Friendly Fire (19 page)

Wagner should have known it was impossible to talk with Peg without the Vietnam War entering in. Peg's opening came when Wagner asked whether Gene might not want to join the American Legion again.

“I know he doesn't, Bill,” Peg said, “and he isn't going to.”

“He's not?”

“Of course he isn't!” Peg said. “How can he join when the American Legion is upholding the war? Until you men wake up, I suppose we'll be there forever since you seem to have more influence on President Nixon than someone like myself.”

“Well, that's your opinion,” Wagner said. “I don't agree with you, of course.”

The secretary returned with the copies, and Peg asked what she could pay for them.

“Happy to do it,” Wagner said, holding up his hand. “You don't owe me a thing.”

“Let me give you something,” Peg insisted.

“You could give me all the money in the world,” Wagner replied, “and I wouldn't take it. I'm glad to do it for you.”

On April 1 Peg joined a group of Iowa antiwar activists on a plane trip around Iowa to publicize and campaign for the passage of the 609 amendment cosponsored by Iowa's Senator Harold Hughes, California's Senator Alan Cranston, New York's interim Senator Charles Goodell, Oregon's Senator Mark Hatfield and South Dakota's Senator George McGovern in an attempt to set a definite time limit on American presence in Vietnam. That same day, in Vietnam, the Communists launched their spring offensive. By the end of that week American forces had suffered their heaviest losses in seven months.

On Monday, April 3, Peg mimeographed the following letter to the many who had written who had expressed support or lost sons or husbands in Vietnam:

Dear Friends:

We wish it were possible to answer each letter personally, but it can't be done at this time. We'll try later. We have too much work to do in carrying on our protest—each hour that is lost haunts us.

Michael's story has also appeared in the Kansas City
Times
and the Columbia
Missourian
. We have someone taking it to the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat
and the Milwaukee
Sentinel
. If any of you have contacts with large newspapers such as Omaha, Minneapolis, etc., please let us know.

We feel that letter writing to Washington is a waste of time. I have done it for years and all of you seem to have been pouring out your anguish to Congress and to the President and it is like knocking your head against a stone wall. The only response I get is from Senator Hughes and he is certainly behind all of us.

We apologize to those parents who feel we played up the plight of the college graduates.… We felt we could not tell your story, only the one we know best, ours! Please tell YOUR story of the fine 19 or 20 year old boy you lost—only you can tell it. It costs no money … the news media seem to want to donate their facilities.

We need your ideas—not your money—and thanks so much.

s/Mr. and Mrs. Gene Mullen

Now when the Mullens drove into La Porte, they noticed people avoided them, ducked into stores when they saw Peg or Gene on the street. The townspeople knew the Mullens would want to talk only about the war. Gene would return to the farm fuming with rage. “It's time for us to speak out!” he would tell Peg. “I want people to know what it's like to walk down the streets of your own hometown and have your friends cast one look at you and turn their heads away. Why do
I
have to be the one to say hello first?”

“Oh, Gene,” Peg said quietly, “you can't blame them. You know it's hard to be with us. This is something we've done to ourselves.”

“What do you mean, ‘done to ourselves'?”

“We have, Gene. You know we have.”

“We have not!” Gene said angrily. “All we've done is what is right!”

“No, Gene, no.…” Peg shook her head sadly. “You know when you see them that you're terribly jealous that their kids didn't go, that they—”

“That's not so!” Gene interrupted. “I was, but I'm not anymore. I'm not, Peg. I'm just angry that they avoid me.
Why do they avoid me?”

Not all of the Mullens' friends avoided them. Peg's card club tried over and over again to get her to come. She knew they wanted to help. She knew, also, that there was nothing they could do. One afternoon, however, one of Peg's closest friends did stop by. She listened quietly as Peg went on and on about the inequities of the draft and then asked if Peg would have wanted Michael to have avoided his military obligations entirely.

