Friendly Fire (36 page)

“Won't you take one of these?” an old woman asked her.

Peg looked down at the piece of literature the woman had thrust into her hand. “What is it?”

“Everyone should return to God,” the old woman said, smiling. “Only He can right such wrongs. Communism is the true enemy of free nations and free people. Their atheistic dogma is anti-Christ.”

“I agree, madam,” Peg said, “but we should devote our energies to fighting our enemies here at home—not in Indochina. The best place to fight the anti-Christ would be the Pentagon.”

“What's the Pentagon?” the woman asked.

The President of the United States, shielded from view by the wall of buses, had already climbed into his limousine and was gone.

Later that night Peg Mullen, home again, looked at the Des Moines
Register
newspaper photographs of American helicopter crewmen kicking and punching the wounded and panic-stricken South Vietnamese Dewey Canyon II soldiers away from the landing skids so that their helicopters could take off. During the Laotian operation the ARVN troops suffered close to 45 percent casualties. More than 3,800 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, 5,200 wounded, and eight battalions were put out of action. Ninety-four American helicopters and five aircraft were destroyed. Sixty-six American crewmen were killed; seventy-nine were wounded. Peg pushed the newspaper aside and got out her box of stationery.

Dear President Nixon:

It is now just over a year since our son died a needless death in Vietnam, died while he was continually questioning what the administration was doing and going to do about the insane war in Vietnam.

As I listen to the news this week, I can only thank God that we have no more to give,
ie
: We will give no more young men to war. I personally feel that only the mothers of the world can stop this conflict. When I am asked to speak before groups this is my theme: “Mothers, please don't let your sons go—don't live with the guilt for a lifetime that you stood back and let your innocent son die in Vietnam.”

Michael's father and I find it very difficult to live these days, but because we do have faith in God, we feel that there will be a special hell for the men and governments that have allowed the war to continue … there will be a judgment to be faced and it will be as swift as was the death of our son.

Mr. President, your plan [to end the war] is now going into the third year. Did you ever really have one?

In the name of God, stop the insane killing—haven't there been enough heads served on platters?

Sincerely

s/Mrs. Gene Mullen

Peg received the following reply:

DEPARTMENT Of STATE

Washington, D.C. 20520

Mrs. Peggy Mullen

La Porte City, Iowa

Dear Mrs. Mullen

President Nixon has asked me to reply to your comments on Viet-Nam, where your son gave his life in our country's service.

President Nixon and all of us are deeply conscious of your sorrow and that of other parents who have lost a son in Viet-Nam. We share in your loss. The young men chosen to fight our battles are the pick of our youth; America has always relied on the citizen soldier. The question of why young Americans must fight, suffer and sometimes die in a distant country is not an easy one. But two World Wars and the conflict in Korea have taught us that retreat before aggression does not assure our security or that of the free world.

When a just and honorable peace is achieved in Viet-Nam, free men everywhere will owe an immeasurable debt to America's sons who gave their lives in defense of freedom. We pray that God will grant this nation the wisdom and strength to redeem their sacrifice by making the kind of peace that the next generation will be able to keep.

Sincerely yours,

s/Michael Collins

Assistant Secretary

for Public Affairs

Collins, of course, was the command module pilot who had orbited the moon while Neil A. Armstrong and Colonel Edwin E. Aldrin made man's first lunar landing on July 16, 1968. Peg was thrilled to have received a letter from the astronaut, but unimpressed by its contents. Peg's next plea to the President for an end to the war was also answered by Collins:

I can understand your desire for peace but the question of a withdrawal must be considered in the light of our purpose in Viet-Nam. We are fighting to assist the people and the Government of the Republic of Viet-Nam to defend themselves against aggression by North Viet-Nam. We are there, at their request, to help them maintain their right to direct their own affairs free from external interference. This is what we are trying to achieve at the peace talks in Paris and on the battlefield in Viet-Nam.

