Friendly Fire (45 page)

“I knew I wanted to talk to the Mullens,” Schwarzkopf said, “but I also knew I wanted a witness there. I didn't want to get off in a closed room someplace, talk with them, and then have them turn around and say, ‘He told us this or that.' I wanted somebody there to know what I said. I also wanted some advice on whether I'd be out of line talking to them at all. So I called up the JAG [Judge Advocate General, the legal branch of the Army] section at Walter Reed and asked them to send somebody down. I just wanted to ask a few questions about what I should do. Major Knap came down. We had just about decided that sure, I could talk to them, I could tell them anything they wanted to know when the Mullens walked in through the door. At that time I thought only Mr. Mullen was coming. I had no idea Mrs. Mullen was along. I think they were rather surprised by my condition, my cast. I reached out to shake hands with them, to introduce myself when they came up to my bed, and it was very apparent that Gene Mullen was very reluctant to even shake my hand. I was concerned because I wasn't sure what their emotional state was. I was lying in bed. There was a bed on my right, five beds on my left with guys in traction, and I wasn't sure if because of the Mullens' emotional state it was going to degenerate into them shouting and screaming at me or what. So I asked if they would like to go to a private room, and they said, ‘No, we'll talk to you right here.' In fact, Gene Mullen said, ‘We want to talk to you, and we want you to have a witness here to hear what is being said, too.'

“I said, ‘Fine, Major Knap is present.' I asked Knap to stay. I wanted to talk to them because, well, I felt I could help. Here was a family obviously very upset about their son's death, who obviously had some false information, false ideas about how and why their son had died. I felt if I could give them the circumstances of their son's death, tell them exactly what happened right down the line, if they could look me in the eye and see that I was telling them the truth, then they would feel they had finally gotten the straight story about the entire thing and that this would somehow set their minds at ease. That was
why
I wanted to talk to the Mullens. Now,
how
did I approach the interview? First of all,” Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf said leaning back in his chair again, “although I was shocked by Gene Mullen's opening comment about federal district court, I wasn't really concerned because I had nothing to hide and there was nothing I could be taken to court for. But more than that I felt here, coming to see me, is going to be a family whose son had been killed, was killed in an unfortunate incident in an unfortunate war, and they were obviously going to be upset. I felt what I had to do was tell them everything that happened. I didn't want to get into big arguments. I wanted to treat them with compassion, set their minds at ease. Frankly, my attitude toward them was conciliatory. I wanted to show them that their son's battalion commander wasn't a Nazi, wasn't an arch-right-wing military conservative. That I was a human being who felt like they felt, who had cared about their son. I wanted to make it very clear to them that nobody was more upset about Michael's death than I was. I was furious when it happened!” Schwarzkopf said. “Particularly since I'd had another friendly artillery incident from the same artillery battalion only a month before. I was so damned mad when the brigade commander landed with the artillery battalion commander at my position the following morning I couldn't even speak to the guy.”

“Was this the artillery battalion commander Colonel Kuprin?” I asked.

“Right.”

“Could you have told the Mullens, ‘I could have killed Colonel Kuprin'?”

“I may have,” Schwarzkopf admitted. “Like I said, I was furious! But don't get me wrong,” he quickly added. “It wasn't because I blamed Kuprin directly as the man responsible, but it was as if my unit had done something terrible, caused casualties in someone else's unit. The unit commander is responsible for everything his unit does or fails to do. I was tremendously emotionally upset about that whole incident, and as I told the Mullens, nobody was more upset than I was.”

“What was the Mullens' response to that?” I asked.

