Friendly Fire (9 page)

Gene would be explaining to the latest arrival that the family knew only that Michael had been killed by the South Vietnamese artillery, that the Vietcong had somehow made the artillery fire on Michael's platoon's position and that Michael had been killed two days ago. On Thursday.

“But, Gene,” the man would say, “I didn't see nothing in the paper about it. Where'd it say anything about American boys being killed by South
Veet
-namese artillery?”

“You heard about the shelling at Bien Hoa?” Gene asked. “How a lot of American boys got killed and wounded at Bien Hoa? Well, see, it happened all over Vietnam that night.”

“I sure am sorry, Gene. It seems the whole world is coming apart. It gets so a man just doesn't want to read or know about anything anymore.”

“You got to care,” Gene said. “You got to keep caring.”

“Yup, well, I do, I guess,” the man would say, “I do, but it doesn't seem to make sense.”

What so confused these men was that no one really seemed to believe that America stood to gain anything from the Vietnam War, that all the reasons given to justify an American presence in Vietnam—to prevent outside invaders from taking over the country, to provide the people of South Vietnam with a chance to choose their own leaders—were myths dispelled nightly on the television news. Every returning GI felt that
he
had been the outside invader, that the government he had been sent to defend was incorrigibly corrupt, its elections rigged, its political opposition tortured and jailed. Most appalling of all was the fact that the South Vietnamese not only were unwilling to fight for themselves but fired upon, booby-trapped and ambushed the American boys who had come halfway around the world to defend them.

So the men wrung their hands and wept with rage and frustration and confusion because what could any of them say to the Mullens except how terribly sorry they were?

And how were the Mullens supposed to respond?

When a young man is killed in a war, his parents console themselves that he gave his life for some higher ideal, that he died in the service of his country and that his awful sacrifice is recognized and appreciated by a grateful government and citizenry. But how could Gene and Peg Mullen comfort themselves over their son's death in Vietnam? Didn't anyone understand that Michael had been their hope? Their way back up? That Michael would have returned the Mullen name to the stature it had enjoyed when his great-grandfather Patrick J. had owned that 1,000-acre farm?

What could the Mullens say to these friends, these neighbors, these well-meaning townspeople who had driven out to see them? Peg and Gene could not help thinking how none of these people's sons had had to go. How Michael was the only boy from any of the farms around who had put himself through graduate school, who showed the most potential for making a success out of farming. What's more, the Mullens sensed that the general attitude among their son's contemporaries was not that Michael had been a patriot, but rather that he had been a poor, unfortunate scapegoat who hadn't had enough sense or enough pull not to get caught. “I don't need to be here! I don't need to be here!” Michael had protested that night he telephoned from Des Moines. “I simply didn't
need
to be drafted!”

Patricia Mullen, then twenty-one years old, had been met by Peg's friend in Iowa City and reached the farm late that afternoon. Like her mother's, Patricia's reaction to Michael's death was a cold and bitter rage. Only three days before she had written their Senator, Harold Hughes, pleading with him to get her brother out of combat, that it was such a waste to let “Michael's mind to be destroyed.” Senator Hughes had replied the same day to explain the process by which Michael could request an out-of-combat assignment. Patricia had received the Senator's letter that morning.

Peg's sister, Isabel Strathman, and her husband, Gerald Strathman, arrived at the farm next. Gerald Strathman, an Army Air Corps bombardier during World War II, had taken part in the raids on the Ploesti oilfields.

Peg's brother, Bill Goodyear, arrived early that evening. He had driven to the farm directly from Omaha. Bill Goodyear had served in the Army during World War II and had taken part in the construction of the Burma Road.

Mary Mullen, then nineteen years old and a freshman at Rockhurst, had been picked up in Kansas City by Peg's other sister, Louise Petersen, and Mike Kitt, the Petersens' son-in-law. Herman Petersen, Peg's brother-in-law, had fought through the Battle of the Bulge. Mary and the Petersens would not arrive until late that night.

