Friendly Fire (40 page)

We turned off Route 218 and onto John Dobshire's dirt road. Our headlights swept too high to illuminate the drainage ditches on either side. The road, silvered by the frost, lay isolated by the darkness and seemingly floated above the land. As Peg pulled into the farm and parked, she asked, “Do you really have to go back tomorrow?”

“I think I'd better,” I said.

“You'll come by in the morning, won't you? Have breakfast with us at least?”

“I'd like to very much.”

We got out of the car, and I caught up with Peg, who was standing by the path leading to the kitchen door. She brushed a hand across the top of one of the little evergreens Michael had planted his last day on the farm. “Was I awful?” she asked. “Did I talk too much? Go on too long?” She did not wait for me to answer. “I always do,” she said. “I never seem to know when to stop.”

“Peg, you were fine.”

“Do you think they listened?”

“Of course they listened.”

“But do you think they cared?”

Friday morning, April 16, Gene and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, and he said, “People ask us have we done anything? What have we accomplished?… Well, I think we've helped break through to the Silent Majority on Vietnam.” He leaned back in his chair so that its front legs were off the ground. “When I went to work after Michael's funeral up to Deere's, the men would look at me and it was still, ‘We've got to have this war, Oscar. We've got to do it!' But in the last four, five months the attitude has changed. Now they come up to me and tell me, ‘Oscar, we're
wrong!
' They say, ‘We've got to get out of there. How can we get out?'

“I tell them, ‘Write a letter,'” Gene continued. “They say, ‘They won't listen to my letter.'

“I tell them, ‘Write a thousand of them! Two, three,
four
thousand letters,'” Gene said. “But the attitude is changing here in Iowa. I had one hard-core Republican, one of those loyal to the party, tell me just two weeks ago, the day after the President's decision to release Calley from the stockade, he said, ‘Oscar, I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed that I voted for that man in the White House. What's wrong with my country?'”

Gene smiled. “I said, ‘Warren, what's wrong with my country and your country is you allowed it to happen.'”

“It's what's wrong with us all,” Peg added.

“I told Warren, ‘You allowed it to happen so long as it didn't affect your boy. You were hoping and praying this war would get over with, but,' I said, ‘it isn't going to be over with. This Nixon was a bug about Communism. He figures himself a second General Patton. A hero. But,' I said, ‘you look at his past record. Even in 1954 he wanted to send U.S. troops to fight in Vietnam.
*
Eisenhower had to shut him up.'”

“It's the same all over the country,” Peg said. “If you don't have a son in Vietnam—well, you've seen for yourself how they react around here.”

“People keep telling us, ‘You're going to destroy yourselves,'” Gene said. “They say—”

“I don't care,” Peg said.

“They say over and over again, ‘You must stop. You're going to destroy yourselves!' But we don't think so.”

“I don't care!” Peg repeated.

“Do you think the past year has changed you?” I asked.

Gene shrugged and looked over at Peg.

“Yes,” Peg replied, “Yes, Gene, you've changed. I haven't. I don't think I've changed.”

Gene pushed himself away from the table and walked into the living room. He returned with a framed photograph of Michael. Wedged in the bottom, between the wooden frame and the glass, was a poem from one of the consolation cards sent them after Michael's death. “When I think of my boy,” Gene said, “I say that poem about him being happy in heaven fifteen, twenty times a day.”

Peg sighed. “Gene gets consolation from the fact that he thinks Michael is in heaven. I don't.…” Peg paused for a moment. “See, Gene has accepted Michael's death. I haven't.” She began pushing some of the letters back and forth across the kitchen table. “I don't know if I ever will.”

No one spoke. Peg remained with her head lowered. Gene was rubbing his chin, looking down at the photograph of Michael, which lay flat on the table before him. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly and turned to me. “I know you have to be leaving us soon,” he said, “but I'd like to ask one favor of you before you go. I'd like you to drive over to the cemetery again to see Mikey with me. Will you do that?”

“Of course,” I said. I looked over at Peg.