Peg looked stung. “Oh, God,” she said, biting her lower lip, “I think this is probably our real anguish.” She looked through the kitchen window to the dirt road and the open fields beyond. “It's not that we didn't want Mikey to go, it's that we—we
let
him go!” Peg turned back to her friend, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “We raised Mikey in the belief that an individual, a man,
obeyed
. That you didn't question and, and”—Peg's tears were flowing freely now—“this was so wrong! So wrong. Mikey never went against an order. And this, this is our anguish! That we ever did such a thing to our child.” Peg wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Oh-h-h, God!” She wept. “He was the best little guy that ever lived!”

For close to a week now the $2,014.20 gratuity paycheck had been lying on the kitchen table. Gene and Peg were determined to use the Army money to purchase space in the Des Moines
Register
, and although they had not yet decided what to say, they knew it was essential to make themselves heard. The response to their letter to the editor in the Waterloo paper three weeks earlier, the publication of Michael's letter and Lamberto's interview in the Des Moines
Register
a week before, had convinced the Mullens they were not alone, that all over Iowa there were families like themselves “just crying out.” The Silent Majority's unwillingness to speak out was, the Mullens believed, more than anything else why the war had been allowed to drag on and on. And each night Gene and Peg would stay up late trying to figure out how to get their neighbors involved enough to care. The war obsessed the Mullens; they were unable to think or talk about anything else.

Gene had started looking into the Black Hawk County draft calls. Out of the county's population of 125,000, 25,000 young men were registered for the draft. Of that 25,000 only 2,000 were considered eligible to go. All the rest had managed deferments. As Gene began learning who had received deferments and how, he also discovered that the Iowa casualties were coming from the small farm communities where the boys had no access to the men on their draft boards. Peg was unable to forget Michael's phone call from the Des Moines draft headquarters “I simply didn't need to be drafted!” and his accusation that the whole draft setup was corrupt. And so each night, far into the night, Peg and Gene would sit at the kitchen table talking about the draft and the war. If anyone came to the house, the conversation would turn to the war. Every morning Gene would tune his transoceanic radio to a Sydney, Australia, station which carried the Vietnam news. At night the first thing he did when he returned from John Deere was listen to the local news. He would read the
Register
and
Courier
daily and attempt to piece together all the information he had received. Peg, during her day, would have culled what she could from the mail, telephone contacts and the television news. John, their only child who still lived at home, was finding it increasingly difficult to be around his parents. No longer able to bear hearing them go on and on about the war, he began giving one excuse after another to get out of the house.

One night in the middle of the first week of April Gene was sitting at the kitchen table making little marks on a yellow pad. He and Peg had been discussing their advertisement again. “How many Iowa deaths have there been now?” he asked.

“Altogether? Since the beginning of the war?” Peg thought for a moment. “I suppose somewhere around seven hundred by now. At least that many, don't you think?”

Gene did not answer. He continued to doodle on the pad. Suddenly he said,
“Crosses!”

“What?”

“A page full of crosses!” Gene said excitedly. “Think of it! Just crosses, a cross for every boy who died in Vietnam. A page full, a half page, whatever we can afford.”

“Of just crosses?”

“Well, we'd need to explain what they mean. Something like ‘Each cross represents an Iowa boy who has died—' no, who ‘gave his life in Vietnam.' I don't know,” Gene said. “You know what to say, Peg, you always put things better than I do.”

Peg thought for a while. “Just a page full of crosses.…” She reached over and patted Gene's hand. “You know? I think that's a real good idea.”

“Why, thank you, Mother,” Gene said and smiled.

Chapter Twelve

The Mullens' half-page Des Moines
Register
advertisement appeared on April 12, 1970, on page five of the first news section, and exploded habitually taciturn Sunday breakfast table conversations throughout the state. There was a half-inch-high banner black headline:

A SILENT message to fathers and mothers of

Iowa:

And below, in slightly smaller but still boldface type:

We have been dying for nine, long, miserable years in Vietnam in an undeclared war … how many more lives do you wish to sacrifice because of your SILENCE?

