Friendly Fire (39 page)

It was not the first time that day the Mullens halted in midsentence when I had had to change tapes. It bothered me initially that they could seemingly “turn on and off” at will, but I simply did not recognize the obvious: the Mullens stopped because the tape stopped. There was nothing studied or playacting about it. They stopped because the recorder, like the pens and yellow legal pads with which I wrote, were instruments of record, a means of capturing, preserving and disseminating everything that had happened to them. With the exception of the Another Mother for Peace film crew, no one had shown any interest in them for a long, long time. Therefore, each hour spent, each page covered, each cassette filled encouraged them, comforted them in their need to believe that the anguish they had been through might somehow prove to have been worthwhile.

“It involves our whole school system from the kindergarten on up,” Peg continued when the tape resumed. “Iowa is a very patriotic state. People here took great pride in being a member of the Silent Majority. That is why we decided to run that first advertisement. We were driven by the fact that we had to speak out in some way. We had to rouse the people, waken them, warn them that since it happened to us, it could happen to them.”

“There've been a hunnert and twelve killed since we ran—no, wait,” Gene said.

“Hundred and eighteen,” Peg corrected him. “Eighteen since the first of this year and a hundred during the year before.”

“It's so hard to talk to people,” Gene said, shaking his head.

“They don't want to talk to us. They don't. They know the war is wrong, and now a hunnert and eighteen more are dead. Well, what do you do!… All these parents.… What do you say when a man tells you your boy is
dead?
”

Peg had been invited to address an Another Mother for Peace meeting my last evening with the Mullens. We arrived at the basement of the Catholic Student Center near the campus of the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls just after eight o'clock. Card tables had been set up against one orange-brown cinder-block wall to display Another Mother for Peace literature, posters, sample cards and letters to be sent Congress in support of holding public hearings into the granting of offshore oil leases throughout Indochina and those proposed specifically off the coast of Vietnam.

Approximately fifty persons were present; although a few men and children stood about, the vast majority were women in slacks and pantsuits. The younger women wore their hair long, natural, the middle-aged women had spray-set bouffants, and the older women simple, almost boyish haircuts. Many of them greeted Peg by name and spoke with her briefly before drifting away.

The chairwoman called the meeting to order, and everyone moved to the folding chairs set up for the showing of Bess Myerson's
You Don't Have to Buy War, Mrs. Smith
, an Another Mother for Peace film.

The film urged women to boycott those companies which also manufactured war goods: Alcoa, for example, built rocket tubes; General Electric made the multiple individually targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV); Bulova, metal parts for high explosive shell fuses; Honeywell, antipersonnel mines; and so forth. The film proposed that Dow, for example, should cease manufacturing napalm and create, instead, a nonpolluting detergent. Over and over again the point emphasized was: “Whirlpool, get out of the beehive projectile business and build us a washing machine that doesn't self-destruct and we'll buy it. General Motors, instead of building electronic assemblies for torpedoes, build us an automobile that doesn't pollute and we'll buy it.”

Following the film there were announcements on the need to send those postcards off to Congress, and then a young man in a black and yellow striped T-shirt and blue jeans, stepped barefoot up to the center of the room and discussed the upcoming April 24 antiwar march in Washington. “What we need from you,” he explained, “is food, moral support and forty dollars for bus fare.”

I leaned over and asked Peg if she planned to attend. She shook her head no.

Next an earnest young mother proposed planting a tree for peace on Memorial Day. “Some living symbol,” she said, “which we can dedicate to ourselves, our children and peace.…”

She was succeeded by the chairwoman, who introduced Peg: “If you don't know her personally, I'm sure you've heard of her.” The chairwoman mentioned the Another Mother for Peace film crew's visit to the Mullen farm and then, turning to Peg, said, “Peg's lost her voice, but can you muster enough to tell us about the film being made?”

Peg was suffering from a mild case of laryngitis caused as much by five days of constant conversation as the onset of a cold.

