Friendly Fire (47 page)

“‘God,' I'd say, ‘don't
you
be sorry!'” Schwarzkopf continued. “And I'd do what I could, find out if he'd notified his parents, get a phone call through so that he'd be able to talk directly to his folks if possible so they'd know he was all right. You'd do whatever you could. Always, as soon as I had a man wounded, I would get to the hospital as rapidly as I could to see the guy … but it was hard seeing those kids.… It was even harder when somebody would give you the impression that they felt you were deliberately sending these kids to their deaths.”

“Who made you feel this?” I asked.

“Well, number one, the Mullens,” Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf said. “The Mullens told me that in so many words. And number two, the whole public seems to give the impression the military deliberately wastes people. That we're a bunch of callous bastards to whom human lives don't mean a thing. Well, when people feel this way and then you have to see these young men with such terrible wounds, it's tough to take.

“The public seems to have lost faith in the military because of the war in Vietnam,” Schwarzkopf continued. “After all, we're only an arm of policy of the United States government. We're public servants. If the public no longer has confidence in us, then what good are we? I think right now in the officer corps there an awful lot of people who feel confused about the public's attitude. I came into the Army because I wanted to serve my country. I took an oath saying that I'd protect this country from all enemies foreign and domestic—I didn't say
I'd
determine who the enemies were! I said I'd merely protect the country after somebody else made that determination. So this war comes around in Vietnam; the duly elected government officials send us, the Army, to fight the war. We go to Vietnam and fight the best way we know how—not needlessly wasting lives for the most part. We did the best we could, and it dragged on and on and on. Many of us were sent back a second time. A lot of young officers have been sent back a third time. I'm talking about the kid who went over first as a platoon leader, returned as a captain and commanded an infantry company and then, a third time, went over as a major. Three times he's gone off not knowing whether he was going to come back alive. He's got ten years in the service and in that ten years has been separated from his wife and family for three of them. He didn't go off to Vietnam because he wanted to. He was sent by his country. Now, suddenly, public opinion is violently antimilitary as though it had all been this kid's idea! So here he is, a young Army major with ten years' service and he's going to sit down and think, ‘All of a sudden I'm being blamed for all this,' and he hurts. He's hurt! He doesn't understand why he's bearing the brunt of this animosity when the guys who sent him to Vietnam seven years ago are now back on college campuses writing articles about how terrible it is that he's there in Vietnam!”

“Colonel, Gene Mullen told me you had said we should never have been in Vietnam. Is that right?”

Schwarzkopf took time to pour us both fresh coffee before answering, “No, I don't think I could have told him that because I don't believe that. My feeling now is that we should get out. What we're gaining by being over there is no longer significant, and of course, we are getting out.
*
We're withdrawing much faster than I ever thought we could. But I think this is an important point: the government sends you off to fight its war—again, it's not
your
war; it's the government's war. You go off and fight not only once, but twice, okay? And suddenly a decision is made, ‘Well, look, you guys were all wrong. You're a bunch of dirty bastards. You never should have been there!' Now this is going to make me think long and hard before I go off to war again. This is me, Norm Schwarzkopf, personally. I don't think there will ever be another major confrontation where huge armies line up on both sides. If that happens, it's inevitably going to be nuclear weapons and the whole thing. So I think all wars of the future are going to be—and again, God forbid, I hope we don't have any. War is a profanity. It really is. It's terrifying. Nobody is more antiwar than an intelligent person who's been to war. Probably the most antiwar people I know are Army officers—but if we do have a war, I think it's going to be similar in nature to Vietnam and Korea. Limited in scope. And when they get ready to send me again, I'm going to have to stop and ask myself, ‘Is it worth it?' That's a very dangerous place for the nation to be when your own army is going to stop and question.”

We carried our coffee back to the table. He sat cradling the mug between his palms. “I
hate
what Vietnam has done to our country! I
hate
what Vietnam has done to our Army! But to go back to your original question, could I have told Mr. Mullen that we should never have gone to Vietnam? No, I don't think I could have told him that because I don't believe that. We went to Vietnam for the same reason we went into South Korea. For the same reason we went into Germany during the Second World War. For the same reason we went to Europe during World War One.”

