Friendly Fire (21 page)

By this time Peg Mullen was dizzy with rage. The Cambodian invasion prompted a fusillade of letters—to and from Senator Fulbright, to and from Martin Culpepper, to and from the Army. Peg had earlier asked Fulbright to “inquire how nonbattle deaths are listed by the Department of Defense” and whether those deaths were released to the press. The Senator responded that he would let her know the results of his inquiry and added, “I certainly agree with you that it is important that the most accurate information be made available to the public.” A few days later Peg wrote Fulbright again:

Thank you for your letter of April 29 concerning the history of nonbattle deaths in Vietnam. Having checked into this from many angles I have learned that the names are released to the press listing them as hostile and non-hostile; however, on Thursday, when the total kill is given only those dying in hostile actions are included.… We believe the nonbattle count could run as high as one-third, not one-fifth as given out by the Pentagon.

Peg requested his office's assistance in obtaining the casualty list and next of kin of those who had died in Vietnam the week Michael was killed so that she could pursue her search for what had happened to her son. And because additional mothers with sons in Cambodia had since written, she included an updated list of their units.

On May 4, the afternoon Peg mailed her letter to Senator Fulbright, the Ohio National Guard tear-gassed a noon rally of Kent State students who had gathered in protest of the widening Southeast Asian war. When the students refused to disperse, when instead they turned angrily on the guardsmen, shouting obscenities and throwing rocks and the tear gas canisters back at them, the inexperienced and frightened young soldiers inexplicably and indiscriminately fired into the crowd. Four students were killed, and eight were wounded. The dead students were Allison Krause, nineteen, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Sandra Lee Scheuer, twenty, of Youngstown, Ohio; Jeffrey Glenn Miller, twenty, of Plainview, New York; and William K. Schroeder, nineteen, of Lorain, Ohio. Their deaths appalled Peg Mullen; she saw them as four more non-battle casualties of the Vietnam War. Children were not safe from the U.S. Army even on their college campuses.

Near the end of that week, on the day the U.S. casualty figures were released indicating 168 Americans had been killed and 1,001 wounded (the highest figure in eight months), Peg Mullen heard from Martin Culpepper again. She had to read his letter twice to make sure she had understood it properly: anyone from Michael's old unit could be court-martialed for writing the Mullens. Any correspondence with the Mullens had to be copied and a duplicate retained by the Army. “Anything sent to you,” Culpepper wrote, “can be censored as we are in a war zone.” Culpepper had misspelled “censored” and someone, with a handwriting quite different, had crossed out Culpepper's misspelling and corrected it. Peg felt the entire tone of Culpepper's letter was so different from his previous ones she was sure it had been dictated—and dictated by whoever had corrected the spelling, presumably the censor. No one had ever opened or censored letters to the Mullens before; it was, to Peg, an indication of a new policy—a policy in response to the Des Moines
Register
interview, letters and advertisements confirming that the Army's attitude was that the Mullens, too, were the enemy.

Obsessed by her conviction that she and her family were the targets of a conspiracy on the part of the United States Army to prevent them from learning the details of their son's death, Peg fought back harder. She sought more proof that the military and the Nixon administration were deliberately preventing the American public from knowing the truth about the war. She had been able to locate Fred Wilson, Michael's friend from NCO school, who was now with an infantry company in Vietnam. Wilson wrote Peg about Ed Gardiner, a young man who had gone through NCO school with Michael: “He is with a reconnaissance unit in the 3/22 working around Tay Ninh. He has been crossing the border into Cambodia since early April, when the ‘Administration' was saying no U.S. troops were in Cambodia.” Wilson also noted that lately the list of casualties “Killed as a Result of Hostile Action” and “Died not as a Result of Hostile Action” carried by the
Army Times
were of about equal length and that in the 4th Infantry Division “more people are being killed in accidents than by the enemy.”

Peg had Culpepper's and Wilson's letters copied and forwarded to Senators Fulbright and Hughes.

Peg was now so upset with the Army that her fury spilled over into her renewed correspondence with the Army Finance Center. Her letter was filled with outrage and sarcasm and, atypical of Peg but clear evidence of the state of mind she was now in, error after error in simple arithmetic:

W. J. Cochran, LTC, FC

Chief, Claims Division

U.S. Army Finance Center

Indianapolis, Ind. 46249

Dear Sir:

It has been fourteen days since I last wrote you and asked that you send me [a] complete statement of account concerning Michael's last pay in Vietnam.

To help you along on this great task, I have worked out in minute detail what you owe him:

His pay was $335.70 per month—and using 30 days per month as [a] schedule, I have come up with the figure of $11.19 per day.

Is it going to take an act of Congress to get this poor dead soldier's pay? I shudder how the bereaved have been taken over the past nine years on this one phase of military operation.

s/Mrs. Gene Mullen

Peg Mullen heard from the Army Finance Center on May 14 (the same day Mississippi state police fired shotguns, rifles, machine guns and armor-piercing shells into student groups and a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a black college, killing Philip L. Gibbs, twenty-one, and James Earl Green, eighteen, a high school student visiting the campus). The letter from the Army Finance Center contained a recomputation of Michael's basic pay rate and a recapitulation of their efforts to track down Michael's $60 July allotment, which had gone astray. A paragraph, near the end however, read as follows:

Your son accumulated 44 days leave from 4 September 1968 through 18 February 1970. A review of his military pay record shows he used 53 days leave, or an excess of 9 days leave. Members on excess leave are not entitled to pay and allowances; therefore, pay and allowances were collected for the period of 23–31 August 1969, the period of excess leave.

