Friendly Fire (20 page)

The only objection the Mullens did receive was from a “Mr. and Mrs. P. J. Schultz” of 2113 Clinton Street, Iowa City, who tore the Mullens' protest out of the newspaper and mailed it back with the message, printed in red ink across the bottom:

MY SON BELIEVED IN WHAT HE WAS FIGHTING FOR IN VIETNAM, FREEDOM FROM THE COMMUNISTS; He believed that they are taking over country after country like Lenin and Krushev said they would, and he believed it best to stop them in VIETNAM, rather than in the streets of U.S. If your son did not believe this, he was a fool to go, but
don't
drag the rest of our sons down to your son's level.

The “Schultzes” also printed “JU” in the lower left-hand corner.

Peg wrote the family, but her letter was returned. No one by that name lived at that address. And there was no “P. J. Schultz” in the Iowa City telephone directory.

The Mullens were overwhelmed by the response to their advertisement. Virtually every Iowa radio and television station featured it on their evening news. The UPI interview was carried by wire service newspapers throughout the country. Local television stations again sent reporters to the Mullens' farm. Television network commentator Paul Harvey, using the
Register
page as a backdrop, told how the Army's gratuity check had paid for the Mullens' antiwar protest and how the Iowa farm family's anger expressed his own growing dissatisfaction with the war.

Peg Mullen, with mixed feelings, discovered she had become a celebrity. Although she realized people now sought her views, that it was now easier for her to express her opposition to the war, she was deeply troubled that her new status as an “antiwar spokesman” would not have occurred had not Michael died. She knew that people in La Porte felt she was “cashing in” on Michael's death, that she was, in a sense, “displaying his bones for a profit.” And it distressed her that their protest had had precisely the effect they had hoped for everywhere except their own hometown. La Porte resented the publicity she received. The estrangement the Mullens had begun to feel within their own community was growing worse. They saw fewer and fewer people, withdrew more and more into the isolation of their farm.

Peg continued to correspond with parents whose sons had been killed in the war. If a new casualty's family didn't live too far away, she would visit them and offer her help. But Peg's outspoken opposition alienated, in several instances, the very people she had most hoped to comfort. Many families were unprepared and unwilling to agree with Peg that their sons had sacrificed their lives for an unjust cause. They would not believe that their sons' lives had been “wasted.” Peg was forced to accept exceptions to her conviction: “There's only one side when you lose your son.”

Peg learned from Culpepper that publication of Michael's letters and the Lamberto interview in the
Register
had reached Vietnam. “I've just come from Bayonet to the field,” Culpepper wrote Peg. “In the rear they told me about your articles. I'm glad to see that your son told how it was and you had it published so the public can see what goes on over here. I'm glad that you stand up for us boys in Vietnam.” Culpepper also told Peg that if anyone asked where she was getting her information from, she should “tell them about me. They can't do anything. It might get me out of the field.”

Peg was enormously gratified by Culpepper's letter. He had provided vindication for the antagonisms her outspokenness had generated. She was “stand[ing] up for us boys in Vietnam.” She was even more encouraged when she subsequently learned that soldiers who had seen their advertisement were writing back for fifty more copies at a time. The Mullens' antiwar protest was being tacked up on orderly room walls all over South Vietnam.

Six weeks had passed since the Mullens received the Army Finance Center's request that they sign a blank pay voucher for Michael's final eighteen days of pay. They had not heard from Army Finance again. On April 21 Peg wrote Lieutenant Colonel William J. Cochran, chief of the Army Finance Center claims division: “It seems that we did not make ourselves clear to you in our letter to you of March 6, i.e., we want a detailed statement of monies due Michael for the 18 days of February, 1970. We want to know what deductions from pay were made, and what additional pay is due because of unused furlough, and allotment of $60 that did not arrive at destination on or about August 5.

“We are merely asking you for a statement of account,” Peg's letter continued, “something I had to do April 15 as far as our government was concerned.”

Peg explained that they had not worried about the money before but needed it now because “our ‘Peace' campaign which has gone nationwide is beginning to become costly, and we have just begun.”

Peg sent duplicates of this letter to Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.

Peg had long felt frustrated by the total lack of response with which her correspondence to the White House, the Army and Congress had been met. Other sympathetic families had complained, too, over and over again that nobody seemed to read the letters they had sent and that writing Washington accomplished nothing. Peg cut a stencil explaining her new plan and mailed it to her friends and contacts. Everyone who wrote protesting the war was to send her a carbon of the letter. She hoped thereby to accumulate as many as 500,000 copies, which she could then present in bulk to one person at the Capitol in graphic demonstration that such letters did, in fact, exist. Carbon copies slowly began to trickle in, but the flood which Peg had anticipated never materialized.

Instead of being discouraged, Peg merely channeled her energy toward an already proved idea, a second advertisement, one which would reinforce the premise that the war and the deaths of young Iowans would continue until the citizens of the state had the courage to speak out. Because the crosses had been so effective, Peg and Gene decided to repeat the theme. A huge cross was formed by the intersection of the words “SILENT” and “SILENCE”:

S

I

SILENT

E

N

C

E

The accompanying text bludgeoned their message home: “Was there silence when you looked at your son and said, ‘He is too young, it will soon be over.'” “Was there silence because you were afraid to speak out?” “.… you were afraid to be labeled un-American?” “.… you accepted the status quo?”

“Was there silence when you thought of your boy in Vietnam and said, ‘It couldn't happen to him.'?

“Are you silent because ‘You did your duty' in another conflict?” “Are you silent because you think the war doesn't involve you?” “… because you have a financial interest to protect?” “… because of political expediency?” “Are you silent because you have no CONSCIENCE?”