Two inches to the right of the “SILENCE?” was a small black cross and beneath it, the epitaph “Sgt. Michael E. Mullen—killed by friendly fire.”

Then came the crosses. Rows upon rows of crosses. Fourteen rows containing forty-nine crosses each, a fifteenth row with twenty-seven and space left open for more. Their ranks, so starkly aligned and black against the bleak white page, suggested a photographic negative of some well-kept battlefield cemetery viewed from afar. The crosses blurred, vibrated, played optical tricks. There were too many for the eye to contain. One could only grasp blocks with white space in between. But as the eye moved across the page, ranks appeared to open up, re-form themselves into ghostly platoons, companies, battalions on parade.

“These 714 crosses,” a legend explained, “represent the 714 Iowans who have died in Vietnam.”

Near the bottom-left-hand corner of the page was printed:
“In memory of Vietnam War Dead whom our son joined on February 17, 1970 … and to those awaiting the acceptable sacrifice in 1970.…”
On the opposite side appeared the credit: “Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Gene Mullen, La Porte City, Iowa.”
*

That Sunday morning Peg had attended the five o'clock mass at Father Shimon's Sacred Heart Church. Gene Mullen awoke at seven, carried the newspaper into the house and left it opened to the advertisement for Peg to see upon her return. She took a quick, satisfied look, asked Gene to wake her if there was any response and went back to bed. Peg got less than an hour's sleep.

Iowans were already busy telephoning neighbors, friends, relatives. College students were calling their parents; fathers were arguing with sons. The Mullens' telephone began ringing at eight o'clock and never let up. In La Porte, William Wagner caught sight of the advertisement, put down his breakfast cup of coffee, grimaced in shock and said, “Good God!” United Press International interviewed the Mullens at nine. At ten a Des Moines television station newscaster complained he had been trying to reach Peg all morning but had had so many incoming calls himself about their advertisement he hadn't been able to get an outside line. “Everybody wants to know what you meant by your ad.”

Peg explained how the Army had drafted their son, a biochemistry student in graduate school, and made him a soldier, that Michael was on a combat mission when he was killed by his own artillery in Vietnam but was considered a “nonbattle casualty” and, therefore, “wasn't counted.” She told him she was now convinced the casualties in Vietnam were much greater than the American people were being told, that the public didn't realize “how many thousands of American boys have been lost in this manner.” Peg pointed out the discrepancy between the actual number of Iowa deaths and the Pentagon's “official casualty lists” and said that although she and her husband had once been members of the Silent Majority, the death of their son convinced them that “the time had come for us to speak out.”

“Our advertisement,” Peg explained, “was our way of telling the world what we feel about the draft, the war and the loss of life in Vietnam.”

One by one broadcasting stations throughout Iowa telephoned, but the majority of the callers were people who simply wished to express their sympathy and agreement with the Mullens' views. They were of all age groups, from Iowa and neighboring states, and over and over again would say they were sure the Mullens would be receiving a lot of “crank calls” (or “outraged calls,” or “negative calls”), that the Mullens would be accused of being “un-American” (or “Communists,” or “deranged”), but that they had telephoned because “we just wanted to say, ‘Good for you!'”

Peg would reply that they
hadn't received
any calls from people who didn't agree, that
all
the people had said that they were sick of the war, too. The person on the other end of the phone would pause, surprised, then say something like: “Well, I'll be darned!”

It would be a mistake to suggest that there weren't people who disagreed. Many persons in La Porte objected strongly to the Mullens' advertisement. They thought the protest brought discredit not only to the Mullens but, by association, to the town. However, they didn't call; they simply assumed, like Lamberto, that Peg was “distraught,” that Michael's death prevented the Mullens from making sense. They were “crazed with grief.” As one of the waitresses in La Porte's Mom's Cafe explained, “Other people have lost their sons, and they don't protest!”