Journey into Darkness (32 page)

One teacher commented, “If school could be just social arrangements, Suzanne would get all As.”

Her room reflected her expansive personality. She had the largest bedroom in the house and filled it with dolls and stuffed animals. After she filled the shelves, she started on the windowsills. Wherever in the world Jack would travel, he’d bring something back for her. “But,” as Trudy noted, “it was an effort for her to stop long enough to hang something up or find a proper place for it, so it would just get shoved in the corner and then she’d close the door and nobody else got to see it."

She had also grown from a cute and tomboyish little girl into a gorgeous young woman. “Very, very pretty, the top one percent,” in her proud brother’s opinion. The opinion was borne out by others. Jeff says, “She blossomed in tenth grade, which gave her renewed self-confidence. I thought she was very cute.”

She did some modeling and possessed an excellent fashion sense. All of this also made Stephen even more protective of her. “I always wanted to know who it was she was with when she went out on a date,” he admits. “Before she’d go out, the guys and I would try to get with whoever it was and roast him in kind of a kidding way, but send him away with the right attitude. A lot of people were interested in her and I was just trying to look out for her and help her out.” Stephen’s concerns for his sister were taken quite seriously by anyone approaching her. He was short and stocky, very strong and athletic, and a weight lifter with biceps like tree trunks.

In her own way, Suzanne was just as athletic as Steve. And when she matured, she matured fast and dramatically. She appeared older than her age and so stopped looking like Steve’s kid sister. Even when she was still in junior high, she fit in more with his crowd, and before long they would say to him, “Why don’t you bring Sue along?” She was very popular. And while there were many aspects of her life which really worried her parents, they always trusted her judgment with boys. On that score, she’d never done anything to alarm them. And besides, they knew Stephen was looking out for her.

According to the time-honored suburban ritual, Stephen got his learner’s permit within days of his sixteenth birthday and his driver’s license shortly after that, then bought himself a huge used Pontiac. Jack and Trudy hoped they could hold out driving privileges as an incentive to Suzanne to get her grades up.

“Every time she’d bring home a report card, I’d say, ’Gee, Sue, you know you’re still sort of far away from what you want. Shouldn’t you be thinking about that?’” said Trudy.

Other than social organizing, Suzanne’s greatest passion in school was sports. She was a hurdler on the high school track team and an outfielder on the women’s softball team.
With her long legs and tall, slender frame, she was a natural athlete. This was particularly gratifying to a girl who had spent the first year and a half of her life having to sleep in a leg brace. Being the perky beauty she was, she’d been approached about joining the cheerleading squad, but that wasn’t for her.

“We thought of her as kind of a semi-jock chick,” Jeff Freeman remembers. “Suzanne would always prefer to do rather than watch. She’d always rather participate.”

“She became her own person early,” he adds. “She developed a sense of herself earlier than a lot of kids.” And she had to try everything herself. One day in high school, Suzanne and another girl skipped school, obtained a bottle of rum, and proceeded to kill it off between them to see what it would be like. Her next tactical error was showing up for her softball game.

Trudy got a call from the school office: “Your daughter is in a questionable state. We think you’d better come pick her up.” As soon as Trudy saw her, it was obvious what she’d done. “She was blotto.”

When they got home, Suzanne meekly asked, “Are you mad, Mommy?”

“Let’s say I’m very disappointed,” Trudy replied sternly.

“Are you going to punish me?”

“No, Suzanne,” her mother explained. “Because tomorrow morning you are going to be punished by the good Lord.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” Trudy said.

“The next morning, she was so sick, she turned every color of the rainbow, ending up with green. It was terrible, and the hangover lasted for two days. I would get her a cold compress and she would say, ’Mommy, why are you being so nice to me?’ I felt so badly for her.

