Friendly Fire (51 page)

“Schwarzkopf used to come out in his helicopter,” Gene interrupted.

“He'd never stayed out all night on a mission with them, had he?” Peg asked.

“He wasn't on the hill with Charlie Company,” I said. “He was on another hill, Hill Four Ten, with the artillery unit.”

“When I told Schwarzkopf, when he sat there in that hospital bed with that other colonel, Colonel Knap, who was sitting there with him.…” Gene paused, then asked, “Did he tell you about Knap?”

“Yes, he was a major in the Judge Advocate General,” I said. “He was a lawyer.”

“Why'd he want a lawyer there?” Gene asked.

“For a witness,” I said. “He had first asked Knap to come so that he, Schwarzkopf, could ask him some questions. But when you said you wanted a witness there, too, he asked Knap to stay.”

“In other words,” Gene said, “he was afraid I was going to get a little bit violent?”

“I think he was concerned for your sake and his own, as well as the other men in the ward.”

“Why was he concerned for my sake?” Gene asked indignantly.

“Because it was so obviously an emotional situation,” I said. “He wasn't sure how you were going to react and he had asked Knap down initially to advise him. You had said you were bringing charges against him in federal court, remember, so Schwarzkopf asked Knap what it all meant and was it all right for him to talk to you.”

When Gene started to tell me again how Schwarzkopf had been suckered down into the minefield, it was clear he had begun to confuse some of the details of Schwarzkopf's flight out to Charlie Company the morning after Michael was killed with his flight into Bravo's minefield area. I told him I had questioned and requestioned Schwarzkopf about the minefield incident and spoken to others about it as well. The colonel had not been suckered down, I explained. He had landed to free his helicopter for the evacuation of the wounded. Around and around we went. I read him the colonel's transcript, how the company commander had had to be med-evac'd out, how terrified Schwarzkopf had been crossing the minefield to the wounded private, and Gene said, “Now listen, I'm going to tell you something. You're hearing my side now. You've already heard his side. Schwarzkopf has had plenty of time to think of his own self, his story, his ‘I.' I said to Schwarzkopf, ‘Colonel, I—'”

“The thing is that it's over with,” Peg said. “Schwarzkopf has had time to take care of his story.”

“He's had time to plan,” Gene said. “When I looked at him out at Walter Reed, I saw a defeated officer of the United States Army. I don't care what
any
body says, he's got a guilt complex.”

“But, Gene, he didn't kill Michael. You know that. What should he feel guilty about?”

“Because he was hungry!” Gene answered angrily. “He wanted to be a brigadier general at thirty-five. He made that brag, and we can get the boys to prove it to you!”

“Oh-h,” Peg said uncertainly, “I'm not sure whether we can or not.” She pushed herself away from the sink and sat down with us at the kitchen table. “One thing I want to know,” she said. “What was the company out there for? There wasn't anything in that area, was there?”

“They went out for two reasons,” I said. “Their primary mission was to provide security against rocket attacks on the Americal Division Headquarters at Chu Lai. On this particular mission, however, Division intelligence had had some ‘unidentified radio intercepts.' They had picked up Vietnamese talking on radios where there weren't supposed to be any Vietnamese operating. So Charlie and Delta companies from Schwarzkopf's battalion were sent in to make contact. But they didn't find any.”

“You know damn well they couldn't find any Vietnamese radio!” Gene said.

“They were looking for the North Vietnamese troops using the radios,” I explained.

“The whole incident was Schwarzkopf's stairway to a brigadier general.” Gene shrugged.

“No, Gene, let me try to correct you on this because you've mentioned it again and again. Schwarzkopf was a lieutenant colonel. He still had to be promoted to full colonel before he could make brigadier general and—”

“He could make that in sixty days!” Gene scoffed.

