Friendly Fire (11 page)

Senator Hughes hesitated. “Peg, I can't cure all the ills in the world.…”

“But can't you do something?” Peg pleaded. “My family is so upset.…”

“All right, Peg, we'll try. Look, let me get you to talk to Pat. He's my liaison man, with the Pentagon. Hold on a minute, okay?”

Peg told the same story to the Senator's liaison man, who asked, “Are you sure you really want to insist that we bring Hurley or this Salvato out of Vietnam? I mean, has it occurred to you what might happen to your escort when he went back? He might have a good assignment now, see, but I'm wondering whether the Army mightn't put him in combat when he returns just because of our interference.”

“I'm not afraid of the Pentagon,” Peg answered. “And I still have enough faith in the Good Lord and my dead son that whoever it is, Tom Hurley or John Salvato, they'll be taken care of.”

“I don't agree with you,” the aide said. “They may put him directly into combat.”

“You won't do it?”

“No, we'll do it. We'll do it,” the aide told her. “Give us about twelve hours. We'll call you back tomorrow morning.”

Between seven and eight that evening Peter Dobkin read the Mullens their fourth telegram. He did not come out to the farm; he relayed its contents over the telephone. The telegram from the Oakland Army Terminal Mortuary instructed them to disregard all previous messages. Michael's body would be held pending arrival of his special escort.

An hour later the Mullens received a telephone call from the Memorial Division duty officer at the Pentagon advising them that their special request for the escort would be honored after all.

And then Father Shimon called.

“Peg,” he said, “I've been thinking about what you want.… this White Funeral, this Don Bosco Chorus, Father this and Father that, and, ah, I think it's time to call a halt to the production you're talking about for Michael's funeral. I can't go along with you, Peg. We're not going to have a production.”

“Well, Father Shimon,” Peg replied, “if you consider ‘perfection' a production, that's what we'll have. Because Michael's life was sort of perfect. He did things well. He didn't leave many jobs undone. If doing things right for him means having a production, we'll just have a production.”

Father Shimon said, “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

Peg hung up on him.

Peter Dobkin telephoned the Mullens early Wednesday morning with the fifth telegram. It was sent by the Memorial Division and confirmed that either Tom Hurley or John Salvato would be located in Vietnam and returned as their special escort.

The morning mail contained a 9-by-12-inch brown manila envelope from the White House. Inside, on a piece of note paper with a half-size White House letterhead, was a message signed by some minor aide stating that, because of the correspondence Peg had addressed to the White House, President Nixon wished her to know that he was truly sorry that her son had died. The note was paper-clipped to a Xeroxed collection of President Nixon's various Vietnamization speeches. Peg was so offended that she resealed the envelope immediately, showed its contents to no one and mailed it back to the White House with the notation printed in large red letters in the upper-left-hand corner:
RETURN TO SENDER. NOT INTERESTED
.

The mail also contained more letters from friends and the parents of other young men killed in Vietnam. Gene and Peg sat at the kitchen table sifting through the correspondence, selecting parts to read aloud.

“Now, who's this?” Peg asked. She turned the letter over to see the signature. “Oh! This is someone else who lost their son. ‘You don't know us,' they write, ‘but we are truly sorry and know just how you feel. We lost our own dear boy, September 15, 1968. He was a wonderful son.…'” Peg picked up another and read it silently to herself. “Oh, now, Gene, here, listen to this.…”

It was a woman from a neighboring township whose son had been killed the year before. The mother wrote that although her boy had suffered a terrible head wound, she was grateful she had been able to recognize that it was her son. “She says, ‘We didn't care to let anybody else see but the family; it was terrible to take.' She then goes on to say that there are some mothers who are never certain it is their son they bury. The people in L_______ weren't. They still doubt it, you know.…”

Added to their anguish over the continuing wait was the Mullens' uncertainty over what condition Michael's body would be in. A close friend had told them that her sister-in-law's brother, a mortician in Oakland, had called to tell her he had worked on Michael's body. He said that three planeloads of bodies had arrived in Oakland—one on Monday of “viewable” bodies and two on Tuesday of “nonviewable” bodies. Michael, the Mullens believed, had arrived in Oakland on Monday, but they could not be certain. Peg and Gene were unable to believe that Michael could be “viewable.” If Michael had been killed by ARVN artillery, should he not have been “blown to pieces”?

