy was immediately administered oxygen. He didn’t revive, however, so the ambulance team rushed the baby, Tom, and Anne to the emergency room at the Fort Belvoir military hospital, with Dave Beach following in his car. At the hospital, Anne called the doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital, who ordered the Fort Belvoir medics to bring the boy there immediately. Dave Beach took Tom Townsend back to Springfield while Anne held Christopher in the ambulance. It raced around the Beltway, arriving in Bethesda around 10:30 p.m.
After checking in, Anne got to the pediatric ward just in time to hear the nurse holding her baby tell a group of laid-back attendants that the boy was turning blue. “Immediately all hands hit the deck,” Anne said. “One corpsman quickly escorted me from the area into a glass-enclosed office near the ward entrance and told me to remain there until the doctor could talk to me.” Ninety minutes later, with the Fort Belvoir ambulance crew waiting impatiently outside, Anne was told that Christopher was breathing but asleep. She should return to Springfield to get some rest herself.
The ambulance crew returned to the Fort Belvoir hospital around 1:30 a.m. Tom picked up Anne, and they tried to sleep at the Beaches’ house, but it was impossible. Their restless night ended at 5 a.m. when the phone rang. Christopher had died. It was June 27, 1967, a mere three and a half months since he had been born at the Camp Lejeune hospital.
Two days later, Christopher was buried at Arlington National Cemetery following a late-morning service attended only by a Catholic chaplain, Tom and Anne Townsend, Dave and Betty Beach, and another family friend. The Townsends’ drive back to North Carolina later that day was filled with sadness. For Anne, the feeling was already beginning to grow that she was somehow responsible for her son’s death. There seemed to be no other explanation that made any sense to her. For his part, Tom was bitter about his family being left to suffer through the tragedy on its own, without any support from the base commanders and staff. “I felt like the Marine Corps had dropped me off the edge of a cliff,” he said.
Tom’s grief over Christopher’s death changed somewhat after he read an autopsy report that listed the scores of health problems in his tiny body. “In retrospect, God gave us a gift for a few months and took him away,” Townsend said. “He would have been screwed up for the rest of his life.”
Townsend returned to Vieques in early July and was told he would be relieved of his command there by the end of the month; he had been selected for a program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where officers from each branch of the military service were being trained in computer literacy.
In Dayton, the entire family was deeply depressed. After the good life at Paradise Point, their housing at Wright-Patterson, converted from old World War II barracks, seemed dingy and drab. The computer school was very demanding, leaving Tom little time for his family, and the stress levels were so high that Tom and Anne had to meet several times with the base chaplain for counseling. Tom was so distraught that he told the Marine Corps brass that he felt another tour in Vietnam, even at the height of the war, would be better for his mental health than staying in Ohio, though he didn’t tell Anne this. His request was granted, and he was transferred to Camp Pendleton in California in November 1967 to await orders to ship to Vietnam. After some more training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, Townsend’s orders arrived in the fall of 1968; he left for Da Nang in October and remained there until November 1969.
Townsend ended up his career in the Marines with a posting at Quantico, the sprawling base in Virginia south of Washington, DC, and retired from the Corps in 1974. He and Anne rarely spoke about Christopher, but their memories of their third child never left them. It would be more than twenty-five years before they would finally learn the likely cause of his death.
2
LEJEUNE
. . . all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.
—MARINE BIRTHDAY MESSAGE, JOHN A. LEJEUNE
For a military base that dryly bills itself as “The Home of Marine Expeditionary Forces in Readiness” with “the world’s most complete amphibious training program,” Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune on the coast of North Carolina is a fairly resplendent place.
Camp Lejeune is framed by the city of Jacksonville to the northwest, the New River to the southwest, and eleven miles of Atlantic Ocean beaches to the southeast. Only about 10 percent of its 152,000 acres in Onslow County has been developed, yet there are typically more than 100,000 enlisted and civilian personnel on board. The rest of the base—some 220 square miles—is covered with pine and hardwood forests and thousands of acres of marshes, ponds, and streams thriving in a mostly warm coastal environment.
The site is part of what ecologists call the Onslow Bight region, which is described in a Defense Department handbook on biodiversity as “a rich mosaic of saltwater marshes, wetlands, longleaf pine savannas, and other coastal ecosystems” supporting a number of threatened species, including the red-cockaded woodpecker. Some might simply call it a swamp, but it is a splendidly d
iverse and productive one. The wetlands include many bogs, called pocosins—lush with evergreen shrubs—that are unique to coastal North Carolina. The base as a whole is home to a variety of threatened plants, birds, and animals, such as the coastal goldenrod and the Venus flytrap, Wilson’s plover and the American oystercatcher, the Eastern cougar and the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.1
Edward Lindley, now a semiretired attorney and treasurer of the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter in San Diego, lived at Camp Lejeune for nine months in 1967 after he was drafted out of high school in upstate New York. He signed up for the Marine Corps to avoid going into the Army. “I figured if you’re gonna do it, do it right,” he said. (Lindley also wanted to help out a buddy in the Corps—in those days, if a Marine recruited someone to enlist, they were rewarded with an extra thirty days of leave.)
Lindley found Lejeune a pleasant place to be stationed. “Mowed grass, long driveways, . . . two-story brick barracks . . . it was a really nice, even a pretty, base,” he said. He was part of the communications unit—in true military fashion, his training included learning Morse Code, “which I never ever used in the Marine Corps”—and on a typical day at Camp Lejeune he would grab a book, jump in a jeep, and drive to Onslow Beach, where he would spend the day reading while maintaining radio contact with his command. “I did that for nine months,” he said, until the time came for his thirteen-month tour in Vietnam. There he saw plenty of action (“words cannot describe an ‘up close and personal’ airstrike by an F-4,” he said) while supplying and transporting and occasionally evacuating troops, before he was sent back to Camp Lejeune in December 1968. He resisted all the offers to reenlist, including the promise of a promotion and a $5,000 bonus (enough to buy a new Corvette in the late 1960s). Instead he took early leave to attend college and never looked back.