Howard Goodyear, Peg's older brother, was driving in from Pittsburgh and could not reach the farm before Sunday afternoon. Now an executive with Alcoa, Howard had been the radio operator-medic on the weather plane which had preceded the
Enola Gay
to Hiroshima. As part of its mission Howard Good-year's B-29 had to fly over Hiroshima to report the effects of the first atomic bomb.

Peg does not remember her brothers and brothers-in-law ever swapping war stories or even wanting to talk about the war.

By midnight Saturday night the Mullens' friends and neighbors had left. Peg's brothers and sisters had gone to their motel rooms; Patricia was asleep. John was in his bedroom awake and staring at the ceiling. Peg and Gene were seated across the kitchen table from each other, isolated by grief, each tentatively prodding and testing the barriers that would protect them from the anguish of their loss.

“The thing is when you have a boy in combat,” Gene said, “the thing you always keep foremost in your mind is that … is that”—he took a deep breath—“is that
it can't happen to him
—” BLAM! He slammed the flat of his hand down on the table so hard that the spoon skipped out of his coffee mug. “It can't happen to him!”

Peg nodded, watching him sadly.

“It can't happen to him,” Gene repeated and slumped in the chair.

A few minutes later Peg sighed. “Gene, I knew … I think I knew after Michael called on the thirteenth. When he said, ‘Good-bye, Mom, it's so bad here …' I think I kind of started to know he'd be killed.…”

“What are we going to do-o-o?” Gene cried.

“Whatever needs to be done,” she announced firmly. Peg pushed herself up from the table. “First of all, I'm going to open up Michael's tackle box.”

“That's right.” Gene nodded. “Michael said, ‘Don't open it. Only if I don't come back.'”

“O-h-h, Gene.” Peg stopped at the bedroom door. “He didn't say that. Michael never thought for a minute he wouldn't be coming back. He didn't think that way at all. He was a positive thinker.” She continued on into the bedroom, past John, who was still lying there, and took the tackle box from the top of Michael's closet to the kitchen table. She untaped the key, unlocked the box and lifted out the tray with his arrowheads, the stripes and infantry school insignia from Fort Benning. Beneath the tray was a carefully folded piece of tablet paper. Peg opened the paper and saw that Michael had meticulously copied out the names and addresses of all the people who were important to him. Peg sat there holding the list in her hands.

“What is it?” Gene asked.

“Names,” Peg said. “Everybody in Michael's life.…”

There were Michael's roommates at Rockhurst and the University of Missouri, the eighty-five-year-old La Porte couple whose grocery shopping he did when he was home, the close friend whose wife he had always liked so much, Caroline Roby and her mother, his sisters' college addresses. There were maybe twenty names on the list, some of which Peg didn't recognize. She passed the paper over to Gene, who didn't know them either but felt they were important enough to call. Peg next came to Michael's insurance papers.

There was a $10,000 policy with the Knights of Columbus, a $1,000 policy with Federal Life and another $10,000 policy with the U.S. Army. Michael had indicated that he wanted the Army policy split four ways: $2,500 each to Gene and Peg, $2,500 to the Don Bosco High School “for the purchase of new science equipment” and the last $2,500 to “a dear friend so that she might study medicine.” The “dear friend,” obviously, was Caroline Roby, but Peg didn't know how to go about getting in touch with her.

“Call John Stagg,” Gene suggested.

John Stagg had been Michael's roommate at the University of Missouri, and Stagg knew Caroline through Michael. Gene felt Stagg would be the best one to tell her. “She'll have to know that Michael is dead, that he left her that money.”

“I know, I know,” Peg said, “it's just that.…” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“I get the feeling that the thing between Michael and Caroline had, well, tapered off.”

“We still got to tell her,” Gene said.

At two thirty in the morning, while the Mullens were waiting for their daughter Mary and Peg's sister, Louise Petersen, to arrive from Kansas City, Peg started writing down all the information she had learned from her conversation with Sergeant Fitzgerald. She wasn't sure yet why she was doing it, but she felt a need to commit the details to paper. Gene got up from the kitchen table to check on John, who was awake, lying with his arms folded behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

“Johnny,” Gene asked quietly, “are you all right?”

