Friendly Fire (38 page)

There were dozens of sheets of stationery with letterheads from the Department of the Army, the Department of State, the United States Senate, Another Mother for Peace, various universities and business groups. There were newspaper clippings, stacks of typing paper, blue second sheets and carbons, a roll of stamps, several laboriously printed letters on ruled tablet paper. Peg cleared a space for me. I began pulling out my own papers and pens as Peg asked me how my trip had been, what I felt might happen to Captain Ernest Medina now that he had been formally accused of responsibility for the “alleged” murders committed by his infantry company at My Lai, and what the people “back East” thought of Richard Nixon and his “latest invasion of Laos.”

I was trying to answer Peg's questions as best I could when Gene Mullen came up the back stairs followed by John. Gene agitatedly paced from the window by the sink to the side window facing the barns. His hands were constantly working, tapping the windowsill, tugging at his belt, adjusting his half-frame glasses, brushing back his silver hair. He patted the shoulder of his son John, who had seated himself quietly in a corner. Then, impatient to get on with it, Gene sat at the kitchen table, swept some papers aside with his arm, gestured for me to pull my chair closer, took one of my yellow pads and a pen and started right in.

“One boy was on guard here,” he said. He drew an oval on the legal pad and placed a small circle near one edge. “Each platoon had their own guard. Schumacher, he was Third Platoon.” He circled Schumacher's position again. “Culpepper was in the Third Platoon. Platoon Sergeant Webb was Third Platoon.…” Gene drew two more circles.

“Gaynor was Third Platoon,” Peg said. “We've heard only from Third Platoon boys.”

“And Abe Aikins, the medic, was stationed here.” He drew another circle. “We have letters from all these boys. We can tie it all in. Wherever you set up a defensive perimeter, your forward observer radios back to your artillery unit to get your coordinates in case of an enemy attack. The boys tell us they fired a little around eight o'clock.”

“There's a conflict in their stories there,” Peg said. “One boy says they never fired at all. That they called off the artillery and didn't test it that night. Two of the boys said they did fire artillery around eight o'clock and finished. But the shot that killed them came in at two thirty, and nobody believes it was called in.”

“It wasn't called in,” Gene stated flatly.

“We're searching for this Lieutenant Rocamora because he was the forward observer who would have requested the artillery.”

“Now whenever you have artillery,” Gene said, “you can fire from this point here.…” He made an X on the yellow pad below and to one side of the oval “hill.” “Or from this point here,” Gene continued, marking another X above and to the other side of the “hill.”

“It's against the Army Code to fire over a group,” Peg explained. “But this is what they did. They were firing right over the boys' heads evidently.”

“The shell came in, and it killed Michael, here.” Gene drew an X within the oval. “Leroy Hamilton, here.” He marked an X near Michael's. “And a colored boy name of Polk, Private Polk from Detroit, was right between them and wasn't even scarred. There were seven boys wounded in the First Platoon. We know of a boy name of Prince who lost his leg—”

“—We're trying to locate him, too.”

“—and this boy Polk went berserk. He tried to kill the artillery forward observer for calling in the shot. They handcuffed him. And that morning when the choppers came in to pick up the dead and wounded—”

“Gene,” Peg interrupted, “that was over a period of about three days.”

“Just be quiet, please. After the helicopters came in, Charlie Company was moved over to another ridge for the boys to cool off. Sergeant Webb, who lives down to Des Moines, was guarding this boy Polk, but Polk got loose and took a machine gun and started spraying some Vietnamese working in a rice paddy. He also evidently struck a couple officers. So a helicopter came in and picked Polk up. They gave him a shot of sedatives that almost killed him—”

“The medic saved Polk's life!” Peg said. “He went into shock from the sedatives.”

“The medic had to revive him. When they got back to Chu Lai, they had twenty-seven charges against Polk. Now here's his letter.” Gene pushed a letter across the table to me. The rush of voices ceased.

Polk's letter, dated four days earlier, had a “Drawer ‘A,' Fort Leavenworth, Kansas” return address.

