Mental Movies to Unreel

The first American prisoners of war will be home this week; others must wait a little longer. As families prepared for the happy and difficult reunions to come, TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron visited the home of Air Force Major Joseph Abbott in Alloway, N.J. There Joan Abbott and her seven children, who appear on this week's TIME cover as symbols of a moving national moment, were getting ready for his homecoming. Byron's report:

THERE is a man in this South Jersey farmhouse. He is more remembered than real, his presence captured in random memorabilia--a plastic model of his F-105 fighter plane poised on a living-room shelf, a duffel bag of uniforms at the top of the stairs, a portrait by his wife hung in their bedroom. There are less direct reminders too: a grease-splattered map of Viet Nam on a kitchen wall; a dog-eared volume of an encyclopedia spread open on a table--the subject is Viet Nam.

Each evening at 6 o'clock the man is summoned by prayer to a kitchen table ringed with seven children. They say in unison: "God, please take care of our daddy and bring him home real soon. Thank you for the fruits and vegetables from our garden, and all our family and friends."

The youngest Abbott, Matthew, now six, was born a week before his father shipped out to Thailand in 1966. He knows from his older brother Joseph, 13, and his sisters Joan, 16, and Dorothy, 14, that Daddy made good snowballs, "hard packed ones that wouldn't fly apart in the wind."

Six years have passed. It is a long time in which to keep memories alive through various stages of interest (and lack of interest, for that is the way of even the most loving children). Joan Abbott has done it well, pretty much alone. "Joe and I agreed when we got married that I'd be a real mother --so that's what I'm doing."

Joan and Joe Abbott bought this seven-room house in August 1966, just before Matthew was born. Joe left behind an unfinished project--a willow tree to be planted in the backyard. After he was gone, Joan turned it into a family test of hope. They tried many times to get a willow to take root. The trees kept dying. Finally, two years ago a root took. The omen was, of course, good.

Joan has encouraged the children to write poems, essays, diaries, anything to draw from their young minds the secret thoughts that a father might some day want to share. She tries to spend as many minutes as possible with her youngest child. "In my mind," she explains, "I'm making a mental movie called Matthew. When Joe gets home, I'm going to play it for him."

Last spring, when Matthew entered kindergarten, Joan decided to return after 20 years to nursing school. Every day she makes the round trip of 120 miles from Alloway to Philadelphia General Hospital's School of Nursing, attends six to eight hours of classes and returns home to cook, shop, clean, study and mother her seven children.

Despite her busy days, Joan Abbott remembers the first 2/2 years after Joe's capture, when he was neither dead nor alive, just M.I.A. She remembers November 1969, when an antiwar group brought back a list of prisoners from Hanoi and Joe was recalled to life as a P.O.W. She saw Joe on television then, being paraded before microphones in Hanoi. Most of all, she remembers the whiplash of last fall, when peace was at hand and then suddenly the hand was gone. Before that promise faded again for a while, Joan decided Joe would be home before Christmas. She called the kids together, and after "a conference" they all agreed. Only one present would be bought, "a toolbox with lug wrenches, torque wrenches and all the stuff a person needs to tinker with cars--Joe's favorite pastime."

The kit sits in a closet, a reminder to Joan each time she opens the door that the future is best consumed in daily bites. Of that period, she remembers now, "I felt as if I were a ship being battered on the rocks, the waves dashing over me incessantly. I felt more tired, more worn out, than ever before in my life. I just don't think I could go through it again."

For a while, there was talk about repainting the house.

An Army chaplain offered men to help, and Joan was pleased. The Abbotts held a family conference, where twelve-year-old Daniel declared his opposition: "I want Daddy to know that everything that's been done around here was done by us." So the sprucing up has been reduced to whatever the children can manage.

"My principal function is to be a woman to my man,"

Joan says, and she pours her own meanings into those words. What about her return to nursing school? Between mouthfuls of oyster stew at the student nurses' cafeteria, she says emphatically, "I'd drop it in a minute. The very minute he gets home."

