Friendly Fire (41 page)

“Like the mother whose son was in Special Services,” Peg said. “He was murdered in his bunk, and the Army told her he'd been killed in battle!”

I began gathering up my notebooks, pads, pens, the tape casettes. Gene said, “I guess you've got to be going?”

“You won't forget about us, will you?” Peg asked.

“No.” I smiled. “I certainly won't do that.”

Peg handed me a pen I'd overlooked and followed Gene and me to my car. Gene held the door as I got in. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I guess, the same as the two of you,” I said. “I'm going to try to find out what happened to your son.”

On my way out of La Porte City on Route 218 I heard on the radio that the 45,000th United States soldier had been killed in Vietnam. I happened to glance into my rearview mirror and caught sight of the town's paint-chipped and faded sign. It took me a moment to decipher La Porte's motto, its print backward in my rearview mirror. It was
PROGRESSING WITH AMERICA
.

*
Senator Charles E. Goodell (R. N.Y.), defeated in 1970 by Republican Conservative Party candidate James L. Buckley.

*
The Reverend Philip F. Berrigan, forty-seven, already serving a six-year term in the Federal Prison at Danbury, Connecticut, on charges of destroying draft records (Catonsville 9 trial), was then, along with five others, indicted by a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, grand jury on charges of conspiring to kidnap then-Presidential Adviser Henry A. Kissinger and of plotting to blow up the heating tunnels of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Among those indicted with Philip Berrigan were his brother, the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, the Reverend Joseph R. Wenderoth, the Reverend Neil R. McLaughlin, former priest Anthony Scoblick, Sister Elizabeth McAlister of Mary-mount College and Eqbal Ahmad, a fellow of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of Public Affairs.

*
On March 29, 1971, a court-martial jury of six officers convicted First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., of premeditated murder of 22 South Vietnamese men, women and children at the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968. The jury, following thirteen days of deliberation, convicted Calley of 22 deaths rather than the 102 deaths he had been charged with, because witnesses disputed the number during the trial. On March 31, the same jury sentenced Calley to life imprisonment, along with dismissal from the service and forfeiture of pay and allowances.

The guilty verdict brought on enormous public reaction. The Calley case became a rallying symbol for debates over the morality of the Indochina War. The verdict was denounced in Congress, state legislatures, at public meetings, and resolutions demanding Calley's release were passed. Vietnam veterans attempted to turn themselves in claiming they were just as guilty as Calley. Draft boards resigned. In Indiana the state flag was flown at half-mast.

Many saw Calley as a “scapegoat” for others higher in the chain of command. As the public outcry continued, President Nixon ordered Calley on April 1 to be moved from the stockade to his quarters at Fort Benning until his case could be reviewed. Nixon added he would personally review Calley's case “before any final sentence is carried out.” The President was accused of “unprecedented intervention.” Others defended Nixon's action as his legal right as Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

*
In April, 1954, during the desperate battle for Dienbienphu, then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon stated that if the French were unable to hold, Indochina “would become Communist dominated within a month. The United States … cannot afford further retreat in Asia. It is hoped the United States will not have to send troops there, but if this government cannot avoid it, the Administration must face up to the situation and dispatch forces.”—
New York Times
. April 17, 1954.

Chapter Twenty-One

On Monday, April 19, one week after I first met the Mullens, Operation Dewey Canyon III commenced in Washington, D.C. This “limited incursion into the country of Congress” was staged by a little more than 1,000 Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Although their number was small—out of the perhaps 3,000,000 American men who served in Vietnam, only 12,000 joined the VVAW and fewer than 1,200 took part in the protest—the veterans made a dramatic impression. It was the first time American men who had fought in one of this nation's wars had come to Washington to demand its end while that war was still going on.

The veterans remained in Washington for five days. They laid wreaths at Arlington National Cemetery, conducted mock search and destroy missions and took “prisoners” on the Capitol steps; some demanded a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the war; others attempted to turn themselves in as war criminals at the Pentagon. (They were met there by Brigadier General Daniel “Chappie” James, USAF, the Pentagon briefing officer who had denied in front of Peg's CALCAV peace group that American planes were bombing Laos. James told the young veterans, “We don't take American prisoners of war here. Why don't you try the Justice Department?”) The most formidable impact, however, was achieved through former Navy Lieutenant John Kerry's speech before Congress on Thursday, April 22. Kerry, in his fatigue uniform, wearing the Silver Star and other decorations he had received for his bravery in Vietnam, sat in a leather chair studded with brass nails facing the assembled members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the television cameras.

“Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes its hands of Vietnam,” Kerry said, “someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be—and these are his words—‘the first American President to lose a war.'

“We are asking Americans to think about that because,” Kerry said, leaning forward in his chair, “how do you ask a man to be the last to die in Vietnam?
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations. And if you read the President's last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly, ‘but the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists, or whether or not we will try to give it the hope to be a free people.' But the point is that they are not a free people now, and we cannot fight communism all over the world. I think we should have learned that lesson by now.”

Two days earlier, the Nixon administration had anonymously suggested that fewer than 30 percent of the veterans present in Washington had actually ever seen any service in Vietnam. Kerry, like the others, was furious. “This administration has done us the ultimate dishonor,” he told the Senators. “They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in 'Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witness enough for others and for ourselves.

“We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission—to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say ‘Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy, obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.”

Kerry gathered up his papers and leaned back in the leather chair. He looked up at the Senators, and they back down at him. Then the television lights were extinguished.

