Friendly Fire (22 page)

The casualties for the two weeks ending May 23 in South Vietnam and Cambodia were 359 U.S. dead and 2,084 wounded.

A couple of days later Peg was telephoned by a woman from Mason City, Iowa, a town about sixty miles to La Porte's northwest. The woman's son had been only eleven days with Delta Company, one of the five rifle companies in Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf's infantry battalion, when his patrol was caught by a booby trap. Thirteen members, himself included, had been wounded severely enough to require evacuation. The Mason City mother told Peg that her son, while at the hospital, had met Abe Aikins, a young black medic who had been with Charlie Company the night Michael was killed. Aikins had asked her son if he had known Michael. The Mason City boy hadn't. “Well, I've read some of Mrs. Mullen's letters,” Aikins said, “and Michael's old lady is telling it like it is.”

The mother admitted her family had spent several nights discussing whether or not they should call Peg. “We know how much you want to find out how your son died,” she said, “so we decided to go ahead. Maybe this Abe Aikins will be able to help.” Peg was very grateful the woman had called. She wrote Abe Aikins that night.

A week later, on May 23, another Iowa family whose son was in Vietnam telephoned Peg. Gene had met them at the Loomis Funeral Home prior to Michael's service. The father had introduced himself, saying that their son had just been assigned as a medic to Michael's old unit. The mother had occasionally called Peg since to read parts of her son's letters home. Peg was convinced that the losses Charlie Company now seemed to be suffering were so terrible that had Michael not been killed that February night, he would not and could not have survived the next three months.

“Peg, what am I going to do?” the mother asked. “I'm so frightened for him. In his letter today, he said, ‘Mother, I cannot pick up another body sack. Here I am tonight sitting by two of my friends in sacks from booby traps. And there was another one with both his legs gone. I don't think he'll live,' he says. ‘They took him out in a helicopter and I don't know whether he will live or die.…'”

Peg spoke of the sort of operations Michael's unit had carried out. “They never saw any enemy, but,” Peg said angrily, “these crazy Americal officers have this obsession with body counts. This Schwarzkopf, the battalion commander, is one. All any of them want is body counts so they can get their promotions!”

“Peg, what am I going to do?”

Peg explained how her son could enlist out of combat or try for a conscientious objector status. The mother said she didn't think her son would do that, that he would rather remain with his friends even if staying meant he might die.

“Well, just pray for him then.”

“‘Pray
for him'?” the mother said. “Oh, God, don't you think I am?”

Peg was convinced that the high casualties Charlie Company was suffering were entirely Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf's fault. She recalled Michael's letter written late that previous October: “We are supposed to have the BN Co. out here sometime this week—kind of a laugh, for they live in a dream world! They have to have figures and nobody knows what is a VC or a plain ignorant villager, at least in this area.” And Culpepper in one of his earlier letters mentioned that Charlie Company had been “harassed a little bit and it wasn't much fun” during Michael's last stand-down. Peg wrote Schwarzkopf an angry condemnation of the Army in Vietnam, his harassment of Michael during the stand-down and swore her determination to avenge her son's death. She explained how she had taken Michael's gratuity pay and spent it on antiwar advertisements (which she enclosed along with excerpts from Michael's letters). She wrote that neither she nor Gene would rest until they learned who was responsible for Michael's loss. Although Peg did not accuse Schwarzkopf specifically, she left no doubt that she felt he was at least partially to blame not only for Michael's death but also for the high rate of casualties incurred by his battalion since.

What Peg did not realize was that Schwarzkopf had not taken command of the battalion until December. The battalion shortly, thereafter, received a new brigade commander as well: Colonel Joseph Clemons, whose unhappy assignment in a previous conflict, that of a young infantry lieutenant during the waning interminable peace negotiations of the Korean War, had been portrayed by Gregory Peck in the movie made from Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall's book
Pork Chop Hill
. Shortly after Michael was killed, Colonel Clemons shifted Schwarzkopf's battalion out of the “Rocket Pocket” and sent them south to relieve the 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry in the Batangan Peninsula. The new area of operations (AO) was a fifteen-by-twenty-five-square-kilometer section of the peninsula which included My Lai. The Batangan Peninsula had been notorious since the French Indochina colonial wars for its booby traps and overlapping minefields. Colonel Clemons had decided to rotate Schwartzkopf's 1st Battalion of the 6th Infantry with the 5th of the 46th because that battalion's men had become so leery, their morale so shattered by the minefields and booby traps, the brigade commander no longer felt the 5/46th was effective.

Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf requested and received from the 5/46th an overlay depicting the minefields in his new Batangan Peninsula AO. When the overlay was unrolled and positioned on his map, Schwarzkopf saw that the entire AO, from one end to the other, was filled with either suspected or confirmed minefields. Schwarzkopf, whose previous tour with the Vietnamese Airborne had taken him all across South Vietnam in 1965, would later remark that the Batangan Peninsula was the worst experience he had ever been through in his life. It was an entirely different sort of AO from the one in which Michael had been killed. The battalion's whole
modus operandi
changed. The primary enemy was no longer ambushes; it was minefields and booby traps. “It was terrifying to me,” Schwarzkopf said about the Batangan Peninsula, “and I know, I know it was terrifying to the men.”

On May 28 Bravo Company of Schwarzkopf's battalion became trapped in a minefield, and Schwarzkopf himself was wounded.

A portion of Bravo Company had been patrolling and suddenly one man and then another detonated mines. The company commander, a young captain, and the platoon leader, a young lieutenant, were both badly wounded. A medical evacuation helicopter was called for, and Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf and his artillery liaison officer, Captain Bob Trabbert, immediately flew in their command helicopter to Bravo Company's area and landed. In order to save time, Schwarzkopf turned his helicopter over to be used for med-evac. After he helped load the wounded on board, he and Trabbert stayed behind as the helicopter flew out.

The remainder of the patrol was frozen in the middle of the minefield. The young soldiers were on the edge of panic. Their commanding officers had been evacuated; they felt leaderless, abandoned. Colonel Schwarzkopf began talking to them as calmly as possible. He told them that they were going to be all right, to walk back out the same way they had walked in. “Watch where you put your feet, keep to your old tracks, stay calm, keep your distance,” he told them. They had just begun again to move when a young private off to Schwarzkopf's right stepped on another mine.

The same explosion that punched the kid up into the air slightly wounded both Captain Trabbert and Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf. They felt the impact, the pain before the young soldier even hit the ground. The boy's right leg was flapping out to one side. “My leg! MY LEG!” he screamed, and Schwarzkopf saw the men around him begin to panic again.

“Keep STILL!” Schwarzkopf ordered.
“Stay where you are!”
Schwarzkopf called for the radio operator; someone else was yelling for a medic. The first sergeant, too, had been seriously injured by the blast and lay unconscious, the dust settling back over him. “Trabbert!” Schwarzkopf turned to the artillery liaison officer behind him. “Get that dust-off here in a hurry. We need that med-evac
now!”

“My leg! Somebody help me!” the kid was screaming. “Oh, God, it hurts so much!” He was thrashing about on the ground, and the men all around him stood rigid with horror, terrified that the wounded private would trigger another mine. Schwarzkopf began inching across the minefield to reach him.

“Somebody help me, HELP ME!” The private was still flailing about.

“Don't move!” Schwarzkopf yelled at him. He was less worried that the young soldier would set off another mine than he was concerned that the boy would cause himself further injury and lose his leg. “You're going to be all right, just hang on,” Schwarzkopf was maybe thirty feet from the wounded private. He carefully, slowly, slid one foot forward, testing the ground beneath his boot before placing his weight on that foot. There was absolute silence now except for Trabbert talking on the radio to the med-evac helicopter, telling them where Bravo Company was and what they would need. Schwarzkopf still had twenty feet of minefield to cross when the wounded private started panicking again: “I'm going to die! We're all going to die!”

Schwarzkopf's legs suddenly began to shake uncontrollably; his knees were so watery he had to reach down and grip them until they stilled. The perspiration was stinging his eyes. He straightened up and saw the men were watching him, waiting for him to move forward again. Schwarzkopf, to his astonishment, suddenly thought of the sign on Harry Truman's White House desk: “The buck stops here.”

