Friendly Fire (37 page)

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During the spring of 1973 the Mullens, still convinced their telephone was tapped, discussed reporting their suspicions to the proper authorities. Patricia Mullen Hulting, then attending the University of Iowa College of Law, was advised by a criminal law professor that Federal Judge William C. Hanson in Fort Dodge would have had to sign the court order approving the tap. Peg put off writing Hanson until June, when, because of Gene's insistence (and that of a neighbor, tired of the constant interruptions, fading signal and clicking sounds, who shared their party line), Peg telephoned the judge directly.

Hanson was irritated that Peg had asked his assistance and suggested she not discuss her suspicions over the telephone. “If you want to talk to me come to my office,” he told her. “But I must inform you that if we do talk about possible taps on your telephone, our conversation will be taped. I don't want you to be offended, but I will not have you saying things, then distorting what I've said when you repeat our conversation in return.” Later that summer while visiting her sister Isabel Strathman in Fort Dodge, Peg stopped in at the Federal District Courthouse. Hanson was not in, but Peg was able to speak to his clerk, who chided her for having waited so long before speaking to them. The proper man to contact, the clerk told Peg, would be the U.S. Attorney, for the Northern District of Iowa; Evan L. “Curly” Hultman.

When Peg called Hultman from La Porte, she was told he would be away for two weeks. Several weeks passed when Hultman returned Peg's call and, according to Peg, was “quite incensed at even the thought of my phone being tapped.” Hultman, too, added that Peg should have contacted him several years before. He promised he would get in touch with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would have them send an agent out to see her.

Late that August Peg returned from Davenport and found FBI Agent Jim Gibson waiting at her farm. Gibson denied the FBI had instigated the taps. “If your phone had been tapped by the FBI,” he told Peg, “you never would have known about it. Besides, there was no need to tap your telephone. Anything you had to say you always spilled right out in the open.”

Peg believed him. She had always been convinced that their phone tap had been initiated by the military.

Gibson and Peg spoke for several hours that afternoon. At one point Gibson smiled and told Peg, “As a matter of fact, when the U.S. Attorney called me about you, I told him, ‘Oh, sure, I know who she is. I've had her under surveillance for three years.'”

Chapter Twenty

On April 12, 1971, a Monday about three weeks after the Another Mother for Peace film crew had departed, I drove up John Dobshire's dirt road to meet Peg and Gene Mullen for the first time.

For two and a half years, from the fall of 1967 through the spring of 1969, my wife and I had lived surrounded by cornfields in a small white frame two-story tenant farmhouse a few miles east of Iowa City. We rented the house from the Reverend and Mrs. Louis Penningroth, whose much grander house and barns stood at the top of the rolling hill about three-quarters of a mile to our southwest. The house and barns of Mr. and Mrs. Flowery Smith, our only other visible neighbors, lay in the opposite direction, across Rural Route 5, our dirt section line road, beyond the little stand of dead timber, atop the rolling hill to our northeast. In the late summer before the corn was cut, our tenant farmhouse seemed to ride like a chip of flotsam between two deep-green giant ocean swells. In the fall, however, when the corn was down, we could climb the pony pasture behind our house to the hilltop from which we flew our kites and, holding our arms straight out from our bodies, be pointing at nothing but sky. With the exception of our two neighbors' barns, there simply wasn't anything in the way. We could see for miles down the dirt road that passed our house, follow it with our eyes over the crest of the first hill, see it reappear as a thinner stripe crossing the hill after that, still thinner crossing the hill after that, and the one after that, like the road in a children's book. A children's book, exactly. We were very happy in Iowa. Life on that farm seemed pastoral, edenic, almost too good to be true.

In April, 1969, the month before we left Iowa to return East, President Nixon visiting Vietnam told some American ground troops about to go out on patrol, “I think history will record that this may have been one of America's finest hours because we took a difficult job and we succeeded.” How was one to respond to that? Write another angry letter? March in another antiwar parade? To be honest, I didn't do a thing.

