Friendly Fire (18 page)

The enemy, it had begun to appear, was anyone who opposed the war. Almost a month had passed since Peg had written the Pentagon asking who had served with her son. She knew only from Culpepper's letter that at least one other young man had been killed. And then, suddenly, a woman in Kentucky wrote saying that the Pentagon had asked her to communicate with the Mullens since her son and Michael had died together and had been close friends.

The young Kentuckian was Leroy Hamilton. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade after his father was badly injured in a lumber accident. The Hamiltons cultivated more than 100 acres and kept dairy cattle and Leroy, the oldest, was needed to work the farm. After Leroy was drafted, his mother, his sixteen-year-old sister and fourteen-year-old brother were left to do all the haying and milking themselves. Peg was convinced that the Army had written Mrs. Hamilton confident she would be just a mountaineer mother of a high school dropout son and wouldn't know enough to write a letter to anyone.

What the Army failed to take into account was the estrangement people whose sons had died in Vietnam felt toward the government, the military and, in many cases, the neighbors in their own communities. Families of Vietnam casualties wanted to know each other, sought out each other because they had nothing in common anymore with the neighbor down the road whose son didn't have to go to war, who were never going to experience the anguish and bitterness such a loss brought.

A Gold Star family from north of La Porte celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and, in addition to their friends, invited other families whose sons had died in Vietnam. They had asked them, the mother wrote Peg, because she and her husband needed to have others who appreciated how empty they felt celebrating their anniversary without the laughter of their firstborn son.

A few days after Peg wrote Leroy Hamilton's mother back, she and Gene went to dinner at a friend's house, and the husband, a veteran of World War II, after listening to Peg talk about the young people's opposition to the war, said, “Well, I don't know what's the matter with those kids. I went, why shouldn't they go?” Peg couldn't wait to leave. She decided from that moment on she would seek out only people who shared her views. She no longer understood anyone who felt there should be a war on; to be pro-war was, to Peg, synonymous with being pro-Michael's death. As she later explained to Gene, “There's only one side when you lose your son.”

Peg had mailed Michael's letters to the Des Moines
Register
, and the editors decided to run them in their Easter Sunday edition. On March 27, Good Friday, a
Register
editorial headed “Why? And for What?” devoted to Michael's letters concluded:

He was in a night defensive position when artillery fire from friendly forces landed in the area and killed him.

Why? and For what? his parents still ask.

So far some 41,000 Americans and 102,000 “friendlies” have been killed in this futile war. These are not statistics, they are individual human beings—sons and husbands and brothers.

Nick Lamberto, the
Register
reporter who had earlier interviewed Peg about her Waterloo
Courier
letter questioning the casualty figures, telephoned Peg again. He called at a bad time.

Earlier that day Peg had argued with a representative of the United States Army over Michael's headstone. The Army insisted that if the Mullens were to accept the free government-provided headstone, the words “U.S. Army,” “Sergeant” and “Vietnam” would have to be on it. Peg was so disgusted she made up her mind to buy her own. She went to a La Porte memorial carver and related her quarrel with the military; the near-sixty-year-old stone carver replied, “Goddamn the Army! Good for you, Peg, I'll give it to you at cost.”

Peg had the stone engraved:

Michael E. Mullen

Born Sept. 11, 1944

Killed Feb. 18, 1970

Son of Gene & Peg

“He dared to ripple my pond”

The quote was lifted from a letter written by Caroline Roby. Although Peg worried the phrase might appear mawkish, she considered it the most appropriate sentiment they had received. It described Michael. He never left anything undone. “If someone needed their pond rippled,” Peg said, “Michael did it.” Far more indicative of Peg's mood at this time was the word “Killed.” Michael had not died in the war; he had been
killed
.

Lamberto telephoned shortly after Peg returned from the stone carver, and she was still furious. Peg complained that only “the cream of the crop” were sent to Vietnam, that “if you got a girl in trouble, or were too fat, or too thin, you didn't have to go.” She spoke to Lamberto for about fifteen minutes, and it wasn't until she had hung up the telephone and cooled off that she began to worry about what she had said. By the time Gene returned from John Deere she had telephoned her sister Louise, who lived next door to Lamberto in Des Moines, to find out more about him.

