Friendly Fire (2 page)

Michael was looking down at the medallion now chestnut-colored with age.

“I wore this medal through the Second World War,” Gene was saying. “It protected me, and so I give you this … I give you.…” He could say no more. Gene looked at his son, half in pride, half in agony, his throat too tight to speak.

“I'll wear it,” Michael said. He loosened his black Army tie and unbuttoned the collar button of his khaki shirt. He draped the medal and chain around his neck, carefully centered it with the dog tags on his chest and buttoned his shirt back over it. Michael then turned to his mother and hugged her.

It was an awkward embrace, shorter in duration than either of them wished. When Michael stepped back, he was startled to see his mother's eyes were damp. He could not remember ever having seen her cry before. Michael put his hand out to comfort his mother, and she took it. When Peg looked up at her son, she, too, was unable to speak.

“Mom?” Michael said. “Don't worry yourself now, okay?” He squeezed her hand lightly and repeated, “Okay?”

His mother just looked at him, shaking her head sadly.

“Come on now, Mom, please?” Michael pleaded. “It'll … it will all be over March first, okay?”

He gently pulled his hand from hers, picked up his barracks bags and turned away. Peg unconsciously pressed the hand he'd been holding to her lips. She watched her son walk past the cafeteria toward the doors that would lead to his plane. Michael stopped in the narrow passageway, dropped his barracks bags and turned back for one last look at his family. But as they started toward him, he quickly lifted his bags and hurried out the door.

Michael's family moved closer to the big picture window and stood silently staring at the airplane. They saw Michael again when he took a seat at a window on the near side just behind the wing. He did not wave. He did not move. He simply sat there framed by the silver airplane's window, looking out at them as they looked back in at him.

Mary and Patricia cried quietly on the drive back to the farm. Peg could see that Gene was gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. When they were once again on the other side of Waterloo, back on Route 218 past the Robo-Wash and Burger King heading toward their farm, Peg resolved to cheer everybody up by telling them what Michael had said just before boarding the plane.

“Why March first?” Gene asked her.

“I don't know,” Peg said. “He just told me not to worry. That it would all be over then.”

On March 1, 1970, Michael Eugene Mullen, age twenty-five, was returned to the Waterloo Airport in a U.S. Army issue twenty-gauge silver-gray casket.

And one year after that, his mother was under surveillance by the FBI.

Chapter Two

Long before the sacrifice of their oldest son the Mullens had earned their place upon that prairie land. Michael was to have been the fifth generation of his family to work their same Iowa fields and the most recent link in an unbroken family chain reaching back through more than two-thirds of our history as a nation to John Dobshire, his paternal great-great-grandfather, who, seeking a better life in the new land, emigrated from Ireland in 1833, leaving behind his wife, Ellen, and their then nine-month-old daughter, Mary Ann.

The America John Dobshire arrived in, the America of the 1830s, was still a nation of rural people living for the most part on farms or in country villages. And even though at the start of that decade the number of persons living west of the Allegheny Mountains—west, in other words, of central Pennsylvania—was beginning to approach the population to their east, vast tracts of land across the Mississippi River did not belong to the United States, and still greater areas, though they “belonged,” had not yet been explored.

Iowa had not become a part of the United States until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Although the state was named after the Iowa (also, Ioway) Indians who were part of the Winnebago people originally living north by the Great Lakes, in 1804, when the explorers Lewis and Clark first came upon the Iowa, the tribe had been so decimated by smallpox that there were fewer than 800 left. They were living not in “Iowa” but where the Platte River joins the Missouri in what is now Nebraska.