Phyllis Galanti decided to visit her mother last week in Blackstone, Va. She left her phone number with Lieut. Mike Covington, her Navy casualty assistance officer. On Saturday at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, she was clipping her West Highland terrier Tammy when the phone rang. "Hi, Phyllis," the voice said, "this is Mike. He's on the list to come out in the first bunch."

If all goes well, and the effects of 6/2 years of imprisonment do not require hospitalization, Lieut. Commander Paul Galanti, 33, will get to see Phyllis this week. "It's funny," Phyllis said, "but I knew he was coming in that first group. I just felt it in my bones. I'm overjoyed."

Mrs. Galanti, who came from a career Army family and has served since last November as the chairman of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, has been getting ready for this week for a long time. When Paul was shot down over Vinh on June 17, 1966, he had been married three years. The Galantis had no children.

She has had only 20 pieces of mail from Paul over the years, some of them just postcards, but she has at least had some idea of his health and state of mind. She has also seen pictures of her husband, including one that ran on the cover of LIFE in late 1967. It showed Paul sitting on a bench in a large cell beneath a sign that read "Clean & Neat.' "He's always been an upbeat, optimistic individual," Phyllis says.

Phyllis went shopping last week in anticipation of her husband's return. She bought herself a light blue dress to wear for the reunion, bottles of the "best French champagne and perfume" and, for a man who used to play a good game of tennis, a Rod Laver tennis sweater. "I've taken it up since he's been gone, and now I hope we can play together."

As soon as Paul is certifiably healthy and can leave the hospital, Phyllis hopes they can go off on a vacation together, somewhere quiet and warm. She expects Paul to be lighter than his old 160 lbs., but intends to fatten him up. "His favorite food," says Phyllis, "is a great big juicy hamburger with lots of onions. And milk or a Coke--I bet that's the first thing he's going to ask for."

"I made the man repeat it twice!" bubbled Myrna Borling. "Then I fell apart. I cried, I think. Maybe I spoke a loud prayer. I wanted to run out into the street and just scream --'He's coming home!' "

Myrna Borling, 31, had just learned that Captain John Borling, U.S.A.F., was among the first group of American prisoners to be released on Sunday. Borling was captured in 1966 after his plane was shot down over North Viet Nam. Their daughter Lauren, now seven, was nine months old, and naturally she remembers nothing about her father.

"My life has revolved around Lauren," Mrs. Borling said.

"It's going to be hard to revolve it around John. Last Saturday night I went into her room and she wasn't asleep. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, 'I'm afraid of Daddy coming home. I'm afraid of Daddy.' I told her I was afraid of Daddy too. And she said, 'But if I close my eyes, I can see Daddy smiling, and then I'm not afraid any more.''

For months, in anticipation of the week to come, Myrna Borling has been mulling over the changes in her life. She has prepared for John's return by cleaning the apartment and trying to get all the bills paid. She thought of putting some clothes in drawers for John, "but I decided against it. I don't even know what size to buy."

Lauren also has plans. She has saved three of her just fallen-out teeth, and she wrote to the tooth fairy, telling her not to take the teeth away until her father had seen them. And she has other ideas, too, for when her father returns. "I want him to take me to the park, to take me to Disney World, to teach me how to play bowling and not to spank me like Mommy does."

Lauren's mother is definitely not in a spanking mood, just can't imagine," she says, "I feel like I weigh five pounds. It is just a fantastic feeling." After her worries about the problems of reunion, she finds that the certainty of this week (instead of the old "sometime" state that all P.O.W. families have lived in for so long) has changed things. "I'm O.K. now," she says. "The last time I saw John was Dec. 5, 1965 I look back, and it already seems like it never happened. All of it is gone. It doesn't seem like it's been that long. I can't wait to see him."

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