“Lamberto's going to kill me, Gene,” Peg said that night. “He really is. I didn't find out until this afternoon that he was a hawk on the war.”

“What can he do to you?” Gene asked.

“I just think he's going to print things that will cause me trouble.” Peg thought for a moment, “Maybe I'll drive to Des Moines tomorrow and see if I can talk to him in person.”

Peg did meet with Lamberto and asked if he would delete a couple of statements.

“Lamberto just laughed at me,” she reported back to Gene. “And when I left, he said, ‘Well, have faith, hope and charity, Peg Mullen.'”

Michael's letters and Lamberto's interview appeared in the
Register
on Easter Sunday. Lamberto's piece began: “A distraught mother, bitter over the death of her son in South Vietnam, has vowed to use his insurance money ‘to save the boys still over there.'”

By this time the Mullens had received the bulk of Michael's insurance policies. The $10,000 U.S. Army policy had been split four ways: $2,500 each to Gene, Peg, Caroline Roby and the Don Bosco High School. In addition, Michael carried a $ 10,000 policy with the Knights of Columbus (Gene Mullen later tried to invoke the double indemnity clause since the Army had ruled Michael's death “accidental.” He did not collect) and $980 from a $1,000 policy with the Federal Life Insurance Company.

The Mullens had also received the money Michael had withdrawn and converted to traveler's checks five days before he was killed and a U.S. Army check for $2,014.20, a gratuity payment representing six months' projected salary to defray the cost of his funeral. It was this gratuity pay and not, as Lamberto reported, the insurance money which the Mullens had decided to utilize in their fight against the war. Lamberto wrote that Peg had vowed to use $5,000 “to ferret out the truth about the war. I have no organzied plan,” he quoted her as saying, “but I'm writing letters and making phone calls, telling our story.” Lamberto then reprinted the majority of Peg's letter to the Waterloo paper but added two sections based on his telephone interview of one of which Peg denies ever having said: “They accuse us of a massacre at My Lai. That's a farce. Our boys had a right to kill those people. How many Americans have been killed by ‘local' citizens over there?”

The other passage was the one Peg had tried to have him delete, the part where she had spoken of the boys who had gotten girls into trouble or were too fat to be sent to Vietnam.

Monday, March 30, the day after Michael's letter and Lamberto's article appeared, two local television stations, KCRG-TV of Cedar Rapids and KWWLTV of Waterloo, arrived at the Mullens' farm to interview them. Gene and Peg were good material: angry, articulate, emotional and defiantly opposed to the war. At a time when the American Midwest was the bastion of the Silent Majority and the only real opposition to the war existed among the draft-age young and their college professors, the Mullens represented a newsworthy exception. Still, if the media capitalized on the Mullens, the Mullens were quick to recognize they could take advantage of the media, too.

The television reporters had come only because of the interviews and letters which had already appeared in print. Peg and Gene realized that the newspapers therefore provided the cheapest and most effective platform from which other, broader outlets such as radio and television coverage became accessible. Gene now began to consider the possibility of purchasing newspaper space through an advertisement.

That afternoon a second
Register
reporter, Gordon Gammack, suggested the Mullens take it easy on their activities. He advised Peg that the Army was “doing an excellent job in a very bad situation” and was “doing it as well as they could.

“If you really want to know the truth about the war, about Vietnam,” Gammack told Peg, “the war correspondents will tell you. Don't spend your money trying to find out things that will only hurt you.” He then added, “You can't believe a GI coming back from Vietnam. You just can't believe what they say.”

With the exception of Culpepper, Peg hadn't heard from any GIs! She would soon, though. It had not occurred to her that hundreds of copies of the Des Moines
Register
interview and Michael's letters were already on their way to Vietnam. She had been too busy to think of that.

