Friendly Fire (8 page)

John had registered for the draft only five days before.

“What happened to Michael?” he asked.

“This sergeant is telling us,” Peg said.

“But is he …? Is Michael …?”

“Yes, son,” Gene said. “Mikey's gone.”

“And now,” Peg said, whirling on the sergeant, “we want to know how, and we want to know why!”

“You said you heard about Bien Hoa.…”

“Bien Hoa?”
Peg said. “You don't know very much! Michael wasn't anywhere near Bien Hoa. My son was three, four hundred miles from there!”

“Good God,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said, “it must have happened all over Vietnam that night.” He sat down at the kitchen table. “You understand, how it could have happened,” he said. “The Vietcong infiltrated these South Vietnamese artillery units, got onto their radio channels and called in the wrong artillery coordinates so that when the ARVN artillery fired, they hit Americans.” Sergeant Fitzgerald apologized for not having any more information than was contained in the official casualty message and added he did not want to say positively that this was what had happened to Michael, but the Vietcong had infiltrated ARVN radio channels in the past, and this is what might have happened to their son's unit.

Sergeant Fitzgerald next explained that the Mullens had the right to request a special escort to accompany Michael's body back from Vietnam. If they had some special friend of Michael's in mind, someone whom they would like to have return with Michael's remains, they should let him know.

“Well, it's so soon, so sudden …” Peg said. “Michael had so many friends, I really don't know.…”

“There's no need to decide now,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said, “Either myself or another survivors' assistance officer will call you tomorrow. Now,” the sergeant said, “What funeral home do you want your son's body delivered to?”

Peg and Gene looked at each other speechlessly.

“Well, we don't know,” Peg said.… “We really don't know yet.”

“How long will it be before Michael … Michael's body returns?” Gene asked.

“Just as soon as they have a plane full,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said.

Peg said, “I know it won't be long then.”

“One more thing, Sergeant,” Gene asked. “When will Michael's death be announced on the news?”

“After I notify Fort Leonard Wood that I've seen you, they'll release it. That should be about two hours from now.”

“Two hours!” Peg protested. “You can't! You've got to give us time to tell our other children. Our daughters are away at college, and we can't let them hear about it on the radio. You've got to tell them to hold back the news.”

“Can't you call them?” Sergeant Fitzgerald asked. “You'll have at least two hours.”

“They'll be in classes,” Peg said. “I won't be able to reach them until tonight. Can't you wait?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Mullen, I'm only a sergeant. I can't tell the Army what to do.”

“I can!” Peg said angrily. “I'm not afraid of the Army or the Pentagon. If you won't do anything about it, then I'll … I'll call Senator Hughes in Washington. He'll help.”

“Look, Mrs. Mullen,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said, “you don't have to do that. I'll tell Fifth Army you want them to wait. They won't release the news until you give them the go-ahead.”

“Gene, I can't just tell Mary and Patricia over the phone. They'd.…” She shook her head helplessly.

“What about your sister?” Gene asked.

“Louise?” Peg thought for a moment. “She could maybe drive to Kansas City and pick up Mary.…”

“If there's nothing else …” Sergeant Fitzgerald said. He was standing by the door, ready to leave.

“I'll walk you out,” Gene said.

“That's not necessary,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said. “Oh, and, Father Shimon? You'll stay a little longer, won't you?”

“Of course, Sergeant, of course,” the priest said.

Peg looked at Father Shimon and shrugged. Back in November, after a Sunday service, she had stopped on the way out of church to ask Father Shimon to say some special prayers for Michael. “You've got to pray for him, Father,” she had said. “He hasn't got a chance!”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Shimon replied, taking Peg by the arm to move her out of the path of his other parishioners. “I do pray for him, I'm praying for him every day. We pray for all our servicemen.”