Dear Mrs. Gene:

I received your letter today. I must say that your letter brought back some sad memory. Yes I was in Michael platoon, He was my platoon sergeant at the time of his Death.

You might have been told this, but I'll like to tell you again. I was with your son at the time of his Death. Michael Died in his sleep, he never woke up. Before his Death him and I became very close friend. I was the only Black in our Squad, and I can honestly say I had heard the word Nigger enough to last me a life time. You see I could talk with Michael, he didn't care if you was Black or White. He was a good guy and we both had a Great Deal of Respect for each other.

You know I almost went to jail the night of the Accident. I was trying to get to our Fire Detection Officer. Today I still believe he call the rounds in short. Anyway the guys in the Company keep me away from him.

You might like to know, if you don't already know, the reason why I'm in jail. Well it started right after Michael Died. I was out in the field when this E-5 call me a Nigger, I came close to shooting him. But I was talk out of it buy the Officer in our Company. I was treated unfair because of my color. People dislike me in the Company with out full knowledge of the type of person I was. I was Prejudg the day I got into Co. C., 1/6, 198th. Your son Michael, and Prince, and a few other Blacks who names I can no longer remember, were the only People in the Company I could communicate with. Well, on the 26th of Feb 1971 I woke up in the hospital with a concussion and a contusion on the side of my face. They said I shot at some Friendly Vietnamese and hit a Lt. (Officer) and a E-6. All the while I was in the field and saw the Death of your son I was Depress. I often have Dream about that night, and sometimes I can't sleep for thinking about them guys and how young they were. Please excuse me, but you are the first person I have talk with fully about that night and it Feel Good To Do So.

I have been lock up for 14 months and I'm tired of this. All I want is to get out of jail and see my Family. I haven't seen them in 16 month. I'll be so glad to see them (smile). I guess I'll have to wait until June 1, 1972. I wish you could Be of some help to me, Mrs. Gene, but you see I don't know what to ask you. If you could stop by and visited me I would like that Very Much. Oh yes! I try to get your address in March 1970 to write you to tell you how Sorry I was. But they wouldn't give me your address.

Well, until I hear from you may God blessing be with you and your family.

Sincerely yours,

s/Willard

P.S.: Happy Easter.

“The clue to everything is Private Polk at Leavenworth,” Peg said when she saw I'd finished the letter. “We asked him to send us the name of Prince, the white boy who Culpepper told us had lost a leg that night—they didn't think he would live, but he did. We want to meet Prince because he was in the First Platoon.… The thing is, I don't know whether we are just suspicious characters or whatever, but right away we didn't believe what we were told. And this whole story we were first told by the service officer about the ARVN artillery, we repeated it, of course. So when the boys in Vietnam read about us in the newspaper, how I'd said Michael had been killed by South Vietnamese artillery, that's when we found out the truth. They wrote back that Michael had been killed by
our
artillery. That there had been investigations made.”

Speaking very slowly, Gene said, “We have asked for the artillery log. You see a record of every shot fired has to be kept for one year. We wrote Senator Fulbright—”

“He and Senator Hughes are trying to get it for us.”

“We want to know if that shot was scheduled, see? Who called it in? That information has to be in the artillery log. It has to be in there!” Gene sorted through some papers and pushed one to me. “Read this. It's the death certificate for my son.”

Before I had a chance to finish it, Gene said, “Michael did
not
have a missile wound in the chest. He was lying on his left side. He used to sleep on his left side.” Gene pushed himself back from the table and stood up. “The wound was right through here,” he said, pointing at his right kidney. “The undertaker told us that.”

“This is something we'll never, never be sure of. We don't know why we.…” Peg paused and rubbed the corners of her eyes wearily. “About a month ago we met a couple, and this is what the father did. After everybody left the funeral home, he undressed his boy from head to foot to see if it was his boy. They couldn't tell because their son had been hurt in the face. The father undressed him because he knew his boy had a birthmark on his shoulder. He didn't know where he got the strength to do that. He said it took superhuman power, and he couldn't do it again, but he said, ‘I did it that night. I had to know.' And, see, my older brother when we brought Michael back here said, ‘Peg, you've got to find out what happened to him. Look at him!' he said. ‘He could have had a stroke the way he looks!'”

