Friendly Fire (6 page)

The Mullens next became involved with the local telephone company. A neighbor complained to Gene that some board members of the telephone company were calling up some of the older people in town and offering them $50 a share for their stock. The bylaws prevented any person from owning more than one share of stock. The board members would then place their new stock, worth actually six to eight times that much, in their grandchildren's or children's or relatives' names. Gene Mullen went into La Porte City and told them that if they didn't stop, he would go to the state attorney's office. As a result of Gene's intervention, Peg says with a sigh, “We don't have a lot of friendship with the telephone company.” Still, they were the only persons in town willing to do anything about it.

In 1967 Michael received a grant allowing him to go on from Rockhurst to the University of Missouri's Agriculture School. When Michael returned to the farm for his first summer vacation, he brought Caroline Roby, a diminutive, pretty, happy auburn-haired girl with him. Caroline, four years Michael's junior, was a student in one of the undergraduate biochemistry sections he taught. Michael was clearly in love with her. Caroline stayed a week, then went south to spend the rest of the summer with her divorced mother. Michael mooned about a bit, but he didn't let his dejection interfere with his work. And during the evenings he would sit for hours with his mother and brother and sisters discussing the presidential campaign. All the family, with the exception of Gene, hoped Senator Eugene McCarthy would be the Democratic Party's nominee. Gene Mullen thought McCarthy “lived in a cloud.” Still, like the Mullens, McCarthy was a Democrat, an Irish-Catholic, and, more important, his peace candidacy reflected the Mullens' own growing concern over the war. That fall Michael would swallow his disappointment with McCarthy and vote for Humphrey over Nixon, pulling the straight Democratic Party lever in doing so. It was a party loyalty perhaps inherited from his grandmother.

One morning, shortly before Michael was due to return for the University of Missouri's summer session, he came in from the fields, sat down opposite his father at the round kitchen table and said, “Dad, you're going to see the day when you won't be able to afford to feed the grain we raise here to livestock!”

“Oh-h-h?” his father asked. “And why not?”

“Those cereal grains will be needed to feed people.”

Gene looked over his breakfast mug of coffee at his son with a chiding smile. “Well, Mikey, what are you going to do about that?”

Without a moment's hesitation Michael replied, “I'm going to learn how to take roughage—normal roughage—and make food from it that can be fed livestock and it'll make them grow more meat to feed more people.”

“I believe you will,” his father said.

Michael was then working toward a combined MA-PhD degree in animal nutrition. His specific project was an experiment to develop a high-lysine corn which would eliminate the need to add supplementary proteins to livestock feed. If Michael said he would learn how to boost the protein content of corn from 8 percent to 12, his father believed there was no reason why he shouldn't do it.

“Mike's so much more intelligent than I,” Gene would tell his friends at John Deere. “If I try to give him a little static, he'll just cut me off in one sentence. He'll say, ‘Now here's your argument, and here's where's it's wrong.' But,” Gene would be quick to add, “he won't be trying to hurt me. He's never talked back to me—he might not like what I say for him to do, but Mike's never, ever talked back to me.”

Michael never talked back, and he always did what he was told. That is why, when shortly after he returned to the University of Missouri that summer and received his draft notice ordering him to report in September for induction into the United States Army, he dutifully gave up graduate school and reported to the Des Moines draft headquarters.

After his induction he was to have been placed on a military flight to Fort Polk, Louisiana, to begin infantry basic training, but no military flights left that day. To keep busy, Michael was given a job in the draft headquarters office filing case histories of young men who opposed the war, rejected the draft, who had found ways of having their induction orders changed, revoked or ignored. Michael Mullen spent the day reading about young men who had had themselves certified physically or psychologically unfit for the military, who had fled the country rather than serve. He read about young men who did not for one instant believe it was their patriotic duty—or any of their country's business—to fight a war halfway around the world in Vietnam, who had burned their draft cards, been arrested in campus demonstrations, who had gone to jail, done everything in their power to escape the draft and show their opposition to the war. He filed paper after paper on young men who had not been pulled away from their studies, who had never even attended college, much less a graduate school, but who had still found ways to beat the draft. All day long Michael Mullen read about young men unlike himself.

At first he was angry and resentful of them, then furious with himself, and finally, inevitably, depressed. That night Michael telephoned his mother back at the farm and told her, “The whole setup is corrupt! I don't need to
be
here!” Over and over again, as if in disbelief, he repeated, “I don't need to
be
here! I don't need to
be
here! I simply didn't
need
to be drafted!”

The next morning Michael was flown to Fort Polk and began basic training. On December 3, 1968, he was ordered to “forfeit $26.00 a month for the period of one month” because, “having knowledge of a lawful order issued by Captain Joseph P. Holles, Jr., your Commanding Officer, to keep all personal valuables secured, an order which it was your duty to obey, you did fail to obey same.” Michael had left his wallet on his bunk.

