Books: Prairie Protest

FRIENDLY FIRE

by C.D.B. Bryan

338 pages. Putnam. $10.95.

During the predawn hours of Feb. 18, 1970, on a jungle hilltop near the village of Chu Lai, South Viet Nam, an outgoing shell from a U.S. Army howitzer accidentally struck a treetop and exploded above the men of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, Americal Division. Six were injured, two were killed. One of them was Michael Mullen, 25, the fifth generation of his family to farm the same fertile Iowa acreage. Michael was pierced by a small crescent of steel that tore a hole in his heart. He was sleeping and died instantly.

The men were victims of what the Army called “friendly fire.” Back in La Porte, Iowa, Peg and Gene Mullen, Michael’s parents, found the term painfully offensive. Moreover, the Army had listed their son as a “nonbattle” casualty, a category that, the Mullens were to learn, was used rather loosely to keep down the weekly figure of war dead.

Truly Sorry. C.D.B. Bryan’s Friendly Fire follows the Mullens’ travail step by step. A Connecticut-based novelist (The Great Dethriffe, P.S. Wilkinson) and stepson of the late John O’Hara, Bryan spent weeks interviewing the Mullens. He conducted his own investigation to corroborate the official version of how Michael was killed. Muffling his own indignation, he tells how the bureaucracy added insult to loss. An anguished war-protest letter from Peg Mullen to Richard Nixon brought back a note from a White House clerk assuring her the President was “truly sorry” that her son had died. Attached to the note were copies of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” speeches. Another letter from the Adjutant General’s office informed the Mullens that the “nonbattle” casualty had been posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and the Good Conduct Medal. Then Form 1174 arrived from Army Finance. It was a voucher that the Mullens were asked to sign in order to receive the pay due Michael at the time of his death. They refused to sign without a full accounting. When it came, there was a deduction for advance-leave time that their son was no longer in a position to make up.

The Mullens were unlikely protesters. Although Catholics and Democrats in a predominantly Protestant and Republican region, they shared the natural conservatism common to most farmers. The Mullens had reared their four children to obey the authority of man and God, and they were not self-conscious about admitting they belonged to the Silent Majority. Michael, the eldest, had been an outstanding 4-H Club member and even tried to persuade his parents to vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964. When his draft notice came, he was a graduate biochemistry student who planned to take over the family farm.

But Michael’s death radicalized his parents—particularly his mother—because their basic conservative values had been shattered. As Peg Mullen became convinced that her son’s life was wasted by an accident in a war that itself was a mistake, the line between her grief and fury vanished. She grew obsessed with extracting from the Government every obligation due her. She fought for and won the right to have Michael’s body specially escorted home from Viet Nam. When an Army liaison officer told her that it would take 15 more days, Peg replied: “You can tell that sonuva-bitch in the Pentagon that I’ll wait 15 years.”

Tapped Phone. Two weeks later, Peg became the La Porte pariah when she told the American Legion there would be no military rites at the funeral. Although her husband shared her bitterness, he was too busy to share in all of her protest activities. She traveled to Washington to participate in antiwar demonstrations and confront Senators and Congressmen. She corresponded with other parents whose sons had been killed in Viet Nam. The Mullens also used Michael’s Government insurance money to publish a full-page ad in the Des Moines Register. It consisted of 714 crosses representing Iowa’s Viet Nam War dead. One of the results was that the family’s phone was tapped. Once, when Daughter Mary Mullen called her mother, she heard an unfamiliar voice say, “Shut that thing off.”

Friendly Fire is not another self-righteous lamentation about the U.S.’s tragic blunderings in Southeast Asia; rather, it is as close to elemental tragedy as any nonfiction account to come out of the war. Bryan conveys Peg Mul len’s grief and rage with such purity and tact that at times she seems like a Mid dle Western Antigone, challenging the authority of the state in the name of what individuals hold most sacred. This might be too high-blown a comparison for the farmer’s wife to accept. But she would probably agree with Sophocles’ ancient heroine that “it is the dead, not the living, who make the longest demands.”