“Soldier’s Widow, Soldier’s Wife, Soldier’s Mother”: The Incredible Life Of Norma Donlon

Norma has led an extraordinary life marked by resilience, service, and deep ties to the U.S. military. She is the author of Soldier’s Widow, Soldier’s Wife, Soldier’s Mother, and has been a lifelong volunteer. Recently, she published a new book titled Forty-Six Years of Silence: The Journey of One American Family of Japanese Ancestry. Norma's paternal grandparents immigrated to California from Hiroshima, Japan, in 1902. Her grandmother was an incredibly hardworking woman who raised flowers, worked in California’s fish canneries, and cleaned train station bathrooms on weekends. Norma frequently lived with her grandmother during her childhood and for one semester in college. Early in 1941, discrimination drove her maternal grandfather to move his family back to Japan. Norma’s mother was unhappy with this decision because she had been born and raised in America, and she had met her future husband in high school. She returned to the U.S. alone to marry Norma’s father, a pre-med student at UC Berkeley. After Pearl Harbor, her father was sent home along with 500 other Japanese-Americans who were attending Berkeley. Norma’s family were initially forced into horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack assembly center before being sent to the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Norma was born in Camp Jerome on March 16, 1943, and her mother was given only aspirin during the delivery. After their release, her father moved the family to New York City (as they were banned from going west of the Rockies). Eventually, they lived in a tenement apartment in Harlem. Her father earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, leading to a job in Michigan, where Norma finally slept in a bed for the first time at age seven. The family stayed in Michigan for two years before returning to California, moving into the same house her grandparents had lived in. Unfortunately, during their time in the internment camp, the house had been ransacked. During her childhood, a high fever brought on by measles led to a loss of hearing, requiring Norma to wear hearing aids and learn to lip-read. After high school, she moved in with her grandmother to attend El Camino College, where she was on the cheerleading team and cheered for the LA Rams in 1960. Her resulting poor grades led her father to bring her home. Not wanting to attend community college, she took a job in the electronics company her father started with five friends. She served as a receptionist and typist, and it was while working in this capacity that she met her first husband, John Irving. John was a student at San Jose State at the time and came to work at the company during his summer break. When Norma’s parents were on vacation, she began to secretly date John because she knew that her parents would never allow her to pursue a six-year-older man (he was 24, she was 18) who had a reputation as a lady’s man. As their relationship grew, Norma flew to San Jose to attend John’s ROTC formal, and her father kicked her out of the house. With no place to go, John found her living accommodations and a job. Their relationship continued to flourish, and Norma followed John to Ft. Benning, Georgia, for his Infantry training. Near the end of 1963, they decided to marry, and since Georgia state laws prohibited interracial marriages (Norma is of Japanese descent and John was white), they had to cross the border and get married at a courthouse in Phenix City, Alabama, on December 7, 1963 (Pearl Harbor Day), which Norma’s Japanese family certainly did not approve of. Fortunately, Norma’s family eventually approved of John, and the young couple sailed for Hawaii, where John joined the 25th Infantry Division. He was excelling as a Platoon Leader and Norma was happy living in a house on the beach when John volunteered for a short (TDY) deployment to Vietnam on January 25, 1965, as part of a "shotgun platoon" (providing door gunners for helicopters), before door gunners were assigned to helicopter crews. While John was deployed, Norma returned to California to live with her parents, returning shortly before John’s expected DEROS (Date of Estimated Return from Overseas). On May 7, 1965, just one week before John was scheduled to return home, the battalion commander and chaplain knocked on Norma's window at 4:00 AM to deliver the news that John had been killed. He was the first officer from the 25th Infantry Division killed in the war. At just 22 years old, Norma was a widow. Norma returned to California, struggling heavily with grief and trauma. She turned to alcohol to cope, especially after being assaulted by an officer who came to her home under the guise of offering condolences. Norma had maintained a relationship with John’s parents, and was returning to North Carolia, where John’s high school library was being named in his honor, when she stopped at Ft. Benning to revisit some of the places she and John had enjoyed. She had purchased a book, written by the first Special Forces Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War, Captain Roger Donlon, hoping to get it autographed. On her flight from Atlanta to Benning, she happened to sit right next to Roger, who had just returned from a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Roger offered Norma a ride to her hotel (she had two large suitcases) and to take her to dinner, since it was late and neither of them had eaten. The next morning, he took Norma to breakfast, and then back to his apartment to watch a football game, which she enjoyed. As she left for North Carolina, Roger