The Mullens had “THE FIGURE IS NOW 719 IOWANS DEAD IN VIETNAM” printed in large boldface letters across the bottom of the cross.

The advertisement then asked, “Vietnam deaths recorded in Defense Dept., Washington, D.C., only—not at State level—WHY?” Below that appeared five small black crosses with the legend: “number of crosses added to 714 since April 6, 1970.”

The advertisement ended:

To the hundreds who have written … or called in person, we agree—YOUR DECISION IS NOW. This nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Mullens could afford to purchase only a quarter page this time. Their advertisement appeared on Sunday, April 26, 1970, again on page five of the first news section of the Des Moines
Register
, next to a Singer sewing machine advertisement. Its appearance met with practically no response. The Mullens don't know why that happened, whether it was the advertisement's location in the newspaper or its layout, but they were terribly disappointed.

The next day Secretary of State William Rogers, faced with almost unanimous bipartisan opposition within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against giving military aid to the new Cambodian leaders, informed the committee members that the Nixon administration had not reached any decision on Cambodia's request for extensive military aid. He did suggest, however, that the President had authority to send at least limited amounts of military assistance with or without Congressional approval.

Two days later, only a few hours after thousands of South Vietnamese troops supported by American warplanes and heavy artillery crossed into Cambodia, the Defense Department announced United States advisers were being provided the ARVN forces fighting in Cambodia, but that “only a few hundred Americans” were involved. Peg felt sure the Defense Department was lying.

Mothers for the past several weeks had been worriedly writing and telephoning Peg. About a month previously, these mothers said, their sons had written that their units were heading for the Cambodian border. The young men were with the 198th Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the 1st Air Cavalry Division and the 11th Armored. The mothers had heard nothing from their sons since. Peg, certain that those units had been sent into Cambodia, decided to forward the women's letters and comments to Senator Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee right away. She had intended to have them duplicated on the Don Bosco High School machine, but while in La Porte on an errand she noticed Bill Wagner and his brother, Roy, on the sidewalk in front of their law offices. She had the letters with her, Wagner had been nice enough to have had her letters copied three weeks before, so she parked her car, walked over to him and asked if she might rent his machine for about an hour. “I'll pay the girl whatever you pay her, or more than that,” Peg told him, “if you'll let her run me off some work.”

“I can't, Peg,” Wagner said. “Today's the last day for filing state returns. You're aware how we work, that we get all the farmers out in the mail on March first. So we still have all the people who have been gracious enough to wait until the farmers' papers are done.”

“It'd only take an hour,” Peg said.

“I can't.” Wagner shook his head. “I just can't spare the hour you want—or the girls. A lot of these people are due refunds and they're anxious to get them back. These are people whose federal returns are due, not just the state returns. We've got to get them in the mail. We've got two girls tied up running these machines now all day long.”

“That isn't the reason, and you know it!” Peg said bitterly. “You just don't want—”

“That's not so!” Wagner interrupted. “If you'd asked me any other day, you could've—”

“You don't want to let me use the machine because you know why I need it.”

“It has absolutely no connection whatsoever with why you want to use it,” Wagner said impatiently. “I wouldn't rent the machine to, to
the President of the United States
today if he asked me. I've got to use the machine today. It's packed with my business, and
that's it!”

“That
isn't
it! You American Legion types—”

“That's ENOUGH!” Wagner shouted. “I don't want ANY PART of you or WHAT YOU'RE DOING! It's trash! JUST TRASH!” He whirled away from Peg and into his office.

“Roy?” Peg said, turning to Wagner's brother. “Can't you please—”

“I'm sorry, Peg,” Roy Wagner said. He left her standing alone on the sidewalk.

She turned and saw that townspeople had stopped to watch the exchange, but they refused to meet Peg's look and moved away. She walked slowly back up the street, climbed inside her car and wept. Back at the farm later that afternoon Peg wrote Wagner she was sorry to have lost her temper. “I have cried very little since Michael died, but you can bet I cried today.” She enclosed a dollar and a half for the six letters he had coped for her three weeks ago and mailed the letter.

When the canceled check was returned in their monthly bank statement, Peg saw that Wagner had endorsed it over to the American Legion as a donation from the Mullen family.

The next day, April 30, President Nixon announced that he had ordered American combat forces into action against Communist sanctuaries twenty miles within Cambodia. On nationwide television the President said, “Tonight American and South Vietnamese units will attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.” Even as he spoke, more than 50,000 troops, half of them American, were pouring into Cambodia in eight separate thrusts from the highlands opposite Pleiku to the jungles west of Saigon. The President stressed that it was “not an invasion,” he was taking this action “not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.”

The President's speech provoked new antiwar protests, campus violence and moves in Congress to curb his powers. The President, the newspapers reported, referred to those on campuses who opposed his policies as “bums,” compared with the American soldiers in Vietnam whom he called “the greatest.”

It was apparent within only forty-eight hours of his speech that although the American and South Vietnamese troops were able to locate substantial rice stores and some abandoned medium-sized enemy bases, the Communists had evacuated the Cambodian Fishhook section being searched, and no indications whatsoever were found of any elaborate underground “headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.” The Defense Department announced that more than 100 U.S. fighter-bombers had attacked Hanoi's antiaircraft guns in “protective reaction” against the firing upon of unarmed U.S. reconnaissance planes. The raids were the biggest since the November, 1969, bombing halt.

College campuses throughout the nation were racked with antiwar protests. At Kent State in Ohio, after two nights of violent disruptions during which the ROTC building was burned to the ground, a 600-man contingent of the Ohio National Guard was sent to the campus to bring the university students back under control.