The Indians who dominated Iowa at the start of the nineteenth century were the Sioux in the west and north, the Potawatami (also, Pottawatami) in the north-central part of the state, and the Sauk (also, Sac) and Fox, (in their language, the Mesquakie), whose vast domain centered on the Mississippi River and extended north to the Wisconsin River, east to the Illinois River, south into what is now Missouri and west across the gently rolling plains of east-central Iowa into what would become the Mullens' land. Saukenuk, the chief Sauk village, lay just north of where the Rock River flows into the Mississippi at what is now Rock Island—one of the “Quad Cities” of Rock Island, Davenport and East Moline. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase the Sauk and Fox had already been planting their corn at Saukenuk for more than 100 years. Black Hawk, the Sauk warrior chief after whom the Mullens' Black Hawk County in Iowa is named, was born in Saukenuk in 1767. He was forty-five years old in 1812 when the British and Americans returned to war. Black Hawk stood about five feet four inches, had a high, sloping forehead, ruddy, angular features and shaved his head clean except for the scalp lock to which eagle feathers, the mark of his warrior status, were tied. With very little urging, British agents won Black Hawk and others of the Sauk-Fox Confederation over to their side; Black Hawk was given the rank of colonel and fought next to Tecumseh and the British against the Americans, wearing a British “red coat” and war paint.

For the next twenty years Black Hawk defiantly resisted every attempt by the whites to expand into his lands. Not until 1832 was Black Hawk subdued. Abraham Lincoln, then a twenty-three-year-old captain in the Illinois Militia, rode off to take part in this “Black Hawk War” on a borrowed horse. Jefferson Davis, then a young lieutenant, escorted Black Hawk to Jefferson Barracks, where the now sixty-five-year-old warrior spent his winter shackled and chained.

Black Hawk's imprisonment removed the last formidable barrier to westward expansion into the unorganized territory of Iowa; and on June 1, 1833, the Iowa lands were officially opened. Previous to that date only a small trickle of whites had crossed the Mississippi; the Army had been ordered to turn back anyone who attempted to settle on the other side. Of course, some white men had gone among the Indians, had established trading posts, hunted, mined and prospected, intermarried. Explorers had traced the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. But the “Iowa” that existed when John Dobshire landed in America was still considered the “Far West,” a dark wasteland on the Indian frontier beyond which lay the Great American Desert. Iowa's vast prairie fields were then considered “almost unwholly fit for cultivation.”

On June 1, 1838, Iowa achieved formal territorial status and included in addition to what is now the present state of Iowa, lands which would become Minnesota, and North and South Dakota as well. One of the initial problems, however, was resolving where to build the territorial capital. It was finally agreed that the proper site should be along the banks of the Iowa River, but because the location selected was still so remote and unsettled that no trail went to it, it was doubtful whether any pioneer or new territorial legislator would even be able to find the spot. A Mr. Lyman Dillard was therefore hired to plow a guide furrow 100 miles west across the prairie from the Mississippi River to the site chosen for the territorial capital to be called Iowa City.

On the Fourth of July, 1838, in celebration of Iowa's formal territorial status and the nation's sixty-second year of independence, the citizens of Fort Madison at Iowa's southeastern tip invited Black Hawk to be their Independence Day guest of honor. Black Hawk had been released from prison only four years before and placed with his family on the reservation near Fort Des Moines. A banquet table was set up on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and the old warrior chief, now seventy-one years old, his skin parched and wrinkled, his legs needing a cane for support, sat at the table beneath the shade trees and listened to their words of friendship and unity, progress and prosperity, strength and peace. And when they called on him to speak, Black Hawk pushed himself to his feet, steadied himself and talked to them of the past.

“Rock River was a beautiful country,” he told them. “I loved my villages … my cornfields … the home of my people. I
fought
for them!” He glared at the white men seated around him, and then, looking beyond the banquet table to the broad Mississippi below, Black Hawk paused lost in memories. The citizens of Fort Madison waited patiently for him again to speak.

“I was once a great warrior … a great warrior … now,” Black Hawk said in almost a whisper, “now I am poor.… Now I am … old.”

Three months later, on October 3, 1838, Black Hawk died and was buried sitting erect within a small log mausoleum near his home. The following year an Illinois doctor dug up Black Hawk's remains and attempted to exhibit them for profit. When Black Hawk's bones were finally recovered, they were placed on display in the Geographical & Historical Building in Burlington, Iowa.