As was entirely normal and legitimate, Michael Mullen had taken twenty-one days' advance leave prior to his departure for Vietnam, which, when added to his previous Christmas and other leaves, came to a total of fifty-three days. At the time of his death Michael had served only long enough to have earned forty-four days' leave;
the Army, therefore, billed him for the nine days he had taken but had not lived long enough to earn back
.

Peg was so outraged she telephoned the Army Finance Center and asked to speak with Lieutenant Colonel Cochran himself. She was shifted to an aide whom she told: “You can goddamn well keep that final paycheck as payment for embalming Michael's body—evidently you
forgot
to bill us for that!” She informed the aide that they would never accept Michael's final paycheck until the Army returned to him “the nine days' pay, nine days' clothing allowance and nine days' food ration you withheld from him!”

Peg realized that the deduction from Michael's final paycheck reflected only a certain terrible bureaucratic logic. The point was not that Michael did not live long enough to earn back his advance leave but that he simply did not earn back his leave. It did not matter that the organization which was deducting his pay was the same organization which had killed him, thereby making it impossible for him to earn it back. The Mullens were faced with the implacable logic of computers, of standard operating procedures. This demonstration that her son's death meant no more to the Army which killed him than it did to the actual artillery shell, the flyswat which did it, was, as Peg so aptly explained to Gene that night, “the last obscenity, really!”

Would that it had been.

Two weeks earlier Peg had castigated Iowa Senator Jack Miller for letting ten weeks pass since Michael's death without any expression of sympathy. “You always find time to vote in the Senate in favor of those issues which condemned our sons to death in Vietnam,” Peg wrote, “how is it you are unable to find time to write these dead soldiers' grieving parents?”

The Senator's reply arrived one week after the Army Finance Center's letter deducting nine days from Michael's final pay:

UNITED STATES SENATE

COMMITTEE ON

AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY

Washington, D.C. 20510

May 18, 1970

Mrs. Gene Mullen

La Porte City, Iowa

Dear Mrs. Mullen:

Replying to your letter of May 5th, I naturally extend my deepest sympathy to you over the loss of your son. I have written a good many letters of sympathy—not only to people like you, but to parents and wives of our prisoners of war. Also, you should know that many Members of Congress have shared some tragedies and concerns of people like you. Our son-in-law flew over 120 combat missions in Vietnam, and fortunately returned.

It has been my observation that, with few exceptions, the persons bearing the real burden of this war—the men who have been doing the fighting, the wounded, their wives and parents—have been the least complaining of anyone over this tragic war.

I regret that you are one of the exceptions.

Very truly yours,

s/Jack Miller

*
The Mullens thought the eighteenth in Vietnam was the seventeenth in the United States.

Chapter Thirteen

Senator Jack Miller's letter reached Peg the day 150,000 blue-collar workers and hard hats carrying thousands of American flags marched in New York City in support of President Nixon. That morning's mail also contained Senator Fulbright's reply to Peg's request for the casualty list of the week Michael had died. The Senator had not yet been able to acquire that information, but he did enclose the Defense Department's response to his inquiry as to how “nonbattle” casualties as a result of artillery fire were arrived at. The communication read, in part:

One cannot assume that all such [U.S.] casualties to [friendly artillery fire] are included in the category of “U.S. Casualties Not the Result of Action by Hostile Forces.” If it is determined that such casualties occurred during an action with enemy forces, the casualty is placed in the category of “U.S. Casualties Killed as a Result of Action by Hostile Forces.”

This meant if, for example, American troops were surrounded and in danger of being overrun, and they called in artillery over their own position, those Americans killed by their defensive artillery barrage would be considered killed as a “result of Action by Hostile Forces,” or battle casualties. The same would hold true if American troops were advancing behind their own artillery screen and a round fell short, killing a few. Both these actions are more common than one would wish to believe; such casualties are, however, taken for granted as an ugly facet of war. At any rate, the major point was that just because a man was killed by his own artillery, he need not necessarily be considered a nonbattle casualty.

The letter from the office of the Department of Defense continued:

All Vietnam deaths, hostile and non-hostile, are reported on the daily casualty lists which are available to the press. Only when the next of kin specifically object to the publication of the name of the deceased is that name withheld. The casualty is also included in the weekly statistical summary of casualties.

Local newspapers would report only local casualties and would not generally distinguish between battle and nonbattle deaths. Major metropolitan newspapers might include the total casualty count and might list battle and nonbattle deaths as such. But the bulk of the nation did not read those casualty lists. They would instead depend on the evening television news to provide them with the information about the war. The television networks did not include the nonbattle casualty count during this period. There was no deliberate network policy of omission as such; it reflected simply the national attitude that the number of non-battle deaths was no real indication of the progress or lack of progress achieved in the war. Since the only means of “scoring” the war lay in the accumulation and comparison of body counts (if the evening news reported 750 Vietcong killed and 75 Americans, America was “winning” 10 to 1), it was to the military's advantage to keep the reported casualty figures as low as possible. North Vietnamese and Vietcong losses were inflated, American casualties disguised. Men who died in the hospitals as a result of wounds were likely to be listed as having died from postoperative complications; they were nonbattle casualties and not counted.

I am informed that each instance where Americans have been killed by friendly artillery fire is investigated. These are included in a category designated by the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) as “Misadventure,” and are not tabulated separately.

The Mullens were so outraged to discover that the Army, with cosmic inappropriateness and unseeming levity, referred to the manner in which their son had been killed as a “Misadventure” that they almost missed the information that an investigation had been performed. If they were able to read the results of that investigation, then they would know exactly how their son had died. The Defense Department neglected to point out, however, that such investigations are classified “For Official Use Only” and not available for public scrutiny. The Mullens now knew that their son had been killed, in military terminology, by “friendly fire” and was, therefore, a “nonbattle” casualty as a result of an artillery incident officially referred to as a “misadventure” in a war which was never declared.