She was now spending several hours every day at her typewriter. Letters had become her major link to Michael, the only means she had of keeping him “alive,” of making his death mean something. The frenzy with which she corresponded reflected an energy which she had to direct away from her anger and grief. She was so convinced the military was behind a deliberate conspiracy to prevent the American people and their representatives in Congress from learning the truth about the war she immediately copied any information she gained about Michael or any letter from any person containing any knowledge whatsoever about the war and forwarded those duplicates to Senators Fulbright and Hughes in Washington.

The Xerox machines in the library and bank cost a quarter for each copy, so Peg tried whenever possible to have her correspondence duplicated for free on the Xerox machine at the Don Bosco High School. But one afternoon she was in La Porte with six letters and called attorney William Wagner to ask if she might use one of his office machines.

Bill Wagner shared law offices with his brother, Roy, whose own son was serving with the Americal Division in Vietnam at this time. Bill Wagner is a square-jawed, iron-gray-haired, crew-cut ex-Marine in his mid-fifties who took part in the assaults on Guam, Bougainville and Iwo Jima. Wagner had become active in patriotic organizations after the war and was now vice-commander of the La Porte City American Legion Post to which Gene had previously belonged. Wagner would later say, “There isn't anyone in this town who has more sympathy over the loss of their son than I have. I've been there. I've seen the smell and taste and sound of battle, and after thirty-eight months in combat you kind of learn a few things. You learn that this country is worth all it takes to keep it going. I believe in
this
country
first
. I'm not a ‘superpatriot,' but if my country calls and has a use for me, by God I'll be the first guy out there with a bayonet to stab somebody!” He genuinely liked Peg and Gene, and they liked him, too. He did not, however, approve of their approach. He could not condone Peg's wearing a Moratorium armband, writing letters to Senators, Congressmen, newspapers protesting the war, saying the sort of things reported in that
Register
interview. It puzzled him. It was the sort of behavior which Wagner expected from some
damned radical
, not Peg and Gene. Still, he appreciated Peg's feelings. He knew that if he had lost a son, he couldn't be sure how he would have reacted.

The bookshelves of Wagner's office are lined with more than 200 Jim Beam commemorative whiskey bottles he has amassed as a hobby. His collection increased to such an extent over the years that his wife wouldn't let him keep them in their house. Wagner laughingly tells about his Iowa state trooper friend “who saves beer cans and thinks I'm crazy!”

Wagner rose from behind his massive desk as Peg entered and expressed again how sorry he was over Michael's loss. “He was a very nice boy, Peg, an exemplary boy, a credit to the community.” Peg thanked him and said that both she and Gene appreciated his having called off old Peter Dobkin.

“So you'd like some letters copied?” Wagner asked as Peg sat down.

“I have six. You'd find them interesting, I think.” She slid the letters across his desk. “It's the real story about Vietnam.…”

Wagner glanced quickly at the top letters, saw they were to Senators Fulbright and Hughes and buzzed for his secretary. “She'll have these copied and back to you in a few minutes.”

“Don't you want to read them?” Peg asked.

Wagner refused to be baited. He believed he knew as well as anyone what was going on in Vietnam. His old outfit was there, and he would receive a communication from the Marine Corps every two weeks. Although he was disturbed about the American involvement because Congress had never officially declared war, he disapproved most of all the limitations on the men doing the fighting. “You know,” he would muse, “I've always wondered how my old comrades could sit back and get shot at and not fire back. Hell, we had guys who'd make Patton look like a Sunday school teacher!” Wagner simply didn't want to get involved in a discussion with Peg about the merits or lack of merits of the war. He admired the Mullens' concern, their courage and dedication. He believed in “standing up and being counted” and questioning one's Congressman “at the proper time and place as to why we are in Vietnam. Nobody's answered that one for me yet,” he said, “but I wouldn't tear the flag down to find out. I still think our Congressmen, our leaders have a lot more information than I have.” The only time Wagner did write his Senator was when Iwo Jima was given back to the Japanese. “We had four thousand kids who never walked off that place,” he protested.