“The whole conversation had started off in a rather accusatory fashion,” Schwarzkopf replied. “Questions like: ‘Why did you do this?' ‘Why did you do that?' ‘Why did you cover up the circumstances of my son's death in your investigation?' I proceeded to explain that, first,” he said, tapping his cast, “I did not, in fact, conduct the investigation. Any time there is a friendly artillery incident, the friendly artillery investigates it. And second, it's all disinterested parties who are involved in the investigation. Therefore, I had nothing to do with the investigation whatsoever! Still, when I tried to explain how upset I was by Michael's death, Mrs. Mullen then asked me, ‘Well, when you flew out in your little helicopter, wasn't your first statement, “Gee, it looks like the Vietcong did this!”?' I explained again I didn't conduct the investigation, that the artillery investigators were, in fact, the ones who flew in in the small helicopter. What happened was this: Colonel Clemens, the brigade commander, picked me up in his big helicopter as soon as he could get to my position. Kuprin was with him at the time. We next flew to Charlie Company's position—that would have been at about eight in the morning. Charlie Company had had to cut a landing zone large enough for our big helicopter to come in. We then flew back out prior to the artillery investigators' arrival.” Schwarzkopf paused. “As I was explaining all this to the Mullens, the more we talked, the more I recalled the circumstances of the entire thing. I remembered then that someone later in Charlie Company had said that in fact, one of the artillery investigators had gotten out of the small helicopter and his first reaction was that it hadn't been done by American artillery at all, but by the VC. The point is, however, the lieutenant colonel Mrs. Mullen was referring to, the one who flew in the small helicopter, wasn't me at all. It was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the investigation. He had been assigned by the division.”

“About what time do you think they arrived?”

“About ten in the morning would be my rough guess.”

I asked Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf how far he had been from Charlie Company when the shell hit. About two or three kilometers, he said. Why then if the artillery round had killed the two men and wounded six others at nearly three in the morning, had he then not been able to come to Charlie Company until five hours later?

“I couldn't,” he said. “No helicopters were available. Generally I never had a helicopter at night. No one had a helicopter at night. No battalion commander, no brigade commander, no anyone—Med-evac got to them. Med-evac will fly in all weather conditions any time, any place, anywhere, under any circumstances. But that night the med-evac pilot had a tremendously difficult time even finding them. There was a thick fog, Charlie Company was down in the valley firing all sorts of flares and everything else.” He took a sheet of yellow paper. “You had huge mountains on one side, very high mountains on the other”—Schwarzkopf drew two ellipses—“it was almost a river valley. A very narrow one.” He penciled in a thin line meandering between the two ellipses. “But seated on the left, on the south side of the river, was another piece of high ground that rose in the middle of the valley. Charlie Company was on the top of that.” He put an X on top of the small hill. “I was sitting on the mountain over here. It was Hill Four Ten.”

“And that was where the artillery had been placed?”

“That's right,” he said. “But let me explain this because it's one of the ironies of these things happening.”

The maximum range of a 105mm artillery piece, the colonel told me, was approximately 12,500 meters. The artillery which would normally have supported Charlie Company was located at “Fat City” (the division artillery base camp over Chu Lai), and for this operation the guns would have been firing at their extreme range. The greater the range, the less accurate the artillery. Schwarzkopf, wanting to ensure that Charlie Company would be covered adequately, asked that the supporting artillery be moved forward. Colonel Joseph Clemons, the brigade commander, approved Schwarzkopf's request, and ordered Colonel Valentin Kuprin, the artillery battalion commander, to displace a battery (minus) of 105mm howitzers to a position from which Charlie Company's operation would be well within range. Kuprin had the responsibility to select that spot from which the artillery would be fired, and he chose to place the guns on Hill 410.

“Frankly, I would have picked Hill Four Ten too,” Schwarzkopf said. “Hill Four Ten was the only location that far out where the guns could have been placed. There was another hill, Hill Seven Oh Seven but we're talking in meters now, and that would have placed the guns over twenty-three hundred feet high.”

Was it essential the guns be placed in a position from which they would have to fire over Charlie Company's heads?

