Friendly Fire (24 page)

“Of course you were,
General
…” one young man said.

“Don't call me general!” the Senator replied.

“But you are a general, aren't you?” the boy quietly asked. He was referring to the Senator's commission as a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve.

Peg told Miller she thought Congress should simply end the war immediately. “We should bring all the troops home bang! Right now! There's no need to stay another hour, another day or lose another life.”

Senator Miller glared at Peg. “You're a dreamer, Mrs. Mullen!” he said, pointing a finger at her. “You live in a dreamworld with your theory on ending this war!”

“So do you, Senator,” Peg replied.

“Well, Mrs. Mullen, your theory is an obsession with you,” Senator Miller said angrily. “It would never work; it can't work. It won't work.”

Peg shrugged and tuned the Senator out.

The meeting with Senator Miller ended just after five o'clock, and the woman from Virginia asked Peg if she might take her to dinner. “I miss Iowa so much,” she said, “and it's so good to talk to someone from my home state. Can't I do something for you?”

“But I look like the devil!” Peg protested, patting her hair.

“You look fine,” the woman insisted. “Please? Can't I take you to some place nice to eat?”

“Well.…” Peg thought for a moment, then smiled. “Oh, why, sure you could.”

They ate at a seafood restaurant overlooking the Potomac River. During cocktails and red snapper the woman spoke of growing up in Iowa and Peg told her what had happened to Michael. Suddenly Peg put her fork down and laughed. “This just kills me!”

“Why?” the woman asked.

Peg gestured in dismay toward the elaborate dinner she had been served. “It's all so delicious and pleasant I feel guilty enjoying it.”

“Guilty?
Why? About what? Don't you think you deserve a decent meal?”

“Oh, sure”—Peg smiled—“but I couldn't help thinking about all those hungry kids.” Peg explained how she had traveled from Iowa with two busloads of penniless students and how the money the man had given her for her bus fare was almost all gone.

“If that's all you're worried about,” the woman said, rummaging into her purse, “here.” She gave Peg $30. “I'd gladly give you more, but that's all I have with me.”

“I couldn't accept that!” Peg said.

“You sure can!” the woman said and pressed the money into Peg's hands. “Consider it my donation to your antiwar activities. Frankly, this is one donation I know will be doing someone some good. Besides, I'm not asking you to take it for yourself. It's for the students.”

Peg gave the $30 to the CALCAV group. Several of the girls brought groceries with the money and that evening cooked dinner in the church kitchen for about sixty members of the group. Afterward Peg telephoned Gene to tell him what had happened since she had left the farm.

“I got the casualty list from Senator Fulbright's office,” Gene told her, “the one for the week Michael died.”

“Yes?”

“Michael's name wasn't on it.”

“Wasn't
on it? Are you sure?” Peg asked.

“Of course I'm sure—and I'll tell you who else wasn't on it,” Gene said. “That Hamilton boy, Leroy Hamilton from Kentucky. He wasn't listed, nor was that boy from Illinois whose father called us and said his son had died the eighteenth.”

They spoke for a while about others missing from that list as well. The day after they had been informed of Michael's death, Peg and Gene had started investigating other casualties which might have resulted from South Vietnamese artillery firing upon American forces. While they were getting in touch with other families whose sons had died on February 18, they learned four helicopters had been shot down with at least thirty men on board that same day and that there were at least five sites where mysterious shellings had occurred. But when it was confirmed that Michael had been killed by American, not ARVN, artillery, they had quit their search. Peg told Gene she would try to see Senator Fulbright the following morning and assured him she and the children were fine, just tired. Gene told her to go to bed.

The next morning, Wednesday, June 3, the Iowans visited more Senators and Congressmen. Peg was initially impressed by Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, whom she thought very handsome. Percy took time to shake hands with everyone in their group; he was the only Senator to do that.

“Of course I'm for the 609 amendment,” Percy told the CALCAV listeners. “I thought you all knew that. But when the war ends, I'd like it to be my bill that ends the war.”

Peg thought the Senator's comment so shallow she couldn't stand it.

Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, the Senate minority leader, was too busy to meet with the group, but sent one of his aides. Peg and Patricia knew the Senator opposed the 609 amendment. Patricia, who spoke very emotionally about the morality of the war, received a standing ovation from the CALCAV group.

Peg went from Senator Scott's office to Senator Fulbright's. She spoke there with James Lowenstein, Fulbright's military liaison aide, and told him the casualty list sent her had been incomplete.

“What do you mean ‘incomplete'?” Lowenstein asked.

“I mean,” Peg said, pausing deliberately, “our … son's … name … isn't … on … it! I know something fishy's going on. Isn't there some way I could speak directly to whoever makes up these casualty lists?”

Lowenstein shrugged. “You could always try.…”

“I can't believe my son's death wouldn't be recorded somewhere,” Peg said. “And if it isn't, then how many others have there been like him? How many boys have never been counted?”

Lowenstein seemed hesitant to contact the Pentagon any further about the casualty lists, so Peg suggested she would call them herself. A young man with the CALCAV group telephoned the Pentagon instead and was able to arrange a briefing for the following afternoon. Peg left Lowenstein's office for the Senate gallery so she might sit in on the Cooper-Church amendment debate.
*

The only time the CALCAV group were asked to leave their purses and briefcases behind was on entering the Capitol. Peg checked hers and moved up to the gallery. She listened to the debate for an hour; then she and Patricia went back down to the rotunda. Peg handed a guard the claim check for her briefcase, and he grunted lifting it over the counter.

“Your briefcase is certainly
full!”
he told Peg.

“It's interesting, too,” Peg replied.

“What do you mean, ‘interesting'?” the guard asked.

“It's full of antiwar literature.”

“Oh? Can I have some?”

“Sure,” Peg said, snapping her briefcase open, “that's what it's here for.”

As the guard sifted through the papers, a second guard came over to look. Peg explained to him what was inside and the guard said, “Look, lady, I was there. I know what Vietnam's all about.”

“Then you know how immoral the war is,” Peg said.

“I don't know any such thing!”

Peg's briefcase was returned to her, and as she and Patricia were walking together out the Capitol, they fell in step with some men in hard hats who wore name tags identifying them with some Pittsburgh labor union group. Peg turned to the nearest one. “I suppose you're here lobbying against the war?”

“Mother!” Patricia said, taking her mother firmly by the arm. “You'd better start behaving yourself.”

The following afternoon, Peg's last day in Washington, she visited the Pentagon. Although the young CALCAV member had arranged the briefing for twenty members of the CALCAV group, twice that number showed up. To Peg's outrage, just within the front entrance a display booth had been set up to “sell” the Cambodian war. The rear projection screen showed American GIs chopping through the jungle and breaking open crates of captured supplies while a brisk and hearty narrator described how successful the operation was. Patricia, standing next to her mother, said, “They're neglecting to show one thing: the American boys dying there. There aren't any pictures of dead bodies.”

Roger Simpson, one of the organizers of the CALCAV group and a chaplain at the University of Iowa, walked up behind Peg and Patricia and was so visibly shaken by the display booth's merchandising of the war that he was not sure he wanted to go further. Peg told him he must. Simpson later described Peg as “the spiritual focus of the whole effort.”

“Those of us with the university were up on the intellectual issues, question-oriented, prepared to discuss things objectively,” he explained “We needed the emotional balance Peg provided. She was such a good communicator, so open and friendly. She accepted sort of a mother-sister role to us all and was largely responsible for creating among us a family spirit in the best sense.”

“Peg,” Simpson asked, turning his back on the Cambodian display, “is it all going to be like this?”

A Pentagon public relations officer in civilian clothes approached before Peg could answer. “Will you come with me, please?” he said. He led the group down one corridor after another, deeper and deeper into the Pentagon where their briefing was to be held. Peg, oppressed and alienated by the vastness of the building, lagged behind and finally slumped onto a bench along the wall. She did not want to follow the group anymore. All during the march down the corridor she had felt the animosity of the Defense Department guards and the military personnel. She had not missed the anger in their eyes when their glances flashed upon the peace buttons the Iowans wore. The antagonism depressed Peg even more. She did not want to be there. She did not want to have to listen to the Pentagon spokesmen's words. She knew how futile the briefing would be. They would not be told anything because addressing them would be considered “aiding and abetting the enemy.” Peg, seeing that she had fallen far behind, forced herself to her feet. She reminded herself that she had come to Washington after all to find out about the casualty lists, and as she trudged along after the group, she was determined not to relax until after she had done that.

