Friendly Fire (28 page)

Perhaps Peg's confusion might be partially explained by the communication she had received from Lieutenant Colonel Dominic Giorgi in that same day's mail. His letter, in response to Peg's request for more information on how the casualty reporting system functioned, reads like a celebration of Pentagonese:

As I have mentioned to you in my previous letter to you the casualty lists are available in alphabetical order and alphabetically by state. We do not maintain lists by those who were casualties on a specific date. To get such a list would require an extraordinary amount of time and personnel resources which are not available.

However, I am sending you the official casualty releases of February 25, 26, and 27, as you requested. As I discussed with you these lists do not necessarily indicate that those are names of U.S. servicemen who died the previous week or on a specific date. Quite possibly some died the previous week but you cannot determine if this is the case by reading the release. The attached explanation will clarify this point.

There followed a typed single-spaced “Procedure for Reporting U.S. Casualties in Southeast Asia,” which filled one-half of a sheet of regular office typewriter paper:

The number of casualties as they are reported, is expressed as a cumulative number beginning in January, 1961. At the end of each week the previous cumulative number is subtracted from the new cumulative number and the difference is referred to as the number reported for the week. This statistical process permits us to make necessary changes; such as, from non-hostile to hostile, missing to died-while-missing, etc., and still preserve the accuracy of the published totals. Everyone of the dead, missing, and captured are on our lists, with date of casualty. Note that the weekly number represents the number reported during that week and will almost always contain reports of a few whose date of casualty was earlier.

There are two principal reasons for this: One, some men are initially reported as missing and as evidence is later received are changed to dead although the date of death is established as the date they were reported as missing. Secondly, in some instances the circumstances are such that a determination as to cause of casualty cannot immediately be made and the report would then usually be classified as non-hostile and later changed, if necessary, according to information in the final report. Some of these cases take quite a while.

The foregoing is to explain why we would find in the list of names of those reported as having died during any week some who would have an official date of death which was earlier. Conversely, some who actually died during the week in question could not be reported until later.

Over and over again, while reading the procedure, Peg had had to remind herself that the “casualties” and “cumulative numbers” and “statistical processes” referred to dealt with human beings, young men once as alive and as vital as her son. The vocabularly, with its businesslike detachment, offended her as much as the message itself.

Several points should be made about Giorgi's letter and the enclosed casualty reporting procedure. His assertion that “to get such a list [of casualties on a specific date] would require an extraordinary amount of time and personnel resources” was probably correct. Since, however, lists were available by alphabetical order and alphabetically by state, and since “every one of the dead, missing, and captured are on our lists, with date of casualty,” there is a means by which a computer search by date could have been made—were the military to have wanted such a thing done. The computer might not have been programmed to provide such information, and the creation of a new program is what might have taken the time and personnel resources.

Secondly, the procedures Giorgi outlined permit considerable flexibility in reporting the actual number of casualties. Heavy losses on any given week could be delayed in filing and thereby spread out over a series of weeks, hidden away, or at least dispersed so that no one state adjutant need become overly alarmed by having to report a large number of area casualties at one time.

Thirdly, as the procedure document points out, in those instances where “the cause of casualty cannot immediately be made,” that casualty would “usually be classified as non-hostile.” Why? Nonbattle casualties were not included in the casualty count given on the evening news. This policy, therefore, facilitated keeping the “reported” casualties as low as possible. By the end of June, 1970, the actual casualty figure for the Vietnam War was 42,754 deaths as a result of hostile action, 8,122 deaths from “non-hostile” causes.

On July 7 Lieutenant Colonel Taylor acknowledged having received Lieutenant Davies' and Larry Phelps' signed application for compassionate reassignment papers and wrote Peg, “We hope that the case will be resolved favorably and without delay.”

On July 10 Major General F. W. Boye, responding to Peg's night letter to President Nixon pleading for Phelps' life, explained that Phelps' request could not be honored because the problem was long-term and could not be resolved in the one-year period authorized. “Physical conditions which are of a long term duration,” the general explained, “do not satisfy the criteria for compassionate reassignment.” In other words, if young Kathy Phelps had been stricken with polio recently rather than when she was two years old, her husband could have been reassigned.

On July 17, six weeks after Peg had mailed her angry registered letter to each United States Senator denouncing the deductions taken from her son's final paycheck, Senator Jack Miller introduced the following bill, S.4099, before Congress:

A BILL

To amend section 2771 of title 10, United States Code, relating to final settlement of accounts of deceased members of the armed forces.

1.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House

2.
of Representatives of the United States of

3.
America in Congress assembled
.

4. That section 2771 of title 10, United

5. States Code, is amended by adding the

6. following new subsection:

7. “(e) A setoff may not be made

8. against an amount otherwise due under

9. this section to recover pay and allowances

10. for any period the deceased was on excess

11. leave if the member was killed by hostile

12. fire, explosion of a hostile mine, or any

13. other hostile action.”

14. Sec. 2. This act is effective as of January 1,

15. 1964. A

(page 2)

1. person who is entitled to payment of an

2. amount by virtue of the enactment of this

3. act based upon a final settlement made under

4. section 2771 of title 10, United States Code,

5. before the date of enactment of this Act

6. shall be paid that amount if application is

7. made therefore to the Secretary concerned

8. before the first anniversary of that date.

Jack Miller's bill was read twice to the Senate and referred to the Armed Services Committee. From the Armed Services Committee the bill was forwarded to the Pentagon for further study. The bill never re-emerged, nor has it been passed.

Even if it had passed, Michael Mullen would not have been covered, nor would any other “nonbattle” casualty.