Gene put his letters aside, but Peg could not leave hers. She would pick up one after another, turn it over, read it, put it down and search through the stack for a new one. “Oh, Gene, this is from A_______,” an Ozark girl who had baby-sat for the Mullen children years before. “Listen, she says, ‘Dear Peg and Gene: We heard about Mike. I can't tell you how sorry I am. Peg, I was just sick when I heard it. It seems like such a waste.…'” Peg looked up at Gene for a moment, then reached for another letter and skimmed through it silently. “Here, Gene, another: ‘Your family has our sympathy. What a tragedy, yes. Our Mike came home Friday night. He was killed at _______.'” Peg put the letter down and brushed her hand through the stack. “All these letters.…”

“Who would have thought …” Gene said.

“They mean so much, you know?”

“I know,” Gene said.

“This one's from those two women we met when we went on the bus trip east last October.… And this is from another girl who baby-sat for us.… And this, let's see … ‘Just to let you know our thoughts and prayers are with you constantly in these trying days and nights. We wonder if the saying, “These are the days that try men's souls,” was ever more applicable to we Americans and those back of us, the ones coming up. We truly wish there was something we could say.…'”

“Who's that?” Gene asked.

It was from an elderly lady on a neighboring farm. Peg fanned through a batch of small cards. “‘Remembering you, Parents of Sgt. Jay K_______,' … ‘Our Michael was killed at …' … ‘The Parents of the Late Thomas W _______,' … ‘My Michael died at _______' —all these
Michaels!”
Peg exclaimed. “It seems that everybody twenty-five years ago named their sons Michael!” She gathered the letters together in her lap. “It's like a fraternity, you know? I mean these people all over the state who have lost their sons. I never would have thought they'd write like this, but they do.… Here, this one says, ‘I'm simply no good at expressing myself, but I had to tell you that your grief is shared. It is so difficult to understand why.…'” Peg rubbed her brow. “‘To understand why,'” she repeated. “These letters, they all write and try to explain, to understand why their sons died and you guess there's a reason, but I don't see it. I really don't see it. Do you, Gene?”

“What?” Gene asked, lost in thought.

“Out of the—what? How many now, thirty-five thousand? Forty thousand? Out of all those thousands who have lost their sons, I bet all but a few feel the way we do.…”

Peg would not leave the letters alone. “‘In memory of Thomas C _______, August 12, 1969,'” she read. “And here, ‘Parents of Lance Corporal James P _______, December 19: We want you to know that you have our sympathy. We truly understand your heartache. These things are so hard to understand and not something you will ever get over. But with God's help …' and so on—no, here: ‘Our sons are all fine men and we can be proud of them.' … Did you know that two Waterloo fathers who lost their sons died within a year after their boys were killed? There's that, too,” Peg said, glancing over at Gene. “Fathers grieve worse than mothers, I think. They can't handle it. Can't express their grief.”

Gene did not move.

Peg looked at him worriedly. She passed him a letter. “Here, Gene, read this.”

The letter was from a family who had moved away. Gene read it slowly, softly, with obvious effort. “We grieve with you. I told our girls, what can friends do? Really nothing. Only God can console you. Our Carmelite sister, Mary, keeps reminding us parents that God gave us our children and so they really belong to Him. We can pray for Mike and we are having a mass said for him. I'm beginning to become a Conscientious Objector myself when our finest young men are being taken from us in this crazy war. But accept our humble condolences and our far away presence. I wish we were closer. I simply hate to tell our Patricia, she—'”

“Remember her?” Peg interrupted. “Her Patricia and our Patricia worked in the post office together one summer?”

Gene nodded and continued to read: “‘hate to tell our Patricia, she feels things so deeply, and is so antiwar now.…'” Gene could not read any more.

