Friendly Fire (5 page)

Peg's mother, Jo Goodyear, had been chairman of the Pocahontas County Democratic Party for years. Peg had been attending political meetings with her mother from the time she was six. Therefore neither Peg nor her mother was a stranger to Senator Gillette. Because of her mother's intervention and influence, Peg received a Civil Service appointment to the Department of Labor in Des Moines. That winter her immediate boss, G. D. Miller, was responsible for conducting a survey of Iowa coal mines. Miller's superior, the administrator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Office, was a hot-tempered red-haired Irishman named Joyce. One afternoon Joyce called the then nineteen-year-old secretary Peg Goodyear into his office and told her he wanted to read every piece of correspondence originating in the office before it was placed in the mail. Further, Joyce told Peg, he didn't want her boss, Miller, to know about it. Peg refused, saying she could not show him her boss' letters without her boss' consent. If Mr. Joyce wanted to read Mr. Miller's mail, he would have to ask Mr. Miller himself. Joyce persisted, and Peg continued adamantly to refuse. “All right then, Miss Goodyear,” Joyce told Peg, “you're fired!”

“You can't fire me,” Peg answered. “You're not the man who gave me my job.”

Joyce was so furious that he picked up a paperweight and threatened to throw it at her. Peg fled his office and got on the telephone. She called both Iowa Senators Guy Gillette and Clyde Harring in Washington and told them she was losing her job. They each called Joyce the next morning, and as a result, both Peg's employment and the privacy of her boss' mail were sustained. In 1939 Peg shifted to the WPA office in Waterloo. She was working in the Women's Division, which handled women's programs such as sewing rooms and school lunches, when she and Gene Mullen met. Sixteen days after their marriage the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Gene Mullen left Black Hawk County to serve in the war. Because of his hearing defect, he was not able to go overseas. He was sent to Camp Dodge, and Peg was able to continue working when she was hired by the Civil Service commissioner in nearby Des Moines. Gene and Peg Mullen's son, Michael Eugene Mullen, was born on September 11, 1944.

By then Gene was a U.S. Army master sergeant. He was stationed now at Fort Carson, Colorado, and was in charge of feeding German prisoners of war. For ten years afterward Gene continued to exchange Christmas cards and correspondence with some of his former POWs.

While Gene was in the Army, the Mullen farmland was rented out. Each year for the five years Gene was away, a different tenant farmer would come in, do spring plowing, fall harvesting, and depart. When Gene returned in 1946, the land had been left in such poor shape he was unable to earn a living off it. Only $875 remained out of his discharge pay, rationing was still in effect, jobs were scarce, and in addition to his wife and infant son, Gene had his ailing mother and father to help support.

Gene, Peg and Michael had moved back into John Dobshire's old house and borrowed $3,500 from a local bank to buy enough equipment to start the farm again. During that first fall harvest he spent two weeks helping his neighbor Cecil Joens pick his corn, but Joens needed to spend only four
hours
helping Gene pick his. The following year Gene tried raising cattle and lost all his pastureland in the spring flood. In debt for his cattle, Gene was forced to take an outside job. In the meantime, Peg had given birth to a second son, Daniel, who died only twenty-two hours after his birth of the same respiratory defect that took the life of President John F. Kennedy's infant. Gene found work at the Rath Packing Company in Waterloo and remained with them until 1955, when he took a different job with John Deere.

Gene felt he was never close enough to Michael. It wasn't because Gene, gentle and good father that he is, didn't want to be or didn't try to be. He simply couldn't be because he wasn't at home. Gene farmed in the morning and left for the second shift of the huge tractor plant in Waterloo at two thirty each afternoon. He would not return to the farm before midnight five days a week. As the years passed and his daughters, Patricia and Mary, then his son John were born and grew up and, like Michael, went off to the local parochial school, they, too, would be asleep when their father returned from work and in school by the time Gene awoke. So, seeing his children only on weekends and vacations, Gene came to feel he was watching them grow up from a distance.