asked Norma to be his personal secretary (to help him answer all of the mail he received as a Medal of Honor recipient). Norma was hesitant, but one day, while visiting John’s grave, she heard his voice telling her it was time for her to move on. Norma drove across country and joined Roger, working as his personal secretary and accompanying him to events (including the celebration for Medal of Honor recipients that Walt Disney hosted) for six months. Roger’s next assignment was Korea, and the day before he left he proposed. Norma’s answer was “yes and no”: yes, she would marry him, but no, she would not rush to a chapel for a quick wedding, waiting until he returned from Korea. She and Roger initially planned their ceremony for June 1968, but when the North Koreans captured the USS Pueblo in January 1968, Roger’s tour was indefinitely extended, with him eventually returning in July. They were married in a legal ceremony on November 9, 1968, in Colorado, almost exactly three years after they met. (Four years into their marriage, Norma converted to Catholicism for family unity, and they were officially married in the Catholic Church in Bangkok, Thailand.) In 1972, Roger volunteered for a second tour in Vietnam. He had previously volunteered, but the Pentagon was hesitant to send him back into combat because the Viet Cong had put a price on his head. Roger was assigned to CORDS (Civil Operations and Rural Development Support) in the Mekong Delta, where he served as a District Senior Advisor. Since this was to be an 18-month assignment, Norma was authorized to live nearby in Hawaii, the Philippines, or Thailand. She chose Bangkok, moving in December 1971 with their adopted son. Norma greatly enjoyed Bangkok (even considering a cross-border tourism mishap while visiting Cambodia), and while stationed there, the Donlons adopted two more sons, with all sons being under the age of three. Eventually, Norma gave birth to their fourth son on Earth Day in 1975. Roger’s second tour to Vietnam was cut short later in 1972 after he suffered a severe concussion and a detached right retina during a mortar attack, ending his combat career and bringing him back to the United States for surgery. After Roger’s medical treatment, he was reassigned as an Advisor to the Royal Thai Army before returning to Ft. Benning, Georgia, in 1974 as the Chief of the Mortar Division and Test Project Officer for the Infantry Board. In 1977, he was assigned as the Commander of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group at Ft. Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. For Norma, this was an adventure, but also a challenge as she frequently had to drive the Transisthmian Highway because she was not allowed to fly on the helicopters that took Roger across the country for the required formal events. She describes their time in Panama, including during the historic Canal Treaty negotiations. In 1978, Roger was stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served as an instructor and Director of Allied (International) Personnel at the Command and General Staff College. This was a joy for them both because they were able to meet and interact with so many different officers and learn about their cultures. From 1981 to 1982, the Donlons lived at the Presidio in Monterey, California, while Roger learned Japanese for his follow-on assignment in Tokyo, Japan, as the Commander of the United Nations Command Rear Headquarters at Camp Zama. Norma loved this assignment, and her themed parties were a highlight of their experience in Japan. Not being able to speak Japanese but always at Roger’s side at embassy and attaché functions, she became known as the “American woman with a Japanese face” because in Japan, it was not customary for wives of the Japanese officers to attend formal functions, but Norma was always present. In 1987, they returned to the Presidio, where Roger finished his final year in the Army before retiring as a Colonel on December 17, 1988. Norma then picked Ft. Leavenworth as their retirement location, and the family remained active in the community, sponsoring over 100 international military families over 25 years. Norma and Roger also spearheaded several humanitarian and healing projects in Vietnam, including restoring an abandoned cemetery at Nam Dong (the site of the battle for which Roger was awarded the Medal of Honor; the cemetery held many of his indigenous fighters. The couple also established a scholarship program (now at Texas Tech) for Vietnamese-American students named for General and Mrs. William Westmoreland, enabling recipients to return to Vietnam to study at the Medical College of Can Tho University. They also built a Special Forces Children's Library and Learning Center in the mountains of Vietnam to honor fallen comrades. Roger and Norma worked hard to heal the wounds of the war. In 2024, Roger Donlon passed away following a 12-year battle with Agent Orange-related Parkinson's disease. He died on January 25, just five days shy of his 90th birthday. Currently, Norma is fighting a bureaucratic battle against a Veterans Affairs (VA) policy regarding headstones in national cemeteries. Roger explicitly requested that Norma’s name be placed on the front of his upright military headstone, which the cemetery director allowed (the headstone reads “Married to Norma”). However, the VA informed Norma that when she dies, her name must be moved to the back of a newly created stone because “it cannot be about her.” Norma is passionately advocating to change this policy, asserting that if a veteran wishes to have their spouse on the front of the headstone, that wish should be honored.