“That girl was in everything there was at the University of Michigan,” Peg said. “Then she got tied up and dropped out completely. She didn't even finish school. She's out in—oh, I don't even know where. California somewhere?”

Gene dropped the letter back in the pile.

“This, too, Gene. Listen, ‘From the Parents of Specialist Dean B _______, January 23, 1970. Only ones—' Oh, now
listen
, Gene. ‘Only ones who have lost a son in Vietnam.'” Peg paused and reread the line again with great deliberateness: “Only-ones-who-have-lost-a-son-in-Vietnam-know-the-
heartache
-and-
anguish
-it-brings. We lost our son a month ago at the age of twenty-one.'” Peg looked up at her husband. “Oh-h-h, Gene.…”

He was sitting across from her quietly, not moving, tears flowing down his cheeks.

“Gene? Don't, please?”

He shook his head and wiped at the tears with his hands. Peg walked over to him and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Gene?”

“I can't help it,” he said. “I can't help it.”

“It's all right,” Peg said. “It's all right.”

For the six days since the Mullens had learned of their son's death, their farmhouse had been filled with family and friends waiting for Michael's body to arrive. The people in town knew only that for some reason or other the Mullens had refused to permit the corpse to be returned. There was one rumor in La Porte that the Mullens had taken a shotgun after the survivors' assistance officer who had brought them word of Michael's death. A great many La Porte people couldn't understand the Mullens' behavior, thought it vaguely un-American, somehow unpatriotic.

Cecil Joens, a bachelor neighbor whom Michael had gone to see his last afternoon on the farm, had reportedly got into several scrapes defending the Mullens in town, and yet he had not stopped by to see Gene or Peg at the farm. Cecil had always been the Mullens' closest friend and neighbor, a man whose understanding and generosity they could always count on, and it bothered them that he had not been by. It was unlike Cecil to ignore them. When the farmer who lived down at the corner of John Dobshire's road took his tractor out onto Route 218, the two-lane hardtop between La Porte City and Waterloo, and was run down by the speeding tractor trailer truck, it was Cecil who brought in that farmer's harvest, stored his grain until the price was right and took care of the widow's needs. But Cecil had suffered a heart attack. Although not a major one, the attack was still brutal enough to make Cecil know that that was how he was going to die, and it scared him. It touched him deep in the very pit of his being, and he was never quite the same. No more would he subject his heart to a strain—physical or emotional. He had loved Michael like a son. They had gone to basketball games, football games, 4-H meetings together. In a sense, Cecil was Michael's second father, the man who came when the hogs escaped and Gene was off at John Deere. Cecil had stayed home rather than visit the Mullens because his grief was already so great that he dared not put the extra strain on his heart. Nevertheless, he was the first to defend the Mullens against the Legionnaires outraged by Gene's comment about not wanting those “USO soldiers” firing over his son's grave. And Father Shimon quashed a rumor about the Mullens going after Sergeant Fitzgerald with a shotgun.

Thursday morning Father Shimon telephoned to ask Peg if she knew yet when the funeral would be held.

“I hope to know by noon, Father,” Peg said. “If Michael comes today, we'll hold the funeral on Saturday.”

“Saturday?”
the priest said. “You know we can't have the funeral on Saturday!”

“Why not?” Peg asked. “Why can't we?”

“We have catechism on Saturday, Peg.… And I'm, ah, I'm not going to interrupt my catechism program.”

“Okay, Father,” Peg said. “We'll have our funeral service on our front yard if we have to. But we'll have it Saturday if this is what we want.”

She hung up the telephone and looked first at her husband and next at her houseful of family and friends, the classmates of their children, neighbors who had come to their farmhouse. She told Gene she thought it might be nice to get out of the house for a while.

Four more area boys had died in Vietnam that week, and one was missing in action. Sergeant Fitzgerald had confided to the Mullens that it was only a matter of time before he would have to tell the missing boy's mother her son was dead, that he had been killed in his tank. She was a widow, and he had been her only son. Peg thought they should visit her to see whether there was anything they might do.