Iowa was a respite from that sort of activity; the crises in the rest of the world didn't seem so urgent there. Iowa was a return to the quiet tree-lined small-town streets of old
Saturday Evening Post
covers, rolled-up newspapers cast upon one's lawn, state fairs and soda pops, of being neighborly. The rest of America has always had a bemused, somewhat patronizing attitude toward Iowa. Perhaps this is because the state's ambience suggests the nineteenth century more than the twentieth. The majority of Iowa's 95.5 percent white population still lives in small towns or on farms. There are no large military installations in Iowa; Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids is practically the state's only industry linked with defense. Agriculture continues to be its primary business. Most Iowans depend directly or indirectly on farming for their livelihood, just as their ancestors did at the turn of the century. The eleven o'clock news is broadcast at ten o'clock Central Time so early-rising farmers can get their sleep.

While I was living there, I believed Iowa to be at least ten years behind the tensions, the conflicts, the polarizations of a California or a New York. I was wrong, of course. The 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention with its riots, tear gas, police clubs and sellouts changed all that—changed it for many of the younger generation at any rate.

I was teaching at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, and a coed in one of my classes went to the Chicago convention to assist in Senator Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. She was the daughter of a central Iowa farmer and not an especially promising student; she would write extremely tense and anxious papers filled with “hences” and “thuses,” but she was an exceptionally hard worker and terribly nice. Whenever we would throw a Sunday kite-flying party, she would show up with more food than she could possibly afford. And she would arrive later than the others because she would have attended church services and have had to return to her dormitory to change. After our first class following the Chicago convention she said she wanted to talk to me about what had taken place. We walked down to my office, and she took a seat opposite my desk. “Well,” she said, taking a deep breath, “we arrived there in the afternoon.…” and that's all she said. She burst into tears, and each time she would try to speak, her words would emerge as cries instead. She would take another deep breath, swallow hard, shake her head and try again. For at least five minutes she sat across from me gasping for breath, her great shoulders heaving, tears coursing down her cheeks, fingers shredding the Kleenex tissues I had passed. Finally she pulled herself together and in a low, wounded voice said, “Oh, those sons of bitches! Those dirty sons of bitches!” and got up and left. What more could she say? What could any of us say?

During my three years in Iowa, 33,384 Americans had died in Vietnam; another 112,110 had been wounded. What could any of us do?

I didn't know of the Mullens when we lived in Iowa: La Porte City was about seventy-five miles to our north, and we had no reason to travel there. The Mullens' half-page advertisement appeared in the Des Moines
Register
almost a year after we had left. It wasn't until November, 1970, when I stopped off in Iowa for a few days to visit friends, that I heard about the Mullens at all.

Vance Bourjaily, the writer, and his wife, Tina, and I were sitting by the fireplace of their Iowa farmhouse having a drink and watching the late-afternoon sky make up its mind whether to snow or not. We had been talking, naturally, about other writers and their books, but inevitably our conversation drifted to the Vietnam War. Tina asked me if I had heard of Peg Mullen. Vance had met her when they had flown about Iowa in behalf of the 609 amendment. Tina told me how Mrs. Mullen's son had been killed in Vietnam and instead of shutting up about it like a good patriotic Gold Star mother, she had angrily published an antiwar ad. Both Vance and Tina thought Mrs. Mullen might be worth looking into, that it sounded like a good story. “Mom's Apple Pie Gone Sour,” I remember, was Tina's phrase. Still, I couldn't help asking myself who was left in America who would be willing to read a story which in any way touched the Vietnam War. I certainly didn't want to write one. Like everybody else, I was sick to death of hearing about Vietnam.

It took me six months to change my mind, six more months of watching the casualty figures on the evening television news before I realized that I was losing my capacity for outrage and shock, that I was simply acquiescing in what this nation's leaders were permitting our country to become. The police and volunteer firemen in the old New England town to which we had moved had suddenly taken to wearing American flags on their uniforms. Why? The wife of a local psychiatrist wanted to pull her son out of the Memorial Day parade because, like the others in his Boy Scout troop, he would have had to carry an American flag. Why? Bumper stickers read
AMERICA! LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!
or depicted the flag with the legend
THESE COLORS DO NOT RUN!