I noticed that Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf's voice was getting hoarse. We had been talking nonstop since ten that morning, and it was now nearly five o'clock. I asked him if he wouldn't like to take a break, and at that moment the apartment door opened, and his wife, Brenda, and their daughter, Cindy, returned. The little girl rushed to her father, and he swept her into his arms. Cindy laughed and chattered, and Brenda, who was very pretty with dark hair and a pale Irish complexion, said hello and excused herself to unload the groceries. The colonel asked me to stay for dinner, made us each a drink, placed a record on the phonograph, and when we sat down again, it was all very relaxed and easy. We spoke about our children, about living in Washington, about his father and the Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hopewell-Pennington-Princeton-Lawrenceville part of New Jersey. I don't think we deliberately avoided speaking about the war since occasionally the subject would naturally come up. I believe, simply, we both preferred to talk about something else. Once though, toward the end of dinner, I remember asking him how soon he felt we should get out of Vietnam. Schwarzkopf answered, “As fast as possible.” He looked across the table at his wife. “I don't ever want to go back there again.”

After dinner we slipped into the sort of long political discussion that doesn't change either party's mind and then, at about nine thirty, I told the colonel I felt I had taken up too much of his time, and if he wouldn't mind, I'd like to give him a break and then come back the next morning. There were many more things, he said, that he wanted to talk about, too.

Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf insisted on driving me back into Washington where I had reserved a hotel room. He said he needed the air, and maybe it would help him sleep. Because of his cast, he said, he was never able to sleep more than a few hours at a time. I asked him about his wound. He was in a cast, it turned out, not because of anything that had happened in Vietnam but rather the accumulated strain and pounding his back had taken over the years had been aggravated by parachute landings.

The Army decided an operation might alleviate some of the pressure on his lower spine. He would be free of the cast, he told me, in another couple of months.

During the drive I asked him about his correspondence with the Mullens and whether Peg had sent him Michael's letters.

“The only letter I ever got was from
Mrs
. Mullen. It arrived in May, as I recall, shortly after I was wounded. She told me she had taken his gratuity pay and spent it to buy a newspaper advertisement. I think she sent me a copy of the ad and excerpts from his letters and that was about it.…” He thought for a moment, then said, “I was very upset by the tone of her letter. I wanted to write an answer. I contacted Division and was told I shouldn't, that I should forward the letter to Division instead, and they would handle it from there. And so, of course, that was my guide.”

“You mean the two letters the Mullens received from you weren't written by you at all? Why wouldn't the Division want you to answer?”

“I don't think it was a question of not wanting me to answer,” he said. “I think it was because it involved friendly fire casualties—in fact, any casualties at all.”

He explained how it was the Division's policy in situations involving casualties to have the Headquarters write and coordinate all letters sent to next of kin. The purpose for this policy was to ensure that no conflicting details were given, thereby sparing families the sort of anguish varying versions might cause.

The result, in the Mullens' case, however, was clearly the opposite. It was precisely the conflicting evidence, plus an implicit policy of information control, that started the Mullens out on their search to learn what had happened to their son.

I asked the colonel what he would have written the Mullens had the Division not intervened.

“Oh, God, I don't know,” he said. “I probably would have tried to give them as much detail on what exactly happened as I could. And I probably would have tried to convey to them my personal feeling of … of, I guess, horror that this did happen.…”

We were both silent. The colonel was busy navigating the access route to Key Bridge across the Potomac River, and I was playing back our conversation in my mind. I could not reconcile the discrepancies between what the Mullens had told me Schwarzkopf had said and his version of what he had said. I tried to picture that conversation out at Walter Reed, tried to imagine Gene leaning over the colonel, their faces inches apart: “Colonel, now you can tell me your story …” and later, “Do you know you were suckered down out of your helicopter into that minefield?” I tried to imagine how Schwarzkopf would have reacted to Gene's constant correcting him on details and Gene's comment about his having “lost thirty-two men from your stupidity of marching them through a minefield.”