As she rounded a corner, she saw that a young curly-headed boy she had nicknamed Harpo was waiting for her to catch up. Peg hurried toward the boy, and while they walked on together, she had the eerie sensation that she was being “shadowed.” A tall man in black trousers and a white shirt was walking behind her. Whenever Peg and Harpo walked a little faster, the man would speed up. When Peg dropped back, the man dropped back. An Army major came out of an office, grimaced at Peg's peace button, and hurried past. “Harpo,” Peg said, “I'm getting ill.”

“What's the matter?” the boy asked warily.

“Well, if I had thought that just the sight of an American military uniform would make me sick, I wouldn't have come here.”

The man in the black trousers suddenly came abreast of Peg and cut her off, preventing her from continuing up the corridor toward the CALCAV group. “Did you say something back there?” he asked.

“What?” Peg tried to step around him.

“I repeat,” the man said, “did you say something back there?”

Peg attempted to push past him. “Will you get out of my way?” she asked impatiently. “I've got nothing to say to you.”

The man refused to let her by. “Did you say that the sight of an American uniform makes you ill?”

Peg glared at the man. “I'm afraid it does. Now will you—”

“Oh, it does, does it?” he asked. “Well, just what is your bitch?”

“Mister,” Peg said coldly, “some man in one of those American uniforms killed my son! I'm afraid the sight of an Army uniform is going to make me sick forever.”

“Come off it, my son was all shot up in Vietnam, and you don't see me acting the way you do.”

“Your son was all shot up?” Peg asked. “Then what are you doing here? You sound almost glad of it, as though you were bragging! What kind of man are you to brag about your son's wounds?” Harpo began nervously tugging Peg's sleeve, but Peg was furious. She told the man exactly what she thought of him, the Pentagon and the war.

Finally the guard said, “All right, lady, that's enough! I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

“You can ask all you want,” Peg told him. “I don't even know or care who you are—”

“I'm a guard,” the man said. “Now will you leave the Pentagon right now? Or am I going to have to escort you out?” He reached for Peg's arm, and she slapped his hand away.

“Mister, I'll leave the Pentagon when I'm goddamn good and ready, escorted or not. Now get the hell out of my way because I'm with a group.” She simply bullied past the guard, dragging Harpo with her, and hurried down the corridor. At the briefing room door she looked back, but the guard was nowhere in sight.

The briefing room appeared familiar. It was the same one, she thought, they used for their briefings on TV. Since the seats were nearly filled, Peg perched on an oak table near the back. A man asked Peg if she wouldn't like them to bring her a chair, but she declined. Then she leaned toward a colonel standing next to her and asked whether the three men on the podium would be delivering the briefing. The colonel said they would and identified them as Daniel Z. Henkin, an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs; Jerry W. Friedheim, Henkin's deputy assistant; and then Brigadier General Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr., USAF, the senior military officer in Henkin's office and chief of information at the Pentagon.

“And what is your name, sir?” Peg asked.

“I'm Lieutenant Colonel Giorgi, Air Force.”

“‘Georgey?'” Peg asked”.

“G-I-O-R-G-I,” the colonel spelled out.

Assistant Secretary Henkin commenced with a discussion of the Cambodian operation. Peg had the feeling she had heard it all before, that it was, in effect, the same justification delivered by the President on TV. Henkin showed the same maps, the same photographs, the same rationale. Peg listened wearily to the same promises of success. Throughout Henkin's talk Peg had the sensation that the CALCAV group was being photographed, that the briefing was being taped. Although no evidence was in sight, she learned that others in her group had had the same reaction. At Henkin's conclusion he asked if there were any questions. Peg's hand shot into the air. “Why didn't you tell us we've been in Cambodia for weeks, for months before Nixon went on television and said we were?”