Peg walked up to the podium. “Nothing has ever stopped me from talking yet,” she said hoarsely. She spoke briefly about the film, how the film crew had stayed four days at the farm and seemed pleased with the footage they had shot. “I'm not going to look much like Bess Myerson.” She laughed. “In fact, I had to fight with them to let me comb my hair.” She then told of the mother and father she had recently heard about whose son was in Vietnam. After learning that the mother had voted for Nixon in the 1968 presidential election, the father had said, “I hope I won't ever have to say, ‘I told you so.'” At that exact moment their doorbell rang. It was the survivors' assistance officer, come to tell them that their son was dead.

Peg reported having been invited by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to march with them in Washington and that “the Boston people have something called S.O.S., meaning Save Our Sons. The plan,” Peg explained, “is for everyone to send Nixon a photograph of your son whether he's eighteen months or eighteen years with the message that you're not going to let him go to war.” She spoke about that plan for a while and of her own letter-writing campaign shortly after Michael had died, how they had hoped to accumulate 100,000 carbons of letters protesting the war. She told how she had been able to get Larry Phelps out of Vietnam. The audience was beginning to stir. One could hear pocket-books opening and snapping shut, papers rustling.

“… and from September on, Phelps neither gave nor obeyed an order,” Peg was saying. “He had been sent to the First Cav Division, and there were then only sixty men left who would even shoulder or fire a gun. Those sixty, he told me, were just mercenaries. They'd kill anybody. But Senator Goodell
*
when he spoke here last Sunday, he said, ‘If you save one life, you've accomplished something.' And I thought to myself, ‘Well, gee, I have!' All that I've done, all the enemies, friends I have made were worth getting that one boy, Larry Phelps, out of Vietnam.”

Peg's voice became stronger. “We've searched since last summer for a boy named Polk who was with our son,” she said. “He was asleep next to Michael when Michael and the boy on the other side were killed. Polk woke up and went berserk.…” Peg talked on and on about Polk, and the woman to my right took a long and sour look at her wristwatch. It was after ten o'clock; Peg had been speaking for half an hour.

Peg turned her attention to the percentage of Congressmen's sons drafted. When Peg started on Senator Hughes' position on the draft, a man stood up and walked to the back of the room for his coat. By the time she covered Senator Goodell's comments about all the young men in prison because of court-martials and how all aid was cut off to their families, there was a low hum of voices in the room.

“Oh, and another thing,” Peg said, “This could go on. This is somewhat of an obsession with me.” Peg began talking about the deduction from Michael's final paycheck, and the woman on my right groaned and stood up. She reached behind her folding chair for her purse and coat and walked out. “I threatened them with a congressional investigation,” Peg was saying. “They deducted nine days' pay, nine days' rations, nine days' leave.…”

More people were standing. A man began winding up the motion-picture projector cord.

“We had requested an audit, see,” Peg continued, “and when they sent it to us, well, it was the first time in my whole life I lost control.”

A man in front of me stood and tapped the woman next to him. She rose also.

“Well, I never have a good ending,” Peg said ruefully. “I never know when to stop.…” She stepped away from the podium to a smattering of polite applause. The people with their coats on in the back of the room clapped without interrupting their conversations. The chairwoman stepped forward and thanked Peg. Suddenly there was a stir in the back by the door, and a group swirled into the room talking excitedly. Someone hurried up to the podium and whispered to the chairwoman who then rapped for attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please,” she said, “we have some very thrilling news. Eqbal Ahmad, who was addressing the college tonight and who is one of the Harrisburg Six on trial with the Berrigan brothers,
*
is coming here in a few moments and has consented to say a few words to us!”

Peg watched the people in the back of the room removing their overcoats and moved back against a wall, utterly alone.

Moments later Eqbal Ahmad bounced in like a puppy full of enthusiasm and joy. He declined to use the podium and spoke instead from the center of the room where the motion-picture projector had been set up. In a soft, melodic voice he laughingly told of his mother's concern that her forty-year old Hindu son had been placed on trial with “two ungodlies.”