Peg telephoned her friend in La Porte to tell her that Michael was dead and to ask if she would be good enough to drive the seventy-five miles to Iowa City to inform Patricia, who was a senior at the University of Iowa there. Peg next called her sister, Louise Petersen, and asked her to pick up Mary, who was a freshman at Rockhurst College, Michael's alma mater, in Kansas City. Then she telephoned her brothers, Bill Goodyear in Omaha and Howard Goodyear in Pittsburgh. She did not cry. She kept the calls short; she remained strong and in control of herself. She informed them only of what she knew so far, that Michael had been killed by South Vietnamese artillery. Her brothers told her they would arrive at the farm as soon as possible. When she finished, she saw that Sergeant Fitzgerald had left and Gene was waiting to use the phone.

Gene telephoned the local newspapers and television stations and gave them what little details he knew and begged them not to release the news until they had been able to inform their daughters. While Gene was doing that, Peg began drawing up a list of those persons they would need to contact.

“Now, Peg,” Father Shimon said, joining Peg at the table, “ah-h, I didn't know Michael very well and I'm sure you'll want, ah-h, someone else to say the mass.…”

“Well, yes,” Peg said. “As a matter of fact, we'll want Father Hemesath to say the mass.” Father Gregory Hemesath of New Haven, a small town in Mitchell County, northern Iowa, was an old friend of the Mullens'.

“That's just fine,” Father Shimon said. “You write down whoever you want and I'll ask them. I'll bow out and won't have any part in the, ah-h, funeral mass.”

“We'll want music, too,” Gene said, pausing in mid-phone call. “Michael always liked good music.”

“Whenever we went to Kansas City,” Peg said, “if there was any good music being played, Michael would take us to hear it.”

“As you know,” Father Shimon said, licking his lips, “our church doesn't have an organ.…”

“So it'll be Sister Richard and the Don Bosco High School Chorus,” Peg said.

“Oh, all right,” Father Shimon said, “that's fine. That's just fine.”

“And I'd like Father Hirsch to say a few words,” Peg said. Father Robert Hirsch was the principal of the Don Bosco High School in Gilbertville where all the Mullen children had gone. “And I want a White Funeral.…”

“I can't, Peg,” the priest said, shaking his head. “I can't have one.”

“Why not?”

“Because when the permission order came to change the service, each parish had to request the permission from the archdiocese.…” In the Black Funeral, the then-traditional Catholic mass, the priests wore black vestments. The mass mourned the departed, and its prayers were directed toward the salvation of the sinner's soul. In the White Funeral, which had only recently been introduced, the priests wore white vestments. The funeral service marked the deceased's entrance into eternal life. It was a celebration of the resurrection rather than a mass of mourning. “I didn't want the change,” Father Shimon told Peg, “so I ignored it.”

“That doesn't matter,” Peg said, “All you've got to do is have it now. We had one only two months ago when that La Porte boy from the Jesup parish died in Vietnam.”

“Nope. Nope. Nope,” Father Shimon said, “I can't do it.”

Peg regarded him coldly, then lowered her head and went back to work on her list.

After a moment, Father Shimon stood up. “Well,” he said, “I, ah-h, probably, ah-h, should be going.”

“Fine, Father,” Peg said.

A few minutes later they heard the priest's car driving away. Gene, off the telephone, came over to the kitchen table, too. There was nothing that they could do while waiting for the rest of the family to arrive but make a list of those friends who would want and need to know that which they themselves were still scarcely willing to accept: their son Michael was dead.

Chapter Five

The Mullens' friends and neighbors, stunned by word of Michael's death, began arriving at the farm shortly after Father Shimon left. They were stricken, outraged, bewildered that this distant war in Vietnam, a war so wearying, so incomprehensibly foreign, so enduring, could somehow have taken Michael's life as it had claimed the life of that Jesup parish boy only two months before. The men wearing faded bib overalls, ankle-high work boots, day-glo orange earflapped vinyl caps, their mellow, weathered faces creased with sorrow, approached Gene shyly, hesitantly. Gently they touched him on the shoulder, laid their calloused hands almost tenderly across his back. Their wives, in woolen slacks and heavy hand-knit cardigans, brought baskets of food, stews and casseroles, pots of coffee which they set to simmer at the rear of the Mullens' stove. And then they moved back to take Peg's hands in their own, hugged her, kissed her lightly upon her cheek, begged her to give them something to do, wanting to help, and could barely contain the grief in their eyes.

