A Bereaved Mother Takes On the Navy

On Monday night, Lifetime’s focus is death. “Any Mother’s Son” is about the murder of a U.S. Navy seaman at the hands of a shipmate.

The fact-based story also traces the evolution of his working-class mother, who says she never met a homosexual before she learned that her own son was gay.

Now, five years after her own fight with the Navy, she has joined a support group for parents of gays and can talk about her son’s violent death and about changes in her life.

Bonnie Bedelia plays the role of Dorothy Hajdys of Chicago Heights, Ill., whose son, Allen R. Schindler, was beaten to death by Terry M. Helvey in Sasebo, Japan, home port of the amphibious assault ship Belleau Wood.

Helvey, 21, had been drinking the night of Oct. 27, 1992, before the ship was to leave on a long deployment. He and shipmate Charles E. Vins followed Schindler, 22, into a Sasebo public park restroom, where Helvey beat Schindler so viciously that his body could be identified only by tattoos.

Hajdys, whose father and husband also served in the Navy, trusted that the guilty would be punished and that she would be told the truth.

As it turned out, Navy officials were less than candid. She wasn’t informed that her son had been a victim of gay-bashing by his own shipmates, and she wasn’t told until it was over that Vins had entered into a plea bargain, was found guilty at a court-martial, sentenced to four months and served only 78 days.

After Hajdys learned the truth from two reporters--one from the military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes, the other from the Chicago Tribune--she waged her own struggles.

The movie depicts part of the encounter between Schindler and his attackers and spends more time on Schindler’s warm relationship with his mother, sister and brother.

Hajdys said she was pleased with the dramatization. But she still is hurt that of her son’s previous commanding officers, only Capt. Douglas Bradt, skipper of the Belleau Wood, sent condolences.

“Capt. Bradt--I never met him--he sent his condolence to me, regular mail, from Japan,” she said. “The letter came the day of Allen’s funeral, 10 days after Allen was killed. You would think he would have telegrammed.

“Allen had been in the Navy four years. He had officers that were in charge of him. But no other captains, no one from the military did except the big guy, the CNO [chief of naval operations].”

About a month before he was killed, Schindler told Bradt that he was gay and asked for a release from the Navy.

Other sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship said that there was open hostility toward gays among the 950-person crew and that Schindler often was harassed.

His mother, it seemed, was almost the last to know. “I didn’t believe that Allen was gay,” she said. “My opinions of gays were that they wore a dress, like Klinger on ‘MASH,’ or they had their fingers in the air. I had never met anyone who was homosexual.”

But her daughter, Kathy, knew. In the film, she reminds her mother that Allen had tried to speak to them about it when he was home. When Dorothy collects Allen’s personal effects and reads in his diary about his relationship with another man, she realizes the truth.

Kathy, 32, was 27 when Allen was killed; half brother Billy Hajdys, 22, was a high school senior. “It was hard for him,” said Dorothy. “Kids can be cruel.”

Like his older brother, Billy had planned to enlist in the Navy.

“After Allen’s death, the recruiter kept leaving messages for Billy because Billy was going to join the Navy,” said Dorothy Hajdys. “I finally called Washington and told them I was going to press charges for being harassed if he didn’t stop.”

Nevertheless, Hajdys has only good memories of her older son.

“The last time Allen was home, I think all of us got closer to him,” she said. “Twenty-four hours before Allen was killed, to the minute, I talked to him, and during the conversation I told him four times that I loved him. I’ve never had nightmares. And Allen knows that I loved him. He was brought up in the church his whole life. There’s a line in the movie where I say, ‘Allen knows right from wrong.’ ”

When she saw her son again, she didn’t recognize his body. In the movie, the Navy escort recommends that she not open the coffin. But she insists, then faints when she sees her son.

“I got real shaky and everything,” Hajdys said. “My oldest brother started screaming, ‘Close that coffin; she has no business seeing him.’ I had this idea that whole week waiting for his body that I could hold him. They didn’t tell me; I didn’t know how he was killed.”