After the Hero's Welcome by Dorothy H. McDaniel

Author:Dorothy H. McDaniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WND Books
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

ON CAPITOL HILL

By the time Red left Lexington, his anger about national defense priorities was at the boiling point.

“Sailors should not have to hold their ships together with baling wire,” he said.

“I rotted away in a communist cell because President Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam to try to win the White House for Hubert Humphrey. For three years, those bombers didn’t come. For three years, our negotiators in Paris argued with the communists about whether to negotiate at a round table or a square table. Now President Carter is dismantling our national defense! They’re cutting corners on every defense system we have. We can’t even buy a condensate pump for the ship that trains our Navy pilots.

“Seems to me that somebody’s priorities are wrong here. It’s the pork-barrel items in the defense budget that come first. Basics like safe training ships for young aviators get left out. I just don’t understand that. Maybe some of the parlor-room patriots on Capitol Hill can explain it to me when I get there,” he fumed.

“Cool it, Red,” I cautioned. “Don’t forget you’re a Navy man. President Carter is your commander in chief. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

We were headed for Washington, where Red would serve as the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. House of Representatives. It was going to be hard for him to stay out of the political debate on Capitol Hill, feeling as strongly as he did about defense policy.

Leslie did not want to leave Pensacola.

“Why do we always have to move during high school?” she complained.

“Your dad will be home nights,” I told her. “Mike will be able to come home on weekends and bring some of the other midshipmen with him. Dave’s in North Carolina, so we can get our family together more often.”

That cheered her up a little. One of the by-products of the ups and downs of our lives was the deep love between Leslie and her brothers. She had borne the full brunt of her father’s captivity. Too young to understand war, she had been deeply affected by Red’s absence while she was growing up. He had been a stranger to her when he came home. She had held her tears inside and made a valiant effort to learn to love him. But the gap was too wide. Now, in her turbulent teen years, she still sought advice and encouragement primarily from Mike and Dave. The boys were very protective of their little sister and, as busy as they were with their own college activities, they always had time for one of her many long-distance calls to “talk things over.”

None of the children had a hometown. We had uprooted them three times since Red came home and, as each one went away to college, “home” was a different place. But they were proud of their dad. And they were beginning to share his sense of mission – and his politics.

Dave was a freshman political science major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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