We were across Key Bridge and in the old Georgetown part of Washington when I turned to the colonel and asked, “When the Mullens visited you in the hospital, who did most of the talking?”

“Mrs. Mullen did,” he said.

“
She did?
Peg did?”

“As a matter of fact, I was very concerned for Mr. Mullen. At times he was … well, he was very emotional and would become so choked up he was almost incoherent. Why? You sound surprised.”

“I am. That isn't the impression I got at all.”

“What did they tell you?” he asked.

“I guess it wasn't so much what they said as how they said it. The ‘Colonel Schwarzkopf' they told me about just doesn't seem like you at all. Maybe tomorrow we can go over that meeting in more detail?”

“Sure,” he said. “We'll cover it all.”

*
Following his second tour, the colonel's decorations included the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Command Parachutist Medal, three Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars (one with “V”), nine Air Medals, four Army Commendation Ribbons (one with “V”), two Purple Hearts, the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross (with two palms and two gold stars), the Armed Forces Honor Medal, the Vietnamese Campaign Medal, the Vietnamese Service Medal, the German Occupation Ribbon and the National Defense Medal.

*
By the end of October, 1971, the month Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf and I met, U.S. troop strength in Vietnam was 196,700 men, the lowest figure since January, 1966. With the exception of the week ending September 25, in which there had been twenty-nine combat deaths, the casualty figure had not surpassed twenty in the eleven weeks previous to that date. On October 6, the day I first met with Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf, the United States suffered five killed, the lowest figure since the first week of August, 1965.

Chapter Twenty-Four

That evening at the hotel I read through my notes of Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf's and my conversation. One of his statements particularly intrigued me. Referring to the demoralizing effect of the Vietnam War upon the career soldier, he had said, “This is going to make me think long and hard before I go off to war again. When they get ready to send me, I'm going to have to stop and ask myself, ‘Is it worth it?'” It was an extraordinary comment for a young West Point officer with three Silver Stars to have made.

The next morning when I returned to Schwarzkopf's apartment, it was clear he had been thinking about that statement, too. It was one of the first things he mentioned after we had sat down.

“Let me clarify that,” he said. “It sounds like I'm going to stay in the Army, continue to rise in rank or stabilize or whatever, but then someday in the future when there's a confrontation and the Army gives me a set of orders I'm going to say, ‘Hell no, I won't go!' That's not what I'm implying. What I really mean is at twenty years I'm going to make a decision as to whether to pursue my military career or not. If I decide to remain in the service and the government orders me to go, I will go. I don't see how I can refuse unless I felt so strongly about it that my only alternative was to resign from the Army. I'd go because it was my duty. It's like being a fireman. You don't join up and say, ‘I'll only fight chemical fires and not wood fires.' You become a fireman and say, ‘I'll fight fires.'” Schwarzkopf leaned back in his chair. “We can get into a very subtle discussion here of conscience and duty, the Nuremberg Trials, the Japanese war criminals, et cetera. This is a very valid question the government is going to have to face—obviously, it's a question the public is already facing.…” He let his chair drop back forward. “What is moral? What is immoral? Where does duty stop and morality begin? Are we now saying that the military is supposed to question the morality of our government's commitment to a war? I don't know.…” He shook his head. “I really don't know. If we allow the military to question whether or not to go then,” he said, “it seems to me we also have to look at the other side of the coin. What if the government decides
not
to go? Do we allow the military the right to criticize this decision? To decide whether it was correct or not? And perhaps go to war in spite of the fact that the government decides we shouldn't? See, the military is required to follow the orders given it by the government. How they pursue it is another question—and here is where you get into civilian casualties, war crimes, atrocities, ovens and all that business. If you're a member of the military, you don't really have much choice as far as pursuing the war or not. If it ever came to a choice between compromising my moral principles and the performance of my duties, I know I'd go with my moral principles. At the same time, however, I would also cease being an Army officer. I would have to resign my commission. But even at that I could be accomplishing my duty as I see it.”