Life without Father

When the Communists released the names of their prisoners--and then the prisoners themselves--the families of 1,340 men had to bear a shock: those 1,340 were still officially listed as missing in action. Legally, the M.I.A.s are still alive, but their wives and children live in a limbo of both legal and personal uncertainties. Last week a salute to veterans was held at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Such public celebrations serve only to intensify the anguish of M.I.A.wives, and some stayed away. One such wife, interviewed by TIME'S Joseph J Kane, is Peggie Duggan of El Paso.

"I ran into the worst emotional bump when the lists of prisoners came out, " says Peggie Duggan. "I was really expecting a big list. My antenna was up. Then I watched the P.O.W.s return on television. I don't know--I couldn't stay away--it was like a bird being hypnotized by a snake.

"Now, whenever I see a returned P.O.W. I bite my cheek inside, and then I know I won't cry. Whenever you hear certain songs, you know you've had it. I come home and play the piano or the organ. I play a lot of Bach--oh, do I play a lot of Bach. "

Peggie Duggan, a handsome brunette of 34, lives with her two children in a large house atop Mount Franklin overlooking El Paso. It is elegantly furnished with Persian rugs, brass candlesticks and French Provincial chairs. On New Year's Eve in 1971 Peggie Duggan received an unexpected visit from an Air Force major with a grim message: the F-4D jet fighter flown by her husband, Major William Young Duggan, 38, had been shot down that same day over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. It was his second combat tour in Viet Nam, his 454th combat mission--and in the 17 months since then nothing has been heard about him.

Harsh Reality. Talk in the Duggan household usually runs to teen-age beauty contests, minor league baseball games or a month-long visit to the family ranch near Austin. But Peggie Duggan lives with the reality that her husband may never be found. At first she left everything as it was, not moving, for example, the old truck that her husband liked to drive.

Until last week Texas law, like the law in most other states, declared that a person had to be missing for seven years before he could be declared legally dead. But at the urging of Peggie Duggan, Governor Dolph Briscoe personally wrote an amendment, which passed the legislature just three minutes before the deadline of its final session last week. Now a man missing in action is considered dead when the Pentagon issues a death certificate.

With that, Peggie at last will be able to sell stock that is held in Bill's name.The Air Force sends her two-thirds of his paycheck of about $1,800 a month; it deposits the rest in a savings account that cannot be drawn on unless a reason is given in writing.

"The terror needs time to heal, " she says. "I just cling to a fleeting hope. Maybe they were all murdered, but I can only hope they will find one of them in a cave somewhere. "

The Duggans' daughter Charlotte Ann, 13, believes her father is very much alive. Before she will change her mind, she says, "I'll have to see his body. " Her brother Robert Scott, 12, is painfully reconciled to the possibility of his father's death. Their mother fills her days as a coordinator for the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. She is also a volunteer publicist for community affairs in El Paso's public schools. "The only thing I can do is stay extremely busy in the daytime so that I just collapse at night, " she says. "I go to every dum-dum thing that comes along. I've been active before, but never with such hysteria. I cannot stand to think about it--if I relax, I cry. "

Peggie Duggan sees little chance that she will marry again. "It depends.Ann sanctifies her father, and I'm not sure anyone should ask to marry us. We still keep a home for Bill. " She can understand wives who have given up hope, but she is not planning to install any grave markers in her husband's memory, and she is nervously noncommittal about the future. "I just put one foot in front of the other. It's not that I am being optimistic, I'm just grasping for straws.

"The wives of P.O.W.s and those killed in action can run the full grief cycle. But the M.I.A. wife can never complete the cycle. You can only go 359 degrees, and then you start all over again. "

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