“‘Mama,' I said, ‘you know that in every human being there is something good and something evil,'” Ahmad was saying. “‘It is the difference between the saints and the devils. But this fellow, Nixon, Mama,' I said, ‘he is trying to bring out the worst in the country.'” Ahmad remarked upon the paranoia of contemporary American politics and how no conspiracy could be complete without “foreign agitators.”

“But our writings and our actions speak for themselves,” Ahmad said. “We have denied the substance of the charges against us. In principle and in fact we abhor violence and the kind of acts of which we are accused. We are challenging the government outside the court and inside the court to prove one instance where we have lied to the American people. None of us has ever told a lie or betrayed the government. And we are challenging the United States government to prove one instance in which the Presidents of the United States between 1965 and now have told a single instance of truth to the American people about our involvement in Vietnam. We have challenged the government. And in return, these criminals of war have challenged we men of peace.”

Someone asked what could be done to aid the Berrigans.

“The best way to help them,” Ahmad replied, “is to work more to get this war to stop. If only fifty thousand show up in Washington next week, Nixon will see it as a victory. Go to Washington,” Ahmad urged. “Go to Washington and work very hard for the people's peace treaty.”

As the crowd shifted around Eqbal Ahmad, I caught sight of Peg Mullen again. She was still alone, seated on an aisle folding chair and looked tired, sad.

Ahmad was urging public hearings into the FBI and compared the imprisonment of Angela Davis to that of Lieutenant Calley.
*
Calley was free in his quarters at Fort Benning. “There is an imbalance here,” Ahmad was saying. “The crimes Calley committed were crimes against humanity, crimes committed in pursuit of obeying orders given him by his President, the Cabinet and presidential advisers. And yet,” Ahmad said quietly, “it was Calley who was made the scapegoat.… Aren't you shocked the American people are now trying to make a hero out of him? Why do you suppose they are doing this? Why are these Americans protesting Calley's sentence?” Ahmad cocked his head to one side and smiled. “Because they sense that Calley's trial is their trial as well. They are crying to the President, ‘Get us off the hook, too!'”

Ahmad mentioned where he would be speaking next, thanked everyone for listening and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of well-wishers. Peg stood up, took one step toward Ahmad, hesitated, then remained forlorn and forgotten by her chair.

I walked over, and immediately she asked if I was ready to return to La Porte.

“Whenever you are,” I said.

She looked over at Eqbal Ahmad, the center of attention. “Why don't we leave now?”

A few of Peg's friends stopped by as she put on her coat. The woman thanked Peg for her talk, and Peg replied she felt she had spoken too long. The chairwoman smiled, patted Peg's arm and told her to go home and rest her voice.

We spoke little during the drive back to the farm. Peg was obviously tired. I was thinking over what she had said. Throughout her telling of how Michael had died, what had happened to her family, her role in getting Larry Phelps out of Vietnam, the court-martial of Private Willard Polk, I had recognized instances in which her version of the events had differed from what she had initially told me, instances that night at Cedar Falls where the truth had been slightly embroidered. I wondered why she had felt this necessary. The truth was offensive enough. I came to understand that the truth was no longer adequately outrageous to Peg.

She had lived with the truth for more than a year. Now a darker conspiracy had to be hinted at; the Army's behavior had to seem more callous; the government's indifference more deliberate, the survivors' assistance officers more inept. By so doing, Peg could refuel her anger, sustain that high level of outrage necessary to battle those forces responsible for taking away from her forever her firstborn child. It was the only way she could cope with the awful grief she felt. The one time during those five days I spent with the Mullens that Peg ever cried was when she spoke of having reared Michael to accept unquestioningly the authority of the United States government. By magnifying the military's guilt, she could minimize this, the source of her own. She and Gene had let their son be drafted. As a result, Peg's was the sort of grief which transcends tears; it was an arid, furied Medean grief, one in which anguish is indistinguishable from rage. And, to a lesser extent, I believe it was clear by this time even to Peg that the longer she could remain angry and actively fight the war, the longer she could prolong the illusion that she was helping Michael, she might postpone that crushing moment when she would be forced to admit that there was nothing, nothing whatsoever, she could do for Michael Mullen anymore. Michael was dead.