Collins described how the troop level had dropped from 549,000 in the beginning of 1969 to 434,000 fifteen months later. He added that the President planned to lower the troop level by a further 150,000 before the summer of 1971. Collins mentioned the various peace proposals offered, and Peg knew it was the same old line. She assumed Collins wrote what he was told to write and had no intention of any further contact. But a few days later Peg had reason to address Collins directly:

Dear Mr. Collins:

There are very few stories in the newspapers these days to bring a smile to my face … but the announcement that you were resigning from the State Department actually made me chuckle.

Having been the recipient of letters from Washington following the Cambodian invasion, I found it very difficult to associate your signature with the propaganda that went out from Mr. Nixon's office.

Good luck in your new assignment. You are a credit to your ancestry.

Sincerely,

s/Mrs. Gene Mullen

Collins was quick to reply:

Dear Mrs. Mullen:

Thank you for your note concerning my change of jobs.

However, I very much resent any letter I sent you concerning Cambodia being called “propaganda that went out from Mr. Nixon's office.” Our publications are in fact true; and I think events since Cambodia, such as American casualty rates, prove that what we said at the time was absolutely correct.

Sincerely,

s/Michael Collins

There has been no correspondence between them since.

Peg spent the remainder of March attending meetings of her local Another Mother for Peace group. She asked that she be appointed chairman of the Committee on Abolishing the Draft. In a letter to Senator Hughes she explained, “I intend to work hard and endlessly in this endeavor.” Although the inequities Peg saw in the draft had largely been eliminated on May 13, 1969, when President Nixon by executive order signed the random selection lottery system coupled with the one-year vulnerability clause into law, one of Peg's charges bears mentioning: “Only 3.2% of Congressmen's sons and grandsons,” she wrote Senator Hughes, “have been drafted to serve in the Vietnam War.”

Of the 234 draft-eligible sons (grandsons not included) of Members of Congress during the Vietnam period, 118—or just over 50 percent—received deferments. Forty-eight congressional sons served in the military during this period, but not in Vietnam. Twenty-six—or just over 11 percent—did serve in Vietnam. Peg's 3.2 percent figure was the correct amount for those who saw combat. None was killed or missing, and only Captain Clarence D. Long III, son of Representative Clarence D. Long, (D. Md.), was wounded.

Snow still covered the Mullens' fields in the middle of that month when a film crew from Another Mother for Peace came to La Porte City to interview and photograph the Mullens. The filmmakers had already completed their work on four other families who they felt best represented the personal anguish caused by the war. The first family's son was killed on Mother's Day. The second family's son had surrendered to federal marshals rather than serve in the Army. The third family's son was a Navy pilot spending his third year as a prisoner of war. The fourth was from a ranching family from Texas; the young father returned from Vietnam without his leg. The film released under the title
Another Family for Peace
was photographed by Joan Churchill and directed by Donald MacDonald. It was edited down to thirty minutes, the final ten minutes of which was the Mullens. To get those ten minutes, the film crew stayed four days at the Mullens' farm.