The women gathered around the kitchen table with Peg, and the men sat in the living room with John and Gene. They talked in low voices about Michael, what a wonderful young man he had been, how they felt he had been—in many ways—like a son of their own, how hard he had worked, the many little kindnesses he had shown. They retold stories about Michael, about his 4-H activities, how much he had wanted to be good at basketball, about the time back in 1960—or was it '61?—the time Michael wouldn't let any of his family into their newly completed house until the lawn had been seeded and dragged and rolled. Michael had been fourteen then, and his family hadn't finished the lawn until at least eleven at night. Or how about the time that neighbor, the one whose young wife had died of the aneurysm, had driven off the dead end, dragged himself out of his demolished car, his face smashed by the windshield, and crawled all the way to the Mullens' back door, where Michael discovered him, brought him inside, wrapped him in blankets and placed crushed ice on his shattered face until the ambulance and doctor could arrive. Over and over again the men tried to express their sorrow, tried to make some sense out of the war, to say something comforting about Michael's service to his country. And suddenly, astonishingly, one of the men, and then another, would begin to cry, would hide his face, wipe at the tears with the back of his hand and blow his nose into a great billowing pocket bandanna.

These men were part of “the great Silent Majority” President Nixon had referred to, and they wept as much out of confusion and frustration and rage as they did out of grief for the Mullens' loss. From kindergarten through the twelfth grade in their Iowa schools they had pledged their allegiance to the flag, been taught to love their country, respect their government. To them, America's history was of Genesisic simplicity, its early Presidents Old Testament prophets whose lives were parables of selflessness and virtue. Standing there by the Mullens' big picture window, looking out across John Dobshire's road to the rolling snow-swept hills beyond, they were simple, decent people who saw their silence as a form of stoicism, not acquiescence, who interpreted silence as a strength and virtue and whose lonely lives on isolated farms were testimony to the little stock they placed in talk.

Of course, they thought themselves patriotic. Of course, they believed that a man has a duty to serve his country. Many of them, a majority, had fought in the Second World War, a war which had had front lines and battlefields and winners and losers, where success could be measured, enemy territory absorbed behind ribbons and pins and flags on the carefully kept maps back at home. These men had been young then, thinner and tougher, and they remembered how, moving up through the liberated cities and villages, they had been greeted as heroes, how the grateful citizens had gifted them with flowers and wine, how the pretty young dark-haired girls had climbed up the armor-plated sides of their half-tracks and Sherman tanks to be kissed. It was a war which had confirmed the image they carried both of America and of themselves: strong and generous, invincible and humane. And of course, they had been scared. There was no shame in admitting that—but they had gone, hadn't they? In some jewelry box, or sock drawer, or half forgotten in the bottom of some desk somewhere, they still had their dog tags, their combat infantryman's badges, maybe even the medal or two awarded them because against their better judgment, on some occasion and in spite of it all, they had volunteered for something especially dangerous, something that they hadn't even needed to do. But they had done it. Why scarcely mattered; the point, to them, was that they had risked their lives and survived. They had survived and come home to Poyner and Cedar and Big Creek townships, to Eagle Center and La Porte, proud of their participation in that war. Later they joined the local American Legion chapter or the VFW and with the passing years found themselves looking back on their experiences with a strange and paradoxical longing that disturbed them.

They had returned as young lions, brave warriors, to be celebrated and praised … and absorbed and confused … and frustrated and forgotten as their war became American history, shuffled farther and farther back into chapters superseded by the new crises Americans responded to in Korea and Hungary and Berlin and Czechoslovakia and the Suez and Lebanon and Cuba and now in Vietnam. The irony was not lost on them that the two Axis powers which they as young men had warred against, which they had helped reduce to rubble and had subsequently helped to rebuild with tax money taken out of their own pockets, had re-emerged as the two most powerful nations in Europe and Asia. That is why that afternoon at the Mullens' farm these men remained mute. The death of Michael reminded them how powerless they had become. These sudden crises, which in retrospect seemed so inevitable and abundant, unnerved them because they no longer felt they had access to the facts—whatever they might be—facts which they were no longer sure they would want to know even if there were someone around who was willing to tell them.