Friendly Fire (31 page)

During the conversation that followed, Mrs. Mullen recalled a radio broadcast reporting the shelling of friendly patrols by personnel of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), and it was noted by the family that Michael's unit may have been one of those allegedly so shelled. Reverend Otto B. Shimon, the priest who was present, says Sergeant Fitzgerald mentioned that the enemy may have gotten into friendly communication channels and caused the friendly unit to fire on the patrol, but he gave this only as a possibility.

Sergeant Fitzgerald states that he did not at any time say, suggest, or imply that Sergeant Mullen or any base camp mentioned on the radio had been deliberately shelled by ARVN forces. This statement is confirmed by Father Shimon. In his opinion Sergeant Fitzgerald was in control of his feelings and performed a difficult task as well as could be expected under trying conditions.

I realize how deeply Mr. and Mrs. Mullen have been hurt and how lasting will be their sorrow. It is most unfortunate that misunderstandings added to their distress. Michael was a brave and dedicated soldier, and my deepest sympathy is with all the members of the Mullen family in their great loss.

Sincerely,

s/THOMAS F. McMORROW

Major, GS

Office, Chief of

Legislative Liaison

“Of course,” Peg told Gene that night after he had read the letter, too, “it's just between whether I'm crazy or Sergeant Fitzgerald is. I know I didn't make it up! I can see him standing there with his back to me and he was ready to go, remember? And I said, ‘Sit down!' I said, ‘We're going to talk about this wire. What do you mean by “friendly”? How is it the word “American” isn't there?' And he said, ‘Because it wasn't American fire.' I know I didn't make that up!”

Gene nodded. “And when you asked the sergeant why the word ‘accident' wasn't in there, he said, ‘Because it was no accident.'”

“And that's what Father Shimon denies! I couldn't have made all that up because I went downstairs and typed it up so I'd have it. I typed it that day, remember?”

“Shimon was so shook he wouldn't have known what anybody said,” Gene flatly stated.

“Another thing,” Peg said, “I'm sure they'd been talking about the Bien Hoa shelling at Fifth Army when this message about Michael came through. Someone probably said, ‘What's this deal about “friendly fire”?' And another person said, “Well, that's probably another deal like Bien Hoa.' That's the way I think it all came about—and the whole Bien Hoa story, the whole thing about Michael being killed by ARVN artillery was printed in the Des Moines paper. Why didn't Sergeant Fitzgerald deny it then? He was here several times, and I told that same Bien Hoa story over and over again in those next few days to anybody who would listen, and he never once made any effort to correct me. I was so damned mad I told everybody who came the same story, and Fitzgerald or that captain—”

“Captain Pringle.”

“That's right, Pringle. They were here. They never made any effort to correct me.” Peg returned from the sink with a damp sponge and began wiping the top of the kitchen table.

Gene lifted the letter out of the way. “What are you gonna do about that investigation report?” Gene asked. “Do you think they'll ever let us see it?”

Peg shrugged. “I'm going to write General Ramsay and tell him to send it to us. I don't know what else we can do.”

Several weeks passed, and then, to the Mullens' astonishment, a telegram from General Ramsay's adjutant was forwarded by the Veterans Hospital in Iowa City saying that the artillery investigation report was on file at Long Binh and a copy would be sent them. The Mullens waited.

The report was never sent.

In mid-September the Mullens left La Porte to drive east to Pittsburgh for Peg's annual visit with her brother Howard Goodyear. They stopped on the way at Champaign, Illinois, to talk with Fred Wilson, the young man who had gone through the Fort Benning Noncommissioned Officers School with their son Michael.

Wilson, who was now released from the Army and attending the University of Illinois, had been the first soldier to write Peg of his unit's operations in Cambodia a month before President Nixon admitted troops were there. The Mullens visited Wilson at his rooming house near the university campus. They sat on his front porch talking together for about three hours. Peg was alarmed at how difficult it was for him to speak. She would ask a question, and Wilson would pause, struggle to answer and often in the middle of a sentence simply stop and stare off into space. She couldn't help wondering whether Michael would have been like that, too, had he come home.

“How many enemy did you see during your year in Vietnam?” Gene asked.

“I saw one,” Wilson said. “One Vietcong. And he was dead.… I didn't kill him. I don't know who did.”