“I don't want to die,” the kid was whimpering. “You've got to get me out of here.”

“I'll get you out,” Schwarzkopf said gently. “Just keep still. You're all right.”

“I'm not! Goddamn you, can't you see my leg?”

“Take it easy son.” Ten feet to go. “It's only broken; I can tell that from here.” The colonel could see the boy had suffered an ugly compound fracture, pieces of bone were sticking out, but if the boy remained calm, he wouldn't lose the leg. “We'll come out just the way I'm walking in.”

“Colonel,” Trabbert called, “dust-offs in sight!”

“Hear that, son?” Schwarzkopf asked the private. “You'll be in the hospital before you know it.”

“Hurry!” the boy said, and he began to writhe again.

Five feet … three feet.… Schwarzkopf gently lowered himself across the wounded boy's body to keep him still. “I don't want you to move around,” Schwarzkopf told him. “We're going to have to set that leg.”

“Am I going to lose it?”

“What's your name, son?”

“Miller, sir. Private Miller.”

“You've got a broken leg, Miller, that's all.”

“God, it hurts, sir!”

Schwarzkopf looked about for something he could use as a splint. There was a small waist-high tree back where he had left Trabbert and where three other men were standing still. Its branches would be perfect. All they'd need to do would be to snap the twigs off. “I'm going to need to splint Miller's leg,” Schwarzkopf called back to them. “One of you cut me some splints off that tree there.”

Trabbert pulled out his sheath knife and passed it to one of the men. The man took one step toward the tree and triggered another mine.

“Oh, my GOD!” Schwarzkopf cried, horrified. Trabbert had taken the full force of the exposion. One of his legs was blown off, an arm broken backward so that the white bone of the elbow socket showed, and a great hole was gouged in his head. He would survive, but the other three men were killed instantly. They lay where they had been flung. No one moved. Only the young private, pinned beneath Schwarzkopf, was twisting about to get a better look. “Are they all dead, sir?”

The following afternoon, in La Porte City, the American Legionnaires and Veterans of Foreign Wars visited the little cemeteries in the neighboring communities and placed American flags on each of the veterans' graves. Early the next morning Gene Mullen drove to the Eagle Center cemetery and removed the Legion's flag from Michael's headstone. He did not want to permit them to glorify the manner in which Michael had died. It was Memorial Day.

Toward ten o'clock the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, delegates from the local 4-H Clubs and Women's Relief Corps, the Saddle Clubs and Navy Auxiliary began assembling outside the American Legion Hall in La Porte, where the honor guards from the Legion and VFW had already formed. As they marched down Main Street toward the old steel-girdered bridge which crossed Big Creek, a high school band struck up “Anchors Aweigh.” Ladies of the Navy Auxiliary moved closer to the bridge railing and waited until the band stopped before dropping bouquets of flowers into the rain-swollen waters. There was a moment of silence while the white blossoms, like tiny sailors' caps, bobbed and tumbled in the rushing current and were swept under and out of sight. Afterward the drum major hoisted his baton, blew his whistle, the strong-thighed majorettes marked time to the drumbeat, the Boy Scouts punched each other back into line, the baton dropped and the Legionnaires, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Saddle and 4-H Clubs and all the rest stepped briskly off, “Semper Fidelis” ringing in their ears, toward the first of the cemeteries. A brief service was held for the veterans buried there—veterans of Vicksburg, Chickamauga, of Sherman's March to the Sea, of Verdun, Okinawa, the Bastogne, Inchon.

Not all of La Porte, of course, attended the Memorial Day ceremonies; many of the citizens did not wish to remember any wars. And the farmers, who had had to wait for the late spring rains to absorb, were busy in their fields. They liked to have their corn planted by the second week of May, their soybeans in by the twentieth, but this Memorial Day farmers were still out planting the lower fields which only now had begun to dry. So the snare drummers' rim shot marching rhythms would be tempered by the deeper insistent thrumming of tractor motors beyond the gentle hills.