She shook her head. “I've got some letters to write.”

Gene and I left the house together, and he paused by his car. “See that tractor in the shed there, the old red Farmall?” he asked me. “Mike was so small when he was six years old that when he used to go down after the cattle, down that eighty acres back there that my great-grandfather acquired from those two German Walker boys, I'd put Mikey on the tractor, start him out on the road, put the tractor in low gear. He used to have to stand up. He could not sit in the seat and steer. So he'd stand up, and I'd say, ‘Now, Mikey, if anything happens, take your knee and push in that button there and that'll stop the tractor immediately.' See, it'd stall out in low gear. Well, at six years of age,” Gene continued, “he used to go down to the pasture and bring the cattle back up here for milking time and—oh! I had some shorthorns. Great, big cows. Well, they'd be up here in the cattle yard all winter, and they'd know that day in the spring of the year when they were supposed to go down to the blue grass pasture. I had an old, big white cow who was the lead cow.… We used to take them down the road there, and the cattle had to make a right turn to get to the pasture. Well, Mikey would have to run ahead to get them to turn, and the cows would always run faster than him and scatter all over. So we bought him an English racing bike for Christmas, and all winter he was planning. ‘Boy, I'm going to beat those cows down to the corner! Well”—Gene smiled—“the day we put the cattle down to the pasture, we got them out onto the road, and Mike gets on his bicycle and tries to beat that old lead cow—he tried, but the cow was still faster than he was on that English racing bike!” Gene lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “I'll never forget it.” He laughed, replacing his cap. “Never forget it!”

He was looking down the road at where the cows would have to be turned to reach the pasture, but he was seeing a small dark-haired six-year-old boy, hunched over a racing bike, elbows akimbo, knees pumping crazily, trying to beat an old white lead cow to the corner.

Walking up the slight hill to Michael's grave, Gene said, “I've been thinking about what you asked, had we changed? And Peg said I had. Well, she's right. I'm a very changed man. I'm not afraid to die. I go on and don't worry about the crops getting in. It seems like someone is watching over us all the time.…” He glanced at me quickly. “Maybe I sound foolish to think that?”

Gene prayed silently, then crossed himself at the foot of Michael's grave. “He was so loved by his brother and sisters, so
loved!
” Gene stooped over and picked up a piece of scrap paper that had blown onto Michael's grave. “I'll never forget that forlorn look on his face at the airport when he told us not to stick around.” He crumpled the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “Peg used to put him out in the sandbox behind the house where he played for hours and hours. ‘Hoggy house,' he used to say. ‘Maduder.' He couldn't say ‘manure.' Because I was working, I watched him grow up as if from far away, but I was so proud of him!” Gene paused, determined not to cry. “I just opened the fields to him, you know? I was so very proud of my son.…”

He looked up from the grave to the rolling hills that stretched to the distant horizon. “I could justify Mike's death if he had died of an illness. I could justify it if he had died in an accident. I can't justify the way he was killed—I didn't say ‘died,' I said
‘killed.'
You can see what it says on the headstone.… That's what we put there because we can't justify the death of any boy in Vietnam.”

We stood by Michael's grave in silence; then Gene placed his hand upon my shoulder. “I thank you for coming.” His hand fell away, and we both turned toward the car.

On the drive back to the farm Gene said, “You've spent some time with us now. You've gotten to know Peg. She's a very forceful, righteous person. She's critical not because she sees evil, but because she wants to see goodness.… She has so much compassion for people. Everybody calls her Peg. Everybody. Little kids. Older people. She got mail delivered simply addressed ‘Peg. La Porte City.' Even some came ‘Concerned Parent, La Porte City.' You've seen what she does all day long,” he continued. “Answering those letters. You saw how many phone calls we get a day and the sort of people they come from. Good, decent people. Peg has to do this.
She has to fight this war!
Oh! Over there,” Gene said, pointing through the windshield at the field to our right, “that's where my grandfather, Patrick J. Mullen, had his barn with all the horses. Each boy had eight working horses and his own driving team. Can you imagine the names they gave them?” He smiled. “It's all gone now.” We drove on in silence for a few minutes, then turned onto the dirt road past Hubbard Frost's old place with the huge boulder in the field, turned again onto John Dobshire's dirt road and into the Mullens' farm.