“When she finally came out of it, she just said, ’I don’t like feeling like that.’ I said, ’I’m very glad to hear that.’ ”

The house in Springfield became a focal point for Steve and Suzanne’s social circle. Perhaps it was because Suzanne was such an organizer, perhaps it was because Jack and Trudy always welcomed their children’s friends and talked to them as intelligent adults. Often, Steve says, there were
ten or twelve guys there at one time. Also, there were often friends staying with them. To this day, Suzanne’s and Stephen’s friends continue to visit Jack and Trudy, and often spend the night whenever they’re in town.

When she was in high school, Suzanne commented to her mother that there was a girl in her class named Gina, and that she really liked the name. Trudy told her how interesting that was, since Gina had been her original name.

Suzanne asked, “Do you think it would be possible for me to find out who my birth mother was?”

“I think now because of laws like the Freedom of Information Act, you probably could,” Trudy said. “If it’s important to you and you’d like us to, we’ll help you find out.”

“Well, let me think about it,” Suzanne said, but she never pursued the matter.

They then asked Stephen if he wanted help learning about his own origins. “Why should I want to know who my original parents were?” he said. “I’m happy with you.”

Suzanne was a high school sophomore when Stephen left home for college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, continuing as the academic star he had been in high school. He intended to major in fine art. By the end of his first year, he decided he was more interested in commercial art than fine art, so he decided to transfer to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, whose program was more heavily oriented toward commercial art.

Jack thought this was a terrible idea, moving away from such a challenging and nationally prestigious university, but felt it was Stephen’s decision to make. He became more actively involved when Steve went down to Texas over the Christmas break to visit a friend, and then announced he had decided to stay there, drop out of school, and look for a job in the oil and gas industry.

Jack told him, “You’re making a bad judgment and you’re going to be on your own if you do that. We will not bail you out.”

Suzanne became extremely upset that Jack and Trudy seemed to be abandoning and throwing out her beloved brother.

“No, Suzanne, I’m not throwing him out,” Jack replied. “It’s his choice. If he stays in college, we’ll do whatever we
can to help and support him. But he’s making a bad choice and I can’t encourage him or support it.” They were never sure whether Suzanne approved of Stephen’s move or not, but regardless of how she felt and regardless of the conflicts she herself had had with her parents, she couldn’t bear the idea of Stephen being estranged from the family.

But the bottom had recently fallen out of the oil market and jobs were scarce. And Stephen started to feel subtle pressures from his friend’s family; they were concerned that he intended to live in their house forever. In the meantime, though, he’d met a girl who offered to let him live with her. He got a job working in a local supermarket to help support them. He wrote to Suzanne about her. saying she was blond and pretty and just like his sister.

Interestingly, while Stephen stayed in Texas, his Texas friend decided to go to school in the Washington, D.C., area and stayed for a while with the Collinses. At one point, Stephen decided to come home for a visit and announced he was bringing his girlfriend home with him. Upon meeting her, Suzanne quickly decided she was nothing at all like herself.

Stephen returned to Texas and got a job in the construction business. Jack and Trudy were beside themselves.

“Eventually he called us.” says Jack. “He’d been in a car accident, his relationship with his girlfriend had ended, somebody had stolen his wallet with his driver’s license, he’d fallen off a building, he’d broken his glasses, and he was out of money. He’d about hit rock bottom.”

Jack had foreign service business he couldn’t postpone, so Trudy flew down to Texas alone. “I never thought much about the devil and things like that, but when I got down there and saw what was happening, I thought, The devil lives in Arlington, Texas.’ All these young people who had run away from home. They were merely existing; their lives were terrible. All these young girls would come over to talk to me—you know, I was their mother figure—and tell me their sad tales: how they went with this man who was married but he loved her so much he was going to leave his wife. And they all believed it. It was very sad.

“Anyway, I finally said to Stephen. ’This is your last chance. This is it. You come back with me or you stay here.’
And I got him new glasses, we got him a new driver’s license, and I just said, ’We’re not funding any more of this. If you want to come back, you come back now.’ So he did.”

He came back home around Christmas of 1983. This time, Jack said Stephen could not start college right away. “You’re going to work for a year and show that you’re going to do something with yourself.” After that, he was able to get back into the University of Virginia, where he once again excelled in his course work and then graduated with honors in economics in 1987.