“Gene, no one has made colonel in sixty days since the Army Air Corps days of World War II,” I said. “We can talk about this some more if you'd like, but we'll just keep going around in circles and end up with my having to defend the military, the government, the system or whatever, and this is not what I came back out here to Iowa to do.” I sat there for a moment looking at them. Gene was angry with me; Peg was clearly upset. “I thought if I could find out the truth for you,” I said, “if I could learn what had happened to Michael, how he had died, what had caused the shell to explode over his position.…”

The Mullens' expression did not change.

“I guess,” I said, “I guess I don't really know what you want from me anymore.”

“What we want from
you?
” Gene said indignantly. “The whole thing is this: when you came out here, you wanted something from
us!
”

“What do you mean?” I asked, surprised. “What do you think I wanted from you?”

“You wanted a story,” Peg said.

“You wanted the story, and you wanted the truth.” Gene said.

They were right, of course.

I never wanted to be in this book. I had intended only to be a journalist: unbiased, dispassionate, receptive to all sides. I knew my only chance for articulating the tragedy of this war, the only way I could explain, as I had set out to do, the people's estrangement from their government, their increasing paranoia and distrust, lay in limiting my focus.

By concentrating on one specific incident, the death of Michael Mullen, but restricting myself to this one isolated Iowa farm family's story, I had hoped somehow to encompass the whole. This technique, I later came to recognize, was not a journalist's but a novelist's; and it led inevitably not only to my own participation and inclusion in the Mullens' story but also to that awful sadness and disappointment I now felt. I knew because I thought them wrong about Schwarzkopf, they believed I had passed judgment against everything they had done. I knew they were wondering whether they could trust me, or had I, too, become a part of the conspiracy to hide the truth? Vietnam did that to us. It dragged us all in, made us choose sides. Had not Peg herself said, “There's only one side when you lose your son”?

That I disagreeed with them about Schwarzkopf was beside the point. I did agree with them on principle: Michael's death was an unforgivable tragedy—as Schwarzkopf, too, would have been and was among the first to agree. The colonel further recognized, however, that their opinion of him was a symptom and consequence of the injuries they had received. He was the one who said, “But it's an even more terrible thing that has happened to the Mullens themselves.” They, like their son, like the nation itself, had become casualties of the war. And my sadness lay in knowing nothing I could say or write could change that, just as nothing they could say or do could bring back their son.

Gene had said, “You wanted the story, and you wanted the truth.”

“Well, that's what he's getting,” Peg then said.

“Now I'm not going to like the truth if it isn't in my favor—”

“Oh, Gene!” Peg laughed.

“You can understand that,” he said, ignoring Peg.

“Yes, but I also understand that the truth is neither in your favor or their favor,” I said. “It's somewhere in between.”

“The truth is in
their
favor?” Gene asked, beginning to get angry all over again.

“Gene, of course, doesn't want the military ever to look good,” Peg said. “We have a very slanted bias. A hatred for the military. And there's nothing that will change that, I suppose.”

“I can understand that, too,” I said, “but I think it's important for you to know that both Schwarzkopf and Captain Tom Cameron, your son's company commander, were fine officers. Fine men.”

“Well, I don't buy it,” Gene said. “I don't buy Schwarzkopf, and I don't buy the military.”

“Here's the whole thing,” Peg said. “The military didn't want us to think our son had died simply because somebody, his own men, had shot a gun at him. How do you explain this? They don't want to admit how many boys were killed by their own troops. And thousands of them died, you know, not just Michael.

“There was a picture in
Time
magazine about three weeks ago showing the First Air Cav being combat assaulted. The photograph showed three boys being airlifted into battle. I cut it out and sent it to Mr. Nixon, saying, ‘Maybe you'd be interested in the faces of these three young men. What strikes me most,' I wrote, ‘is that none of these young men has a father who is a President or a Senator or a Congressman.…' But”—Peg shrugged—“of course I get no response to any of this mail anymore because I'm a ‘crackpot.' I still wonder about those boys. They lost two or three boys a week out of that outfit for the past two months, and I worry about those three boys. I really do.”

“We know we're not getting the right casualty count even now,” Gene said.