“Fred,” Peg asked, “what was it like over there?”

Wilson shrugged. “What can I tell you? We were mortared every night by local villagers.…”

“
Local
villagers?” Gene asked. “What did you do?”

Wilson turned slowly and looked at Gene. “One night we went out and did our own My Lai. We killed maybe—we.” Wilson stopped and lit a cigarette. His hand was shaking so badly the top of his Zippo lighter rattled. He sat with his cigarette in one hand, the lighter in the other, not saying anything; then he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “After that we lived three, maybe four months before we were mortared again.” He looked uneasily at Peg and Gene. “We had to, see? Because night after night we kept losing.…” His voice trailed off.

Peg knew Wilson didn't want to talk about the war, that it was torturing him to bring it all up again, and she hated putting him through it. But she had to know. Wilson had been there. Peg needed to understand what it had been like for Michael.

“What are you going to do now?” Peg asked him.

“About what?”

“The war.”

“Nothing,” Wilson said. “Nothing for now.” He shut his eyes. “I'm going to close it completely out of my mind. But when I've got myself under control again, when I've got my head straight, then God help them. God help them!”

The Mullens reached Pittsburgh late Sunday night, September 20. They stayed four days. Peg straightened up her brother's apartment, dusted, vacuumed under couches and chairs, defrosted his refrigerator, did those tasks which she knew her bachelor brother had neglected. And while she cleaned, Gene and Howard Goodyear talked about the war. Howard loved his sister and honestly admired and respected Gene. Because he grieved, too, over Michael's loss, he listened patiently, sympathetically and, for the most part, agreed.

“The people in La Porte,” Gene was saying, “they see me coming and look at me like ‘You sonuvabitchin' Communist, you traitor!' and turn away, head in some other direction. And you know, Howard, you know they don't even try to think about what's going on.”

“Don't want to!” Peg corrected.

“See, Iowa's a very patriotic state. We have all these people who were brought up pledging allegiance to the flag, and they don't believe it's possible that the government could be telling lies.”

“Oh, our government's always told lies, don't you think?” Peg asked.

“Never so many so deliberately since Johnson and Nixon. Just tell me one thing,” Gene said. “What are they trying to hide? What are they so scared of? Why are they so afraid to tell the truth?”

“They can't admit they've made a mistake,” Peg said. “We should never have become involved in Southeast Asia. Never sent American boys to Vietnam. It should never have been our war.”

“That's right,” Gene said. “We can't be policemen for the whole world. You know all these people who accuse—who think Peg and me are Communists, well maybe being a Communist in Vietnam isn't such a bad thing. I'm not
pro
-Communist. I'm not pro-anything except putting a stop to this war. I talk to the fellows at the plant, and I try to explain to them that what's going on now in Vietnam is the same thing that's been going on for a thousand years. It isn't a Communist revolution; it's a nationalist revolution. The leaders on the other side just happen to be Communists, and all they want is to unite their country and kick us out the same way they did the French. And they say, ‘But, Oscar, what about the Chinese?' I tell them, ‘Read Vietnam's history. The Vietnamese have been resisting the Chinese for a thousand years!'”

“Nixon doesn't understand what's going on,” Peg said. “He thinks all we need to do is drop more bombs. Did you know more bombs have been dropped on Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia than were dropped throughout Europe and Japan the entire Second World War?”

“Now, I'll tell you this, Howard,” Gene said, “the thing that really gets me, that really burns me up is these people whose sons never had to go to Vietnam, these American Legion types who never saw any combat themselves, these so-called Good Americans who think Peg and me are unpatriotic!”

Howard smiled sadly. “My country right or wrong?”

“When your country's wrong,” Gene said, “the real patriot damn well tries to do something about it!”

On Thursday, September 24, the Mullens left Pittsburgh and drove south following Interstate 79 to Charleston, West Virginia, then west on Interstate 64 paralleling the Ohio River north of Huntington and across the Big Sandy River into Kentucky. They soon left the interstate and followed county roads until they came to the small oilfield town on the ridge above which Leroy Hamilton's family lived. When Peg had first heard from Mrs. Hamilton that her son had died with Michael, Peg had written back spilling out her frustration and rage. Mrs. Hamilton initially asked that neither she, her husband nor Leroy's memory be involved in Peg's protests against the war. Later, as a sense of confidence and trust developed between them, Mrs. Hamilton in subsequent letters came more and more to agree with Peg's opposition to the war. Peg was the first person Leroy's mother had ever carried on an extended correspondence with, and eventually, when Peg wrote that she and Gene were driving east and would like to meet her, Mrs. Hamilton unhesitatingly invited them to come.