Michael, however, had the same love for the land that his father did. When Gene Mullen walks his fields, he will sometimes pause and wonder whether his great-grandfather might have walked that same section, or his grandfather. And he will recall his father speaking about a childhood when there were no fences, no roads. “I have feelings for this land,” Gene explains. “My great-grandfather lived here. My grandfather. My mother and father. Peg and me. We've all lived right here!” and it was that sense of continuity which was, perhaps, the strongest link between Gene, as father, and Michael, his son. Gene never felt Michael was to fall heir to acres only. He was to inherit all those generations of Mullens and Dobshires who would walk beside him each time he turned the soil.

Michael was always the one to have received the farm. Mary and Patricia would presumably marry young men met in school or college and move away with them. John, younger than Michael by seven years, never seemed to have the same feeling for the land that Michael did. So there was never any question about which of the children would succeed to the farm. There certainly wasn't any question in Michael's mind; he spent his life preparing for it.

Michael realized early on that it was his responsibility to take care of the farm when his father was at John Deere. Gene could leave a note, “Mikey, fill the hog water.… Mikey, take care of the cattle.… Mikey, clean out the hog house and get the corners.” And Gene would know that whatever he asked would be done, that
more
would be done because Michael worked hard, drove himself and never excused himself if a job was not done right.

In 1944, the year of Michael's birth, 55 bushels an acre were considered a high yield for an Iowa cornfield. Twenty-five years later it was necessary to harvest 100 bushels an acre just to break even. And, as Michael knew, even higher yields would be required were there to be any profit when it became time for him to inherit the land. Therefore, Michael was determined to educate himself, to learn as much about the land and farming as he could.

He showed his first 4-H project, a Berkshire sow, when he was ten. At fourteen he had his first winner, a Hereford steer that became Black Hawk County Reserve Champion. A photograph of Michael at twelve shows a wiry, fiercely determined black-haired boy, perhaps a bit small for his age, with one cowboy-booted foot braced against the side of a box stall; he is grimly tugging at a balky steer's halter, pitting all his weight and strength against his steer's unwillingness to move. The photograph taken by a passing Associated Press photographer at a county 4-H show appeared in wire service newspapers across the country captioned “Something's Got to Give.” It is unlikely that Michael was amused. He took his farming seriously—but, then, it had never occurred to him not to.

Everybody liked Michael, especially older people. At times, however, he was so
straight
he made people his own age feel a bit uneasy. He didn't smoke. He didn't swear. He rarely drank anything stronger than an occasional beer. He never learned how to dance. He served as an altar boy at La Porte City's Sacred Heart Catholic Church. He kept his grades near the top of his class at Don Bosco, the local parochial school. He worked his way through Rockhurst, a small, quiet, conservative Jesuit college in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1964, when Michael was twenty and in his Rockhurst sophomore year, he urged his parents to pay attention to Goldwater in the upcoming presidential election because Goldwater was telling the truth. To entertain them, he took his parents to concerts. Michael stood about five feet eight inches then and weighed 145 pounds. He had a dark complexion and the long face of his grandfather Patrick J. Mullen. Even though Michael was handsome in a somber sort of way, he had no serious–girlfriends. Perhaps with his solemn, steady gray eyes, his black hair already prematurely flecked with white and his earnest, brisk demeanor, he seemed far older than his years. His maturity certainly inspired confidence: the summer following his sophomore year, Michael worked for the Iowa State Highway Commission and proved himself so trustworthy and responsible that his employers gave him practically unrestricted use of a state-owned car.

On the fourth day of August, while Michael was out with his highway survey crew, the U. S. Navy destroyers
Maddox
and
C. Turner Joy
were supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. Less than twelve hours later U.S. Navy carrier-based planes carried out reprisal raids, intruding for the first time into North Vietnam. This “important threshold of the war,” as it was referred to in a then-secret Defense Department study, was crossed with virtually no domestic criticism. Two days later, on August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, empowering President Lyndon Baines Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”

Michael Mullen, like his family, had no reason to believe that the previous President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had committed advisers and Special Forces troops to Vietnam for any more sinister reason than that Americans wanted the Vietnamese to have what the Vietnamese were supposed to want for themselves: the freedom to resist Communist aggression, to survive as a nation, to
become like us
. The Mullens believed we were in Vietnam to defend it. They believed Vietnam was a moral war, that if Vietnam fell, all Southeast Asia would fall to Communism with it. They believed it possible to equate our presence in Vietnam with our presence in Korea and our participation in the Second World War. The Mullens believed, in other words, what they were being told.