Nobody at that time could have predicted the artillery either would or would not have had to fire over Charlie Company's position, the colonel explained. If Charlie Company had set up on the north slope of the hill or on the southern side, rather than the crest, it would not have happened. But where the company commander establishes his night defensive perimeter is totally that commander's responsibility and prerogative. “In any case,” Schwarzkopf added, “it's even more significant that Hill Four Ten had been used many, many times in the past for similar operations, and there had never been any incident whatsoever or any unsafeness involved. Therefore, I think it was not only the logical choice to put the artillery there, but the
only
choice.”

Why, if the defensive targets had been called in earlier and if the artillery had announced its intention to commence firing Charlie Company's DTs at about eight that evening, had they then not fired but instead rescheduled the DTs for almost three the following morning?

“All artillery firing is done on priorities,” he said. “Obviously a contact mission takes first priority. Say an infantry company over here is calling for DTs and the artillery unit is firing them when suddenly another unit over there is involved in a big fire fight. The priority of all the artillery units is going to shift to that unit that's under fire, in contact with the enemy. Here's how this thing works.…”

Schwarzkopf explained how a company commander, upon moving into a defensive position, attempts to determine the most likely routes an enemy might use to attack him. He and his artillery forward observer select targets that would place artillery fire upon those most likely spots. Each unit might select as many as twenty DTs, and with any given number of units requesting DTs and other units engaged in fire fights which took priority, a unit's DTs would not be fired until firing time was available. “Sometimes,” he said, “this is very late. In Charlie Company's case it was very, very late. The night Michael Mullen was killed the artillery firing was interrupted and not resumed until five hours later.”

Why did the round that killed Michael fall short?

“This is.… It was.…” Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf shook his head. “It was fate. As I said, Charlie Company was sitting on a ridge between two mountains in what amounted to a valley. The artillery was to their north side on top of a hill and the defensive target the guns at this particular time were firing was a DT to the south side of the ridge Charlie Company was sitting on. The artillery fired the first round—the white phosphorous (WP), marking round that is supposed to burst fifty meters above the spot you want the high explosive (HE) round to hit. The WP round did, in fact, burst fifty meters above that spot. Then, naturally, to make the HE round land in the right spot, you would have to depress the tube of the gun to make the round land lower. The calculations of what data to be placed on the gun to lower the tube to account for this fifty meters of airspace are all done back at the fire direction center [FDC]. The FDC is supposed to take into account the mask clearance of the hill along the line of fire and the tree heights on top of the land. In other words, you've got to make sure you're not only going to clear the ground but where the trees stick up from the ground, too. Well, evidently”—the colonel paused—“in this case, this was not done. When the next HE round was fired, as it passed over the ridge to land on the other side, it hit a tree quite a ways up. A tree right over Charlie Company's position.…” Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf let his breath out slowly. “Michael's death was a terrible, terrible tragedy. A tragedy typical of a profane thing called war—maybe ‘typical' isn't the word—it isn't a daily occurrence. It's a unique thing that happens on a very occasional basis. But it happens! I'm not an expert on artillery procedures; this is why I referred the Mullens to Colonel Kuprin. I know the results of the investigation, but I don't know all the nomenclature, the details involved. Still, what I wanted to try to tell the Mullens was that I … feel that.…” Schwarzkopf paused again and rubbed his brow, “I don't know how to express this, but try to think of it this way: Michael was killed due to an error. It was a tragedy that Michael was killed. But I don't think it was an error of … of deliberate negligence. The error was made because of the unique set of circumstances sur rounding this particular mission. All right, yes, it was an error committed by some individual and,” he hastened to add, “I don't know the name of that individual. But I don't believe it's the kind of situation where whoever made the error can be pulled in and sent to jail for it or anything like that. I know one officer in the FDC was given a letter of reprimand, but what the guns had had set on them was what the FDC had sent. The location of where the DT was to hit was, in fact, the target location sent from the field. It was just this weird, tragic set of circumstances of the guns being located just exactly where they were, the line of flight being what it was, the fact that the DTs were bursting on the south side of the ridge and had to pass directly over Charlie Company's position.…” His voice trailed off.