Peg and Gene followed the black macadam road which snaked back and forth up the hillside to the ridge top. The macadam gave way to dirt at the Hamiltons' property line; the dirt became a worn track. The Mullens' old car bounced and bumped across the stones and potholes, continued the last few yards around the corner of the barn and stopped. It was almost six o'clock, milking time; the Hamiltons were at work inside the barn.

Peg and Gene waited inside their car for the Hamiltons to come out; but no one moved. The Hamiltons were expecting them and must have heard their car drive up. Peg suspected that the Hamiltons simply did not know what to say to an Iowa family who might have nothing more in common with them than grief and horror at the deaths of their sons.

“Come on, Gene,” Peg said and led her husband into the barn.

Mrs. Hamilton rose from beside a cow, wiped her hands and looked hesitatingly at Peg.

“Hello,” Peg said, stepping forward. “I'm Michael's mother.”

“I'm Leroy's mother,” Mrs. Hamilton said.

The two women did not touch each other, did not embrace until Mrs. Hamilton suddenly started to cry. Peg quickly hugged her, comforted her, patted her gently on the back. A cow's hoof scraped across the cement floor; there was the slight ping of a metal pail; then Leroy's father emerged from the back of the barn and held out his hand to Gene. “We thank you for coming,” Mr. Hamilton said.

Inside the Hamiltons' simple house, an added-onto mountain shack without indoor plumbing of any kind, the family's youngest daughter, Elsie, rushed up, smiling. “Hello, you must be Peg,” she said. “I knew you'd come sometime, I knew it!”

They ate dinner right away. Gene and Mr. Hamilton talked farming, how hard the Kentucky land was compared to Iowa, the yields one might expect, the advantages and disadvantages of raising dairy cattle compared with hogs. Mr. Hamilton told how the tree had fallen on him and hurt his back.

“I suppose you miss your son very much,” Gene said to him.

Mr. Hamilton looked away and talked instead about his hunting dogs, the four or five hounds Gene had noticed earlier roaming about the yard. Each time Gene attempted to talk to Leroy's father about the war, the man would become guarded, suspicious and change the subject back to farming or his hunting dogs again.

“Tomorrow I'll show you my garden,” Mrs. Hamilton was telling Peg. “And I'll take you down to our root cellar. It's just jammed with canned vegetables and fruit.”

“Let's set outside on the porch,” Mr. Hamilton said.

The autumnal Kentucky evening was dank, humid, oily. Crickets and frogs filled the air with challenges and song. A small flock of doves raced in from the trees, circled briefly above the barn, then settled in to roost. A cow mooed complacently. One by one the dogs approached Mr. Hamilton's chair to have themselves scratched behind their ears. Mrs. Hamilton sat down next to Peg with a photograph album, and as they looked at the pictures of Leroy, she spoke of the past.

“We used to hunt deer,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “Climbing these hills together was one of our greatest joys. He loved these hills, especially this time of year, the fall. The leaves would turn, and we'd go out together to hunt some venison for the table. He was a good shot.… And then when he was killed, I just went out to the hills alone.” She began to cry telling Peg how day after day that winter she would take her rifle and climb the same hills she had climbed with her son, tramp the same trails to keep her sanity, to cry in privacy, to let the deep snow muffle her wounds. “I cried all that winter, Peg,” she said. “I'm crying still,” she added, smiling slightly. She held a photograph of Leroy in her hands, and as she spoke, her fingers would move along its borders in the sort of gentle, absentminded caress a mother makes when soothing a fevered child. “You know he stayed beyond his time during his final leave? He already had his orders for Vietnam, and he didn't want to go. He reported back to the Army after Christmas. He was killed less than two months after his arrival in Vietnam.” She looked down at the photograph of her tall, handsome young son. “Leroy's buried up there,” she said, gesturing toward the top of the ridge. “There's a little cemetery up above. It's real pretty.”