In February, 1965, President Johnson commenced Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained air bombardment of North Vietnam. Michael called his mother from Rockhurst, “You remember kidding me about Barry Goldwater?” he asked. “Well, who's ‘trigger-happy' now?”

That June U.S. military commanders were authorized to send American troops into combat. One month later President Johnson sanctioned the increase of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 men. The Mullens were concerned by the growing war and the escalating troop commitment, but they did not protest. They simply hoped the war would end.

La Porte City had by this time grown into a predominantly Protestant, Republican town with a population of a little over 2,000. It had more churches than taverns, and the proud brick fronts of its turn-of-the-century stores had darkened and become grimy with age. The town was clearly losing business to the newer, bigger shopping centers on the road to Waterloo. There was little new construction in La Porte, no more than two or three houses a year. The signboard on the outskirts of town listing the churches and the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce meetings had begun losing its paint. One didn't see many young people lounging about the streets, and La Porte City's only non-Caucasian was an Indian woman on welfare.

The citizens of La Porte thought well of the Mullens, spoke of them as “hard workers.” They appreciated how difficult life had been for Peg having to take care of Gene's sick parents and four young kids. They saw, too, that she did not give herself any rest when Gene's parents died in 1960. Instead, to help pay for the hospital and funeral expenses, Peg returned to work. She became an executive secretary for an advertising specialty business in Waterloo. Peg had always been politically active in the local Democratic Party; she attended every state convention and always took time off to meet each candidate who came into town. But she continued active in volunteer work as well and remained teaching catechism classes at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. By this time Gene had worked his way up to becoming a quality control inspector at John Deere.

The Mullen children, too, were well liked. They stayed out of trouble, got good grades, were popular with their classmates. Peg and Gene Mullen are innately generous, decent people, and they brought up their children to believe in the same basic values with which they themselves had been brought up. When the Mullens spoke of themselves, they described themselves as being “average” or “typical” or “good, solid citizens” in no way different from others in their neighboring communities. They would explain their behavior and responses as that of the “working class,” as “farmers,” and if they identified themselves as representative of any groups, it was as “Catholics,” as “Democrats,” “Irish-Americans,” or “Iowans” and as being from a background typical of the “Silent Majority.”

The Mullens did not avoid controversy; it is just that in a community like La Porte City controversial situations rarely arose. When the Mullens did discover something wrong, however, they tried their best to stop it.

In 1965 Peg Mullen campaigned for election to the local school board. Peg is a very handsome woman with high, prominent cheekbones, a firm jaw and slightly upturned nose. She wears her gray-streaked hair short. Her face reflects enormous strength and determination, and yet, when she smiles, which is often, all that toughness shatters, and her blue eyes glisten and her cheeks dimple like a child's. There is none of Gene's Irish softness in Peg's voice. She has a hard, abrasive accent, thin, but not flat, an accent which comes down heavily on the
R
s. When she is angry, her voice rises sharply and her consonants rip the air about her.

Peg is a far more impatient, outspoken person than Gene, and when her aggressiveness and tenacity are directed toward local issues, she can precipitate the sort of small-town antagonisms that endure. Peg ran for the school board because she opposed the rising busing budget, because she discovered irregularities in the school-lunch program and because La Porte's taxes were the highest in the state. Out of the $30-an-acre tax rate, $25 went to the local nonparochial schools. Since a school board generally reflects the politics and mood of its community, and since La Porte is Republican and conservative, Protestant and traditional, the sort of small town in which it is considered “imprudent to make waves,” Peg Mullen lost.