“I'm okay, Dad.…” John turned to his father standing in the doorway. “You know, Dad? Mikey's got it made.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he's in heaven now. He doesn't have to be afrai—to worry about what's going to happen to him next.”

Gene stood looking down at Michael's empty bed, then back at John, and because he knew he was going to cry, Gene hurried out through the kitchen past Peg and on into the darkened living room, where he sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Gene?”

There was only the sound of Gene crying.

“Gene?” Peg called across the room. “Are you all right?”

He struggled to bring himself under control. “I was thinking about Johnny,” he said, “I was thinking here's this boy, just eighteen years old, with this mind of … of purity and love for his fellowman”—he shook his head sorrowfully—“and here you have these, these people, these vicious people in the world who want to take him away from us, who want him in their army so that he can … can fight in their war.…
Who wants war?”
He glanced up at Peg sitting beneath the glare of the kitchen lights and answered his question himself: “I don't.”

Peg did not speak.

“I don't want war,” Gene said again.

Chapter Six

There is no telegraph office in La Porte City. Telegrams are transmitted by teletype from the Waterloo Western Union office to the office of the mayor of La Porte, and it is old Peter Dobkin's job to deliver the telegrams in person. Dobkin, a tall, thin, grandfatherly-looking World War I veteran in his mid-seventies, knocked on the Mullens' door on Sunday morning, Washington's Birthday.

Gene Mullen ushered Dobkin up the stairs and into the kitchen, which was already crowded again with the Mullen family and friends.

“Hello, Peter,” Peg said, “would you care for a cup of coffee?”

“No, no, thank you, Mrs. Mullen,” he said, “I've come on official business. I've got a telegram for you.”

“Oh?” Peg started to reach for the telegram, but Dobkin didn't pass it to her.

“I'm supposed to read it to you,” he said. He looked at his wristwatch and, as the voices hushed about him, began to read: “Time: Eleven Seventeen A-Yem. To: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Oscar E. Mullen, Rural Route Three, La Porte City, Iowa, Report. Deliver. Don't Phone.…” Dobkin paused to clear his throat, then continued. “‘The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son, Sergeant Michael E. Mullen, died in Vietnam on 18 February 1970. He was at a night defensive position when artillery fire from friendly forces landed in the area. Please accept my deepest sympathy. This confirms personal notification made by a representative of the Secretary of the Army.' … It is signed, ‘Kenneth G. Wickham,'” Dobkin read, “‘Major General, United States Army, C-dash-Zero-Five-Two-dash-One-Eight Nine, The Adjutant General, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C.'”

There was an awkward moment of silence while Dobkin stood in a pose somewhat suggesting the position of attention, and Peg said, “Well, thank you, Peter.…”

Dobkin nodded perfunctorily, handed her the telegram and left.

Peg dropped the telegram onto the growing stack of papers on the kitchen table. “It doesn't tell us anything we don't already know,” she said.

Sunday afternoon Peter Dobkin returned with a second telegram. “Time: Three Oh Five, P-Yem. To: ‘Mr. and Mrs. Oscar E. Mullen, Rural Route Three, La Porte City, Iowa. Report. Deliver. Don't Phone.…”

The telegram contained information on the return of Michael's body, how much money would be allowed for the burial and cautioned the Mullens not to make formal arrangements until contacted by the Army again. It also listed Michael's rank as private first class, not sergeant.

The error was routine administrative carelessness. But as an indication of the bureaucratic impersonality with which the Army considered the death of their son, it infuriated the Mullens.

Dobkin handed the telegram to Peg, and because he was also a representative of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, he began talking about the military funeral he expected the Mullens to hold. “We will provide both an American flag and a VFW flag at the funeral home,” Dobkin was saying, “and at the grave we can have an honor guard and a bugler—oh, the honor guard will be in uniform, caps and ties, with polished rifles. We can fire a salute if you wish—”

“I don't wish!” Peg said.

“Pardon?”

“We don't want a military funeral, Peter,” Peg said. “Michael was a biochemistry student.”