“The only time Peg has trouble with her grief is when she sees things that Mike did, like that basketball backstop behind the house.” Gene switched off the engine and sat gripping the steering wheel, looking through the windshield at the backstop. “He was about fourteen when he put it up,” Gene told me. “I said, ‘Mikey, the wind'll blow it down. It'll never stand.' I wasn't trying to ridicule him. I was only trying to save him from failure. But he wasn't going to fail. He was going to put it up there. He was
determined
. And look at it. It's staying up there still.…” He turned to me. “You know, people think we're crazy. That we couldn't have had a boy like Michael, like we say he was. But we did. God gave me a boy like that and … and.…” His grip tightened on the wheel, and he looked away from me. “I don't know why! That's what hurts.… It hurts so much!”

Gene's hands dropped from the steering wheel. He removed the key from the ignition and opened his door. “I wish you'd known him,” he said.

The instant we entered the house Peg handed me a letter. “Here, read this,” she said. “I just finished it.”

The letter was addressed to the Director of the Internal Revenue Service, Des Moines, Iowa, and contained a check for the balance due on the Mullens' 1970 federal income tax:

I pay this tax under protest, and with a sickened heart. I do not like the heavy hand of the law forcing me to buy materials to rain more death and destruction on friend and foe alike. I find it almost impossible to live with the thought that my money paid the tax that bought the artillery shell that killed our son in Vietnam.

If it were my choice alone, whether or not to pay this tax, I would not pay it, and gladly go to jail to dramatize my point.… But I have a family … a husband who would in all probability lose his job … and children who would be forced to leave college.

I am sure that the “computer” who handles income tax monies is very grateful that it cannot think.

Sincerely,

s/Mrs. O. E. Mullen

“I'm sending a carbon to Nixon and Senator Hughes,” Peg said. “But you don't think anybody'll read it, do you?”

“Senator Hughes will,” Gene said.

“Peg, once you get in touch with Private Polk at Leavenworth and the others,” I said, “what do you plan to do with the information they give you? What's next?”

“We're waiting for one letter, to find one man,” Gene answered. “Lieutenant Rocamora.”

“We don't believe Rocamora called in the round that killed Michael,” Peg said. “We want Rocamora to tell us he didn't call it in. Mike's death was investigated the following day, as we've said. But we've never been sent the results of that investigation, even though they promised us they would. Several of the boys we've been in touch with indicated that either the officer and the men on the gun were drunk—”

“Or they think it was an old gun,” Gene said. “Or that someone else called in the target coordinates wrong.”

“Those three things,” Peg said. “That's right. But, see, there's nothing we can prove.…” Her voice trailed off.

“But assuming you found out the worst,” I said, “that the artillery forward observer was drunk or that the battery commander and his men back at the guns were drunk and had been firing off shells as a lark and one of them exploded and killed Michael. What are you going to do then?”

Without a moment's hesitation Peg replied, “We're going to demand about five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Michael was in the citizens' army,” Gene said.

“His potential, even with just the degree he had at the time he went to Vietnam, was from thirty to forty thousand dollars a year in his field. We don't want the money for ourselves,” Peg said. “But we think they destroyed somebody with a terrific future for no reason.”

“We know
something
happened there that night,” Gene said, “and we know they're trying to cover it up.”

“The fact that it was never a news item,” Peg said. “We feel that with the one platoon being practically wiped out, the two men killed and seven wounded, that alone would have been a news release.”

“If Mike had died on the streets of La Porte City,” Gene said, “if some drunk had run over him, that would have been manslaughter, and there would have been a trial. Well, we're just tired of the military excusing themselves. That's what they've done in thousands of deaths in Vietnam.”