Waiting Wives by Donna Moreau

Author:Donna Moreau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2005-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

Bonnie

WHAT DO WE SAY TO

OUR CHILDREN?

(1969)

The children raced down the hall. They could not wait to tell Bonnie who they thought had ridden up in the elevator with them. Bruce, Bryan, and Colleen charged into their room at the hotel in New York City, excited to tell their mother the news of their encounter with someone famous. No one remembers who told her first and more than likely they talked over one another, telling her at the same time. They were sure, they exclaimed with childhood certainty, that Mike Douglas had been in the elevator with them. You know, they said, that man who’s on TV in the afternoons when we come home from school.

Bonnie was not surprised that the talk show host was in the hotel. The press had been informed that fifty-eight wives and ninety-four children of military men captured or lost in Vietnam were staying in one of the city’s finest hotels on the first leg of their journey to Paris, thanks to the beneficence of H. Ross Perot. Perot had arranged for the women to leave from John F. Kennedy Airport on December 24. He intended for them to land in Paris on Christmas Day to meet with members of the North Vietnamese delegation, asking them for news of their husbands.

The women and children began arriving in New York on the twenty-third. The billionaire had reserved a wing of the hotel for the families, giving free rein to the children and their mothers to roam the hallways and ride the elevators at their convenience. The round-trip journey to Europe would take twenty-one hours. Seven hours to Paris. Seven hours in Paris. Seven hours or more to return from Paris.

Bonnie had accepted Perot’s invitation without reservation. She and her children, along with Margaret Clark, a British woman married to an American MIA living at Schilling, left Salina with hope that they would find out the status of their husbands. It was an exhilaration that became harder to come by as the years passed without news—a feeling both women held on to as tightly as they held on to their dreams for a happy end to their long wait.

Perot had sent cables to the delegation representing the Republic of North Vietnam at the Paris Peace Talks, telling them of the arrival of the women and their request for a meeting with a representative.

“Hopefully,” he said at a press conference as the families were about to depart on their evening flight to Orly International in Paris, “we have good luck.”

At the same time the women and children boarded the Braniff plane, two cargo planes chartered by Perot called “United We Stand” were being loaded with flats of Bibles and Brach’s candies, food and medicines, blankets and air mattresses, along with several pouches of letters addressed to the soldiers from their families. The North Vietnamese had warned Perot that he should use “regular postal channels,” usually via Moscow, to send things to the American prisoners. Perot had his own ideas.

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