Chapter Sixteen

Five months had now gone by since Michael's death. A Midwestern father whose son had been killed in Vietnam the same day as Michael wrote Peg:

I know how you feel and especially the sense of total frustration in dealing with the Pentagon. We have a huge military-industrial complex now who couldn't care less.

You are familiar with the form letter sent out: “The President deeply regrets—” blah, blah. The President couldn't care less; nor the Pentagon. Your son and my son are just ciphers, just a number who unfortunately stopped an enemy bullet and now are gone forever out of our lives.

Harry went into combat two days after arriving in Vietnam. He was on combat duty six months when wounded by shrapnel—some of it so deep they were unable to dig it out. However the medics sewed him up, and away he went right back into combat, shrapnel and all. I wrote to Nixon and received a reply from some general who said that the Army medics are the people who make these decisions, and like all doctors in America,
never
make a mistake. That letter, of course, was tantamount to a death sentence.

Harry was riding in a helicopter on a reinforcement mission around the Song Bhe area. They were shot down and all were killed immediately. After Harry was killed we received long distance calls from different parts of the country inquiring about Harry. All were from people who had sons who were killed on that day. All had phoned the Pentagon and, for some reason, all had been given our phone number. Anyway, if the Pentagon had been correct, Harry would have been killed in three different helicopter crashes on that day.

Pardon this scrawl, but I have been under medication four years after two major operations. So we still have five in our family with two boys coming up—one almost sixteen. Another couple of years it will be time to flee the country. I am sure my wife and I would never survive another military funeral in the family.

We can only say God helps us all in our sorrow and anguish. We must accept the cross. God bless you and comfort you.

For more than nine years the war in Vietnam had been on the front pages of every metropolitan newspaper, inside every newsmagazine, brought nightly into American living rooms on the television news. By now the casualty figures slipped through the nation's consciousness with no more significance than those windstrewn calendar pages used by early cinematic directors as a device to indicate the passage of time. The casualties weren't human beings; they weren't even
grunts
or
dinks
or
slopes
or
gooks
. They were, as the Midwestern father had written Peg, “just ciphers, just a number.” And America had reached a surfeit of numbers.

Even though concerned citizens continued to read their newspapers and tried to keep informed, it became increasingly apparent that their government did not want them to know the truth and that the executive branch in particular was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent the American people from learning the full extent of United States involvement in the Southeast Asian war. Instead of honesty, Americans were given numbers: body counts, tonnage counts, mission counts, truck counts, troop counts, weapons counts … counts?
Kownts?
The word had become alien and meaningless in its repetitions. It was as if the government believed numbers, through their inviolability, could sanctify and shore up a policy which large numbers of Americans had already come to question and protest.

In mid-July, 1970, in response to the growing antiwar movement President Nixon approved the Huston Plan for expanded domestic intelligence operations, even after being warned that parts of the plan were “clearly illegal” and involved “serious risks” to his administration. The plan, developed by a thin, balding twenty-nine-year-old aide to the President, Tom Charles Huston, called for the stepped-up spying upon of private American citizens by electronic means, the opening and resealing of citizens' mail, surreptitious entry into and burglary of citizens' homes and offices and the continued and increased surveillance of American student groups at home and abroad. Authorization for the Huston Plan was rescinded five days after Nixon initated it only because of objections raised by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, whose opposition seemed based less on the infringement on citizens' constitutional rights than on the threat such an expanded domestic intelligence operations might have had upon the autonomy of the FBI and his role as chief. Nixon's approval of the plan came just two weeks after disclosures that the names of thousands of law-abiding American citizens—termed “persons of interest”—were being fed into large government computers for use by law enforcement agencies. These “persons of interest” were Americans who had made their anguish over government policy known. They were Americans who despaired of not only why we were in Vietnam, but how we were there as well. They were sickened by what the American government was doing to the Vietnamese and ourselves. They were not pro-North Vietnamese, pro-Communist, pro-anything except putting an end to the horrible slaughter of human beings of both sides in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was not only making people like the Mullens believe that their sons had died in vain, but also making them ask if they themselves had lived in vain. What was the point of five generations of a family working the same land if they had become as enemies to that nation upon which their land rested? The Mullens did not believe that they were unpatriotic. The government was unpatriotic. And the only means by which the Mullens could demonstrate their love for this country was by continuing to protest those policies which, they felt, were inhumane and un-American and by proceeding with their efforts to help those still in Vietnam. The more they protested, the lonelier they became. Few people visited the farm. If anyone did stop by, the conversation would always turn to the war. John stayed out in the fields for as long as he could, and when he came home, it would be to change.

“Are you going out tonight too, John?” his mother would ask.

And John would say, “Mom, I got to. You can get turned off by shouting too much. I got to get away.”

Iowa was hot now, muggy. The cornstalks had burned a dark shade of green; lawns were browning out. Larry Phelps had been assigned to “C” Company, 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry, 1st Cavalry Division and had gone directly into combat with them. A month had passed, and still no action had been taken to get Phelps out. Peg asked Henkin if “the saga of Larry Phelps is now a closed book.”

Brigadier General Bertram K. Corwitz responded that an investigation indicated “Sgt. Larry Phelps had not applied in writing for a compassionate discharge” and that when the Army had learned Phelps might have had “justification for such a discharge,” he was interviewed at Oakland “and rejected.” Corwitz's letter infuriated Peg. At no time had Phelps applied for a
discharge;
he had requested only a
reassignment
. She immediately telephoned General Corwitz at the Pentagon. The general was busy, and she was transferred to Colonel Alan Thompson, his aide.