That night Peg Mullen telephoned me from a restaurant on the Indiana Turnpike. She was part of an Iowa group heading by bus for Washington to take part in Saturday's march.

On Friday, April 23, while Peg's bus was speeding east, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were once more marching to the steps of the Capitol. Accompanying them were Anne Pine, Evelyn Carrasquillo and Neil Olsen, Gold Star parents whose sons had died in Vietnam. Both Mrs. Pine and Mrs. Carrasquillo had brought with them the flags which had covered their sons' coffins. Mr. Olsen wore his dead son's field jacket and carried a trumpet. The veterans, as a final gesture of contempt, had decided to throw their medals earned in Vietnam over the wire fence so hastily erected on the Capitol steps to thwart them.

Neil Olsen stopped before the fence, lifted the trumpet to his lips and, with terrible, trembling determination, blew “Taps.” He had a kind face, the sort of gentle small-town American face one saw on druggists, grocers. He held the last note for as long as he could while the newspaper and television cameramen jockeyed about for a better angle from the far side of the fence.

“Hold the horn up! Hold it higher!” a photographer was shouting. Olsen ignored him and brought the trumpet smartly and with as much dignity as he could down to his side.

The fence was a simple wire grille nailed to 2-by-4 boards. Microphones had been arranged in front of it, and one by one the veterans came forward. “I'd like to say one thing for the people of Vietnam,” one said. “I'm sorry. I hope someday I can return to Vietnam and help rebuild that country we tore apart.” He threw his medals over the fence.

The next veteran curled his fingers tightly around his Bronze Star. “I wish I could make them eat it!” he said. He flung his across the fence.

An ex-sergeant from New York City discarded all but two of his medals. He held aloft two Purple Hearts. “I'm keeping these in memory of friends,” he explained.

The next veteran flung away his cane; another bitterly threw his medals, saying, “Here's my merit badges for murder.” The next, a veteran with a surprisingly young face, paused before the microphones and softly said, “I just want to ask for the war to end, please?” And on the far side of the wire the discarded medals pinged against the Capitol's marble steps like small pieces of shrapnel.

Rusty Sachs, a former helicopter pilot with the 1st Marine Division, stood tense with emotion in his leather flight jacket with the Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 patch sewn above his right breast pocket and captain's bars pinned to his shirt collar. He cocked his arm, pegged his Bronze Star over the fence and moved away. Suddenly he saw a newsman pick up one of the medals. Sachs whirled back to the microphones. “Listen, you newsmen,” he warned. “We're not giving
you
the medals! We're turning them back to the country.
Don't touch them!
” Even as he spoke, he saw another newsman lean down, pick up someone's Purple Heart and slip it inside his pocket. Sachs rushed up to the fence, reached through the wire and jerked the closest newsman up against the grille. “Listen,” Sachs threatened, “you tell every motherfucker back there that if somebody touches another medal, I'm going to be over there breaking the fingers off his fucking hand!”

“Hey, hey, calm down a little, brother,” said another vet, taking Sachs by the shoulder, “it's okay.”

Sachs moved back, but not far.

Ron Ferrizzi was wearing khaki pants, an Army fatigue jacket, a black Stetson hat looped behind his shoulder blades. “My parents,” he said, looking at the veterans gathered around him and then up at the Capitol dome, “my parents told me that if I really did come down here and turn in my medals that they … well, they never wanted anything more to do with me. That's not an easy thing to take,” he said, looking down at the microphones. “I still love my parents.”

Rusty Sachs was watching Ferrizzi closely.

“My wife doesn't understand what happened to me when I came home from 'Nam,” Ferrizzi continued. “She said she would divorce me if I came down here because she wanted my medals for our son to see when he grew up.” He glanced at the medals he held and shook his head sadly. “I'm not proud of these medals … of what I did to receive them.…”

He was speaking so softly now it was difficult to hear what he said. He was explaining how three men had died so that he might receive these decorations, and all around him the veterans strained to hear, their faces stiff and tight with memories. Rusty Sachs suddenly began to cry, and when Ferrizzi stepped back from the microphones and flung his medals as far and as hard as he could, the former Marine helicopter pilot grabbed him and hugged him. The two men stood weeping, clinging to each other while the news photographers shouted at the other veterans to get out of the way, they were blocking the shots.

I met Peg Mullen at about two o'clock Saturday afternoon in Washington in the American Friends Office on Second Street, four blocks from the Capitol. I was shocked by how drained and exhausted she looked. I asked her if she felt all right. Peg replied all she wanted was to sit down. We walked to a nearby hotel and took a table in its restaurant-bar. Peg's bus had arrived in Washington at three that morning. “The bus driver was so worried about us,” Peg explained, “that he raced to Washington and arrived here five hours early. We were supposed to have been able to sleep on the bus, but he was so frightened by what he had driven into that he made us get out.”

Peg and the other passengers had been discharged at the Washington Monument and had to walk more than two miles to an Episcopal church in which arrangements had been made for the group to spend the night. Peg, wrapped in a blanket she had brought with her from Iowa, stretched out on the floor and slept poorly. When, this morning, she had walked the two-plus miles back to the Washington Monument, where the march route was scheduled to begin, the crowds were already so heavy she became separated from her Iowa friends. “I just walked with whatever group happened by,” Peg said. “I think it was a teachers' group. Something like Teachers for Peace.”