“The shock I got when we opened the casket and there wasn't a mark on him!” Gene said. “I'll never forget it. Never!”

I spent five days with the Mullens that April out on their farm for the most part listening to them talk about their son, Michael, what a fine, hardworking young man he had been, how he had been active in 4-H projects, had worked his way through college and into graduate school, how he would have been the fifth generation of his family to work the same land homesteaded by his great-great-grandfather John Dobshire, 120 years before. What impressed me most was how positive and unshakable they were in their opinions, as though they were responding to issues the morality of which could be clearly and unmistakenly determined—issues which were, therefore, capable of being judged against existing standards of right and wrong.

The intensity of their indignation wasn't all that overwhelmed me. I was astonished, too, by the seemingly inexhaustible volume of sources their outrage fed upon. Local school board elections, telephone company stock manipulations, draft inequities, Nixon's Vietnamization policies, farm subsidy programs, the voting records of incumbent Congressmen and Senators, the machinations of the military-industrial complex, each seemed to contribute to some consummate proof of a conspiracy on the part of the United States government deliberately to deceive and defraud Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Eugene Mullen of La Porte City, Iowa. It became clear, however, that the Mullens' indignation, their sense of betrayal, stemmed from a vision of an America better fitted, perhaps, to an innocent history primer, one capable of expressing a faith in a simpler America—an America which probably never even used to be. One other thing became clear, too, those first five days: the Mullens' surviving son and daughters would never possess so naïve a confidence in this nation's purpose or its leaders. This, in a very real sense, is as great a tragedy as the loss of a son.

The Mullens rarely needed to be prompted or asked; too much time had passed since anyone had encouraged them to talk. Sometimes their voices were soft, gentle; at other times, they spoke so angrily their words seemed to darken the air about us. Equally expressive would be those sounds which were not spoken at all: the slam of a hand hitting the table in rage, the breath caught because an onrushing memory was causing too much pain, the sigh. Mixed in with their charges and complaints would be numbers: the numbers of dead, of wounded, of nonbattle casualties, unit designations, congressional amendments, the numbers of bills pending, votes needed, letters received or sent, postage paid out, friends who had defected, friends made anew, the number of documents received, copies run off, dollars spent, days used up, weeks waiting, months passed, years wasted. Papers were always rustling in the background, letters, documents, telegrams, carbons, Xeroxes, corroborating evidence shifting about. And, too, there was that full panoply of emotions exposed: Gene belligerent, furious, impatient, confused, exhausted, tender and, in the next instant, anguished, unsure of himself, inchoate, in tears. And Peg: abrasive, demanding, cocky, maternal, protective and then so suddenly lonely and gutted, defensive and vulnerable, so tired and exiled by anger and grief.

During those five days on their farm they would over and over again describe themselves as “typical.” Their detachment about themselves was what had, at first, seemed so puzzling about their unself-consciousness in that Another Family for Peace film. It was as though they viewed themselves as representative rather than actual and, by so doing, eliminated any presumable inhibitions. They abdicated privacy in favor of exposure, and yet they seemed not to have any sense of exposing themselves because “they” did not exist as individuals. “They” were indistinguishable from people like them.

“We want people to know,” Gene said that first afternoon, “what it's like to walk down the streets of your own town and have your friends cast one look at you, then turn their heads away because they have a guilt complex that your son died in this war. We want to know why we have to say hello
first!
”

“Well”—Peg sighed—“as I said to Gene before, this is something we've done to ourselves.… You don't realize the depth to which in Iowa, a farm state, a conservative state, one is taught to respect the flag, the government. It involves our whole school syst—” Peg paused. She saw me turn off the small tape recorder I had brought to put in a fresh cassette.