Looking back on the experience in Texas, Stephen comments, “I got about ten years of immaturity out of the way in two years.” He also admits from this vantage point that his blond and blue-eyed girlfriend there was “nothing like Suzanne.”

The way Jeff Freeman sees it, “Suzanne was an anchor for him. When things were tough with their parents, they bonded even closer with each other. And the older Suzanne got, the more advice Steve got from her. It was really incredible how much he loved her.”

Suzanne didn’t have her brother’s academic options. As smart as she was, her grades had never been good enough for UVA, or any other college with any kind of meaningful scholastic standards. And she made it clear she didn’t want to go to a local community college or settle for some “rinkydink job,” as she put it; she wanted to go somewhere away from home.

The decision to join the Marine Corps came as a surprise to everyone. Recruiters from all the services had visited her high school and one day in March of her senior year she came home and told her parents, “I’d like to join the Marines.” Jack doesn’t remember ever having heard her mention the military before that.

He was tring to figure out how he felt about this, so he said, “Well, gee, Blue Bell, I’m really curious. You know how proud I was of being a naval officer and you’ve heard all my stories about serving on ships. I can’t imagine why you’d want to go in the Marines rather than the Navy.”

She looked at him squarely and said, “Because, Dad, the Marines are the best.”

“What could I say to that?” Jack recalls. “So I answered, ’Well, you’re the best, Suzanne, so that’s fine.’”

When Stephen found out about her decision, he was as surprised as his parents. “I expected her to go to college. I never thought about her not going to school. But I didn’t question her decision. The main thing I remember is that I was very, very proud of her.”

Jeff Freeman says, “I was surprised. I thought it was a pretty ballsy thing for a woman to do. She said she wanted the challenge and I had no doubt she’d be successful at it.”

Jack still had to come fully to terms with it in his own mind. “I’d say to Trudy, ’Is this a good idea? Should we discourage her?’ And then I thought, well, let’s analyze the whole thing. She hasn’t studied well enough to get into college. If she didn’t go in the Marine Corps, she won’t want to continue living at home. She’d want to get an apartment with another girlfriend, get a job. We’d be nervous wrecks worrying about where she was, where she parked the car, was it dark, would she be alone? I thought, at least I know she’ll be safe in the Marine Corps. Someone will be watching her and looking out for her all the time.”

Even after Suzanne committed to the Marines, in some ways Jack could not help being a typical father. When she came downstairs to model her prom dress—very bright red and very short, accentuating her splendid figure—Jack said, “Are you sure there’s nothing missing?”

“It was definitely not a dress I would have chosen for her. But every time I made that sort of comment, she’d say something like, ’You are going to cut your sideburns, aren’t you, Dad?’ So we would end up laughing about it.”

Suzanne graduated from high school on June 4, 1984, and went into the Marines on June 27. She did her basic training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina.

Those of us who did their service in the Air Force, or any branch other than the Marines, know how tough by comparison Marine basic training is. The concept is to break each recruit down and then build him or her up in the Marine mold. Suzanne thrived in basic training, pushing her mind and body to each new challenge. She had her long blond hair chopped off short and spent all day long drilling
in a uniform. All of the discipline she couldn’t accept at home, she accepted willingly and enthusiastically in the Corps. The drill instructor seemed to have it in for Suzanne, perhaps because she was so pretty and from an educated, upper-middle-class background. But Suzanne accepted this as part of the challenge. During the eight weeks of basic training, a number of the women in her platoon washed out, some on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Suzanne knew she needed this kind of structure in her life and loved the sense of direction it gave her.

The letters she wrote home would detail how tough the training was, but never expressed any doubts or reservations. And when they came down to Parris Island for boot camp graduation, Jack and Trudy couldn’t have been more proud. She took Jack to the huge rappelling tower and said, “Dad, I did that! Isn’t it cool? I did that!” She took almost equal pride in demonstrating to her mother that this daughter who could barely get it together to keep her room from being a total wreck could now make a bunk bed so tight that a quarter would bounce off it.