The film, photographed in black and white, opened with a long shot of the Mullens' farm taken from the field next to the stand of timber which had once held “The Old Eagle Tree.” The camera held that shot until the vastness and isolation of that bleak, wintry Iowa landscape seeped in. The only sound was the barking of a neighbor's dog seemingly far, far away. Perhaps the most extraordinary facet of the film was how unself-conscious the Mullens were. Peg had insisted on being permitted to fix up her hair, but other than that, there was no indication that the Mullens were “acting.” There was a great deal of voice-over dubbing, exterior action shots with an imposed sound track: “My reaction to the death of my son was twenty-five years of my life torn out of me,” one hears Gene saying as he carries a huge bucket of feed on his shoulder to his hogs. He is calling, “Pig! Pig! Pig!” and is bundled up against the cold. “I was stunned. I couldn't see it because I had great hopes for him. He had a great future. I couldn't see why it had to happen. I felt this very strong bitterness. I couldn't accept it. My boy—it was only when they brought the body back and I was asked to view it, that I could accept it. That it was Mike.…” Gene has put the bucket down and is now walking over to the old plum red Farmall Michael had driven his last night. “When I went to the airport,” Gene is saying as he climbs into the seat, “and I escorted my boy's body back to the funeral parlor”—he presses the ignition and holds it—“I asked to have his dog tags and the military said, ‘They still belong to the United States Army.'” The tractor starts, and Gene advances the spark. “I said, ‘That's enough! From now on the boy is gone! And I'll bury him as my son and not as a military soldier anymore,” Gene puts the tractor into gear and drives off. The camera shifts to the Mullens' downstairs recreation room where Peg has set up a table and is writing a letter to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Throughout her typing one hears her voice dubbed over saying, “I have to live with this thing.… I have to make Michael's death a cause in my household. This is what I'm doing now. Michael has to have died for something! I think it's my duty to see that he
did
die for something.”

The camera pans across the recreation room wall containing photographs of Patrick and Mary Ann Mullen, a photo duplicate of John Dobshire's original land grant, yearbook photographs of the Mullen daughters; then the camera closes in and holds a tight shot of Michael's photograph as Peg's voice-over continues: “If my protesting of the war is that ‘something,' then that's what I'll continue to do. My feeling now is a feeling of guilt. I feel I didn't do enough to enlighten my son. A mother who loses a son simply feels she didn't protect him, I suppose.… Even though he's a man, he's twenty-five years old, you feel you still should have been in there fighting for him. A mother can't let her son go there. It isn't the ‘patriotism' thing anymore. This son is yours! He's part of you!… They'd have to drag him over my dead body to get him to go now.…”

The final sequence was filmed at the Mount Carmel Catholic Cemetery at Eagle Center. The Mullens drive into the cemetery, stop their car and get out. It is a long shot. Gene reaches into the backseat for a snow shovel, and then, with Peg wrapped up in a fur coat following slightly behind him, Gene walks up the slight hill to the grave. The wind-drifted snow has blown across Michael's flat headstone and Gene chips away at the ice with the edge of the shovel blade. There is no sound except the harsh grating of the steel shovel across the ice. Peg crosses herself, then kneels in the ice beside Michael's grave to pray. It is an awkward shot, too set-up, and Peg, shivering with cold and discomfort, stands without ever actually having looked at her son's grave. Gene is still chipping away at the ice. He kneels and wipes at the snow with his gloved hand, but a crust diagonally crossing the headstone will not come free. Gene straightens, picks up his shovel again, but before he can use it, he doubles over with grief. His shoulders shake, he buries his face in the back of his gloved hand, and Peg, seeing him weeping, lays a hand across his arm. She touches him for only a moment. Gene pulls himself together and begins shoveling again. The ice will not budge, and Gene crosses himself and prepares to leave. Peg, too, turns away from the grave but pauses and turns back. For the first time she looks at Michael's headstone. The camera is not in tight on her face, and she looks at his stone for only a second, but if one stops the projector entirely so that that one instant is frozen in a single frame one cannot help recognizing her expression. It is not anguish or sorrow; it is a terrible rage.

The camera follows the Mullens as they cautiously make their way down the glazed hill to their car; then it pans slowly back across the desolate Iowa landscape, back up the hill to the gravesite, and dips down for one last tight focus on the ice-locked stone:

-ael E. Mullen

-n Sept 11, 1944

-illed Feb 18, 1970

Son of Gene & Peg

-ared to ripple my pond”

(In June that year the Another Mother for Peace Committee arranged a showing of the film in an auditorium at the United States Capitol. All the Senators and Congressmen were invited to attend. The only Senators present were Senators Harold Hughes and Jack Miller of Iowa and former Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska. Miller left before the Mullens' portion of the film was shown.)

*
Dewey Canyon I was the code name for the 3rd Marine Division's invasion of Laos during January and February, 1969.