The Mullens do not know when John Dobshire first set foot in Iowa; in fact, they aren't really sure what he did for the thirteen years following his arrival in America in 1833. They
believe
he came out to Iowa in 1846, looked the land over, then left to serve as a driver of supply wagons for Zachary Taylor during the Mexican War. Taylor was known to like Irishmen, and during that period of “No Mick Hired” prejudice, a teamster job with the Army meant not only an income, but the promise of a presidential land grant after the war. John Dobshire had nothing against the Mexicans; he saw military service simply as his only opportunity to help his wife and daughter escape Ireland.

John Dobshire returned to Ireland in 1850 after an absence of seventeen years. During the potato famines of 1845 and 1846 more than 1,000,000 Irish died of malnutrition and disease. Coffins were openly offered for sale at county fairs, and fallen bodies were being devoured by packs of starving dogs. Nearly one out of every eight Irish man, woman and child between 1841 and 1851 had succumbed to cholera, typhus, starvation or a famine-related epidemic disease. Out of those who had survived, more than one out of eight decided to emigrate—predominantly to the United States. Among these, of course, were John and Ellen Dobshire and their now eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary Ann. The Dobshires must have been fully aware of the ocean crossing's risks. During the years 1847–1853 fifty-nine ships carrying Irish and British emigrants to North America were lost at sea. In 1847 alone, it has been estimated that one out of every two emigrants died. One of those who died that year was Peg Mullens' great-grandfather, whose twelve-year-old daughter, Peg's Grandmother Wolfe, was left to continue the crossing to New York alone.

After landing in America, the Dobshires journeyed directly to New Orleans, where they boarded a paddle-wheel steamboat for the trip up the Mississippi River to Dubuque. The river might have seemed tame after the ocean, but the Dobshires must have been alarmed by the shriek of the steamboat's whistle, the steady rain of curses from the pilothouse—glassed in and gingerbreaded like some fantasy mansion's gazebo, and the thick black smoke and shower of sparks pouring out those elegantly towering rosepetaled stacks. Consider also the Dobshires' concern at the sudden, shocking thump as the steamboat hit an underwater log or a raft that had broken loose, the ragged, shifting rhythm of the engine, the clamor of bells, whistles and orders screamed back and forth as their steamboat maneuvered over the shoals. Still, there was that vast soothing panorama of land passing by: the great plantations set back from the levees, the cotton fields worked by hundreds of slaves, and farther north, as the languorous sweep of the paddle blades walked their boat up the river, the small, drowsing riverbank towns. The Dobshires, leaning out over the carved and ornamental railings, could not help having sensed the excitement of the young country, seen the energy of the farmers, observed the pride the settlers took in their little houses and marked the groups of Indians restlessly edging along the shore.

In Dubuque John Dobshire purchased a prairie schooner, a flatbed lumber wagon with a canvas top which could be drawn in for shelter at each end. Unlike the more famous Conestoga wagon, the prairie schooner was light enough to be pulled by two horses or a yoke of oxen even on virgin prairie trails. Two German immigrants, Isaac and Jacob Walker, made friends with the Dobshires and decided to accompany them to the new lands.

Gene Mullen likes to think of their two wagons crossing the prairie together, the tall grasses higher than their wagons' wheels. He pictures his great-grandfather's prairie schooner with its barrel of water strapped to its side, the bucket of grease for its axles, an iron skillet, perhaps, gently banging back and forth. He wonders what goods they might have brought with them from Ireland. Only a darkened tin tea canister with an elaborate raised floral relief has survived. It sits now on the bureau in what had been Michael's side of the boys' room.

John Dobshire chose to homestead the site upon which the Mullens' modern ranch-style farmhouse now stands because there was a plentiful water supply—he was within two miles of the Cedar River and within a short walk of Miller's Creek. There were springs on the top of his hill—a hill so slight one is hardly aware of it as such. About a half mile east of his homestead stood two very tall trees, one a black walnut, the other an oak. “They were the monarchs of the forest,” recalled A. J. Peck, who homesteaded in Black Hawk County ten years after the Dobshires arrived. “They were, I suppose, the survival of the fittest, for all that growth had been blown down by a terrible tornado perhaps a century before as their prostrate forms were in evidence all through the woods. The tall oak was called ‘The Old Eagle Tree' for every year a pair of eagles built their nest there.” (
1910 Atlas of Black Hawk County
)