“That first week a little while ago when they had a casualty count of only two?” Peg said. “Well, we had three deaths in Iowa alone. I wrote Jerry Friedheim
*
—they were all listed as nonbattle, see—and I said, ‘Well, you'll just have to do a little better job on your homework. Three bodies returned to Iowa, but only two died nationwide.' I had a two-page letter from him saying the news media had goofed in Saigon.”

Gene started in on Schwarzkopf again: the colonel had had time to change his story to suit himself; he was interested only in making general; he had spoken with the Mullens because he was “scared.” Nothing good had been accomplished in Vietnam. We were being whitewashed by the Army. Schwarzkopf had been pulled out of Vietnam. He was finished because of his back injury. Finally, Peg said, “You two have been at it long enough.”

During dinner we talked about the upcoming presidential election. The Mullens would support the Democratic candidate, George McGovern. Nixon would carry Black Hawk County with 31,926 to McGovern's 21,721 votes. We talked about farming and the price freeze (“Gas went up, fuel went up, telephone rates went up … oh, what a freeze!” Peg laughed sardonically). And, of course, we talked about the war. There were still 139,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Several days earlier, on February 25, the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Air Cavalry Division was ambushed during a sweep through Long Khanh Province east of Saigon. The battle lasted from dusk until noon the following day and ended only when U.S. bombers, gunships and artillery came to their aid. The 3rd Brigade suffered the heaviest casualties received by U.S. ground forces throughout the previous ten months. As we covered the same ground again and again, I thought I detected a pessimism, a cynicism that hadn't been present in the Mullens before. Gene began talking about the fox hunters who came out to the farm.

“Why do they want to kill a fox?” he asked. “Foxes have been on this earth for years and will continue to be. They haven't done any real harm. If they were going to do irrevocable damage, they would have done it by now. But that's the way man is: destructive. He'll destroy himself.”

I was surprised to hear Gene speak that way. “What hope do you have if you believe that?” I asked.

“Well, I hope we can learn to live together,” he said. “Here you are. We talk. You have your thoughts. I have mine. You haven't imposed your thoughts on me, and I've tried not to impose my thoughts on you. Tonight we had pork tenderloin and biscuits and you enjoyed it.… Why can't we get along with the other people in the world?”

The following morning, March 1, 1972, was the second anniversary of Michael Mullen's burial. A gentle rain had fallen during the night, and before dawn the temperature had suddenly dropped to fifteen degrees below zero. The roads were covered with a thin sheet of ice.

“Jee-zoos!”
swore one of the men at the breakfast counter of Mom's Café that morning. “How do you like this weather?”

His companion swiveled his stool to look out the window. “Liked yesterday a whole lot better.”

The usual five-minute trip from La Porte City to the Mullens' took twenty minutes that morning. On John Dobshire's dirt road leading up to the farm I was worried that the weight of the car would simply slide me off the crown and into the ditch. On either side the barren fields had been glazed with ice, and as I passed the little patch of woods which remained from the stand of timber once containing “The Old Eagle Tree,” I saw that the bare limbs were covered with crystal sleeves.

Gene was asleep when I arrived, but Peg was up and gave me a mug of coffee. “Here, read this,” she added. “I found this letter last night and thought it might interest you.”

The letter, written on inexpensive stationery in a rough, unschooled hand, had been mailed from a small town in Iowa a few days before.

Dear Mrs. Mullen:

They say my son gave his life for his country, that is not true. He was murdered by his country.

The book written by Robert Scheer,
How the U.S. Got Involved in Vietnam
should be required reading by all Americans; but Norman Mailer says the people in this country like war. Thank you for telling it like it is.

My wife died when Roy was five years old. I cooked, sewed on buttons, worked and farmed 240 acres. Roy was Salutarian of his High School class. Six feet tall and 180 lbs. After 2½ years of college he was drafted. After five months with the Air Cavalry he became a machine gunner on a chopper.

The way the world is going I should think of him as being safe, but I can't get over it.

Thanks again,