The turning point came for me when the President went out to Kansas State and told his audience, “The heart of America is sound.… The heart of America is good!” This simply wasn't true.

The heart of America was broken over the deaths of its young in Vietnamese jungles, in bunkers along the Cambodian border, in helicopters over Laos, on campus hilltops in Ohio and in dormitories at Jackson State. If the President thought otherwise, then, it seemed to me, it was a clear case of “The Emperor's Clothes.” Could he be so out of touch that he was unaware of the growing hostility and frustration throughout the country? Wherever he went, he was met by protesters and picket signs. It further seemed to me that Mr. Nixon should have come away from his Kansas State experience impressed not, as he had bragged, that it was still possible for him to receive a resounding ovation from college students, but that he should have had to go to a Kansas State to receive one.

I felt there had to be some way to articulate the people's discontent, their estrangement from their government, their increasing paranoia and distrust. And what better way was there than to return to Iowa? Iowans are among the most open, honest, friendly, trusting people in the country. If they seemed unsophisticated, then they were unsophisticated in the best possible sense: they believed in personal honor, that a man's word had meaning and that he was responsible for his acts. If the government of the United States had lost the loyalty and support of an Iowa farm family, then it indicated, to me at least, that the government was in very grave trouble indeed.

The editor of the magazine with which I first discussed the possibility of doing an article on the Mullens asked if I thought Peg Mullen might be “deranged.” He did not ask this because he felt Peg's protesting of her son's death was a symptom of any derangement, but rather out of concern for her health. If she were deranged, then any exploitation of her grief could only contribute to whatever imbalance she might have. And it was precisely the exploitation of her grief upon which any article would have to depend.

And yet when I first telephoned Peg Mullen, introduced myself and explained what it was I wanted to do, she was willing to have me come. In fact, I was a little startled and dismayed by how eagerly she had invited me. I left for Iowa two days later.

While driving out, I saw, opposite an Indiana Turnpike service station, a German shepherd just after it had been struck by a car. The impact must have broken the dog's hip because I watched it half drag, half claw itself to the side of the road. And as I passed, I saw it twisting back to bite its hip where it had been struck.

I did not stop. I told myself I couldn't have even had I wanted to. A tractor trailer was highballing right behind me. Besides, what could I have done to help? The dog would probably have bitten me had I approached. There were people in the service area. Someone must have let him escape from a car. I drove on without slowing, ashamed that I hadn't stopped, incapable of shaking the image which to this day is so clearly imprinted on my mind: the grimace on that German shepherd's lips as it arced back to attack the terrible hurt.

There is a line in Nathanael West's
Miss Lonely-hearts
describing the advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist forcing himself to read the anguished letter from a woman who signed herself “Broadshoulders.” “He read it,” West explained, “for the same reason that an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”

I found myself wondering if something like that did not also partially explain the eagerness with which Peg Mullen invited me to come. In a strange way I still think it did. Peg Mullen, of course, disagrees. She invited me, she said, because the war was still raging, young men were still dying, and I was supposedly just writing a magazine piece which would have appeared a few months later when it might have been able to do someone, somewhere some good.

I turned into the Mullens' farm a little after twelve noon. I parked my car by the shed in which rested the old Farmall H-series tractor Michael had used to pull out the tree stumps his last night of leave. Peg Mullen, wearing slacks and a yellow short-sleeved sweat shirt with a
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
traffic sign printed in black on its front, met me at the farmhouse door. We had barely introduced ourselves when she said, “Michael would have just died if he had seen this lawn!” We both winced slightly. The hogs had broken through the fence again the night before and rooted up the spring rain-softened yard. The late March snows had melted away from the fields, but there was still snow in the ditches on either side of the section line roads. Since Gene was out in the lower field with his son John, Peg brought me into the kitchen and offered me lunch and coffee, apologizing for the papers covering the kitchen table.