Friendly Fire (59 page)

On February 24, when Polk became mired down in some mud and two men taunted and laughed at him, he loaded his M-79 and aimed it at them. Twice Polk disobeyed his platoon leader's direct order to put his weapon down. The third time Polk reluctantly handed Lieutenant Joslin the M-79.

On February 25, when the 1st Platoon's medic accused Polk of shamming an injury to his foot, Polk slugged him. He then pointed his M-79 at the medic, who said, “You'd better plan on using it.” Polk was disarmed by his squad leader, but not until they, too, had exchanged blows.

On February 26, when Charlie Company returned to Hill 76, the mortar platoon fire base, Polk fired first an M-16 rifle at some Vietnamese civilians working in a rice paddy and then his grenade launcher. Polk again struck his squad leader, who was attempting to disarm him, and later punched Lieutenant Roderick Bayliss, the black platoon leader of the mortar platoon.

On February 28, 1970, charges were brought against Polk, and he was placed in confinement at Bayonet. Two weeks later he was moved to an Army stockade, and a month after that he was confined at the III Marine Amphibious Force Brig (IIIMAF) at Danang. He remained there until his trial on May 29.

When I spoke with Willard Polk at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, I asked why he had fired on the Vietnamese civilians working in the rice paddies.

“I like the Vietnamese,” Polk told me. “I had nothing against them. When I went into their villages, they'd always treat me right. I wouldn't have wanted to hit them. I like them!… I'd like to go back there someday as a civilian.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Look,” Polk said, “all I wanted was to get-
out
-of-the-field! That's why.”

“You mean out of combat?” I asked.

“Combat!”
Polk snorted. “I hadn't seen no combat. All I seen was guys getting
killed!
”

On March 29, 1973, the last American troops left Vietnam, formally terminating the United States' direct military involvement. The Defense Department's official casualty report for the Vietnam War lists 45,958 combat deaths and 10,303 nonhostile deaths for the period between January 1, 1961, and March 31, 1973. Of the 10,303 nonhostile deaths, 3,060 died in aircraft crashes and 1,075 in motor vehicle crashes. There were 1,172 deaths by suicide or accidental self-destruction, 1,163 homicides and 102 deaths from drug abuse. And 3,731 men, Michael Mullen among them, died of other causes.

On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the Communists.

*
Punishment administered at company level.

A Biography of C. D. B. Bryan

C. D. B. Bryan, an award-winning author of nonfiction books, novels, and magazine articles, is best known for
Friendly Fire
, the 1976 Vietnam War–era classic that tells the true story of the transformation of a patriotic Iowa farm family into antiwar activists after their son is killed in Vietnam by artillery fire from friendly forces. The book exposed the government's attempt to cover up “friendly fire” deaths by not including them in battlefield casualty statistics.

Born in Manhattan on April 22, 1936, to Katharine Lansing Barnes and writer-journalist Joseph Bryan III, Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, known as Courty, grew up mostly in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and had what is euphemistically referred to as a checkered boarding school career beginning in 1945 at age nine. His expulsion from Episcopal High School and the Hotchkiss School inspired his early short story, “So Much Unfairness of Things,” which appeared in the
New Yorker
and was later expanded into his first novel,
P. S. Wilkinson
. The 1965 novel won the prestigious Harper Prize, given by the publisher Harper & Row for the best manuscript submitted by an unknown writer. Bryan often credited his mother's second husband, novelist John O'Hara, for sparking his interest in fiction writing.

After graduating from Yale University, where he was chairman of the campus humor magazine, and serving in the army in Korea, Bryan settled into the life of a man of letters. Renowned as a scintillating conversationalist who enjoyed good martinis, he wrote for numerous magazines, including the
New Yorker
,
Harper's
,
Esquire
,
Rolling Stone
, and the
New York Times Book Review
, and taught writing at Colorado State University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His favorite line about writing, which he framed and kept next to his desk, was from William Butler Yeats: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” When asked for the best piece of advice he could offer to writers, Bryan replied,

“It is included in J. D. Salinger's vastly under-appreciated short story ‘Seymour: An Introduction,' in one of Seymour Glass's letters to his brother Buddy: ‘If only you'd remember before you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can barely believe it as I write it. You sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.' It sounds so simple, doesn't it? It isn't of course, because no writer gets it right the first time through. No one said writing is easy. Nor is rewriting and rewriting, again and again, until your text reads as if it hadn't been written at all, but rather as if the proper words just appeared marching in their proper sequence like good little soldiers one after another, from sentence to paragraph to chapter to book. How an author weaves those words together is what we think of as that writer's style.”

While visiting his friend, writer Vance Bourjaily, in Iowa in November 1970, Bryan learned of Peg and Gene Mullen, local farmers whose son Michael had been drafted into the army and killed in Vietnam. Devastated by their son's death, Peg spent the money the army had sent for her to bury her son on a half-page antiwar advertisement that appeared on Easter Sunday in the
Des Moines Register
. The army claimed Michael had been killed by “friendly fire,” but refused to reveal the precise circumstances of his death. Now the Mullens were confronting the government, demanding to know the truth.

Six months later, with mounting casualty figures on the television news every night and growing frustration across the country over the war in Vietnam, Bryan visited the Mullens with the intention of interviewing them for the
New Yorker
. The story he uncovered proved to be bigger than he expected, and it was serialized in three consecutive issues during February and March 1976, and was eventually published as a book that May. In 1979,
Friendly Fire
was made into an Emmy Award–winning TV movie, starring Carol Burnett, Ned Beatty, and Sam Waterston.

Bryan wrote other works of nonfiction—
Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
, an account of his attending an MIT conference on alien abductions and UFOs, and several coffee table books about the National Geographic Society and the National Air and Space Museum—as well as the novels
The Great Dethriffe
and
Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes
.

After a battle with cancer, Bryan passed away on December 15, 2009, at the age of seventy-three. He is survived by his wife, Mairi Graham Bryan; his three children, St. George Bryan, Lansing Bryan, and Amanda Bryan; his two stepchildren, Derek Simonds and Tiffany Simonds-Frew; and his four grandchildren.

Bryan worked on the Aiken Prep School newspaper from 1948 to 1949.

Bryan in South Korea, where he served in the US Army from 1958 to 1960.

The original advertisement Peg Mullen placed in the
Des Moines Register
on April 12, 1970, after her son's death, to commemorate Iowa residents killed in the Vietnam War.

Bryan with two of his children, Lansing Becket Bryan and St. George Bryan III; his brother, St. George Bryan II; and Magoo the St. Bernard in Iowa City while Bryan was a visiting lecturer at the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1967 to 1969.