Michael spent his Christmas pass with Caroline and her mother, then returned to Fort Polk to complete his basic training. While there he applied for Noncommissioned Officers School. By so doing, he hoped to forestall being immediately sent to Vietnam. His application was accepted, and Michael received orders to attend the NCO school at Fort Benning, Georgia. He made sergeant (E-5) at Benning and was sent next to Fort McClellan, Alabama, for advanced infantry training (AIT). Michael had been able to delay his Vietnam orders for six additional months, but when he completed AIT, his time ran out. His gamble that the war would wind down before his additional training would end had failed. The Army now needed noncommissioned officers in Vietnam more than ever. At McClellan, Michael again was ordered to Vietnam.

Michael applied for and was granted twenty-three days' advance leave prior to reporting to Fort Lewis, Washington, for transshipment overseas. He decided to spent his entire leave at home in Iowa and arrived at the farm on August 10, 1969.

Peg Mullen had expected Caroline to visit for at least part of Michael's leave. She had written the girl over Christmas, inviting her to the farm. A letter addressed to Caroline, in care of the Mullens, had been waiting on the kitchen table, but Michael wasn't saying whether she was coming or not. Finally, after four days of not knowing, Peg could not remain silent any longer and asked Michael, “Isn't Caroline coming?”

“No,” he said. “She's in the West this summer with her father.”

And that's all he would say. He did not mention Caroline again. However, Peg could not help noticing that Michael spent two whole afternoons writing Caroline and that he never received an answer.

There were then 534,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam fighting a war which had dragged on for almost nine years and which had already cost the lives of more than 38,000 American men. During that first week of leave, while Michael was out fixing fences, clearing brush, painting, and doing general cleanup work around the family farm, 244 U.S. soldiers were killed and 1,409 were wounded.

On his last day of leave Michael planted two small evergreens next to the house, sprayed the lawn for dandelions, visited his friend and neighbor Cecil Joens, then climbed up on the old plum-red Farmall tractor to clean up the lower field.

By ten o'clock that night Michael had ripped out the last stump, the remains of a cottonwood tree. He stepped down from the tractor to unhook the chain, and as he knelt by the stump, his eye was caught by the faint flinty gleam of an arrowhead caught in the cottonwood's bole. Michael picked at it until the point came free, then wiped the arrowhead clean on his blue-jeaned thigh. It was a beauty, side-notched, about an inch and a half long and three-quarters of an inch across, the sort used for deer and smaller game. The tip was white, but unlike the other quartzite arrowheads he had found, this one darkened to orange and black at its base. The point was still sharp, the notch and base unchipped by any plow; the cottonwood tree must have grown up around it. The arrowhead may even have been old enough to have been fired by Black Hawk himself. Michael dropped the arrowhead into his breast pocket, climbed back up on the tractor and just sat for a moment listening to the deep drumming of the Farmall's motor in the moonlight. He rested his elbows on the steering wheel and looked out over the land; then, reluctantly, he double-clutched the tractor into gear, advanced the ignition and slowly drove back up to the farm. Michael backed the Farmall into the shed, carefully aligned its wheels with the newer Farmall and shut the motor off. The sudden silence was broken only by the crackling sounds of the engine cooling, the distant chuckle of a cock pheasant and moments later another pheasant's answering call. Michael climbed down from the tractor and walked into the house.

The next morning, September 4, 1969, Michael's family watched his airplane lift off from the Waterloo Airport, saw it climb northwest over the Cedar River and Turkey Ford Forks where the last Indian council had been held, and then he was gone.

Chapter Four

When the telephone rang in the parish office of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church off Poplar Street in La Porte City a little after nine o'clock on Saturday morning, February 21, 1970, the thin, stooped late-middle-aged country priest assumed it was just another mother whose child, sick with a midwinter cold, would be unable to attend catechism classes that day. He unhurriedly walked to his desk and, lifting the receiver, was surprised to hear an entirely unfamiliar male voice ask for him by name.

“Father Otto Shimon?”

“Yes-s-s?”

“Father Shimon, this is Master Sergeant Fitzgerald. I'm with Fifth Army Headquarters.… Do you have an O. E. Mullen in your parish?”

“‘O. E. Mullen'?” Father Shimon repeated, giving himself time enough to move to the chair behind his desk and ease himself down.

“That's right,” Fitzgerald said. “I was just talking to the priest at the Carmel parish and—”

“That would be Father Rahe at St. Mary's,” Father Shimon interrupted, then added, “Sergeant,” because he had been a captain in the Army during World War II and served now as chaplain for the local American Legion chapter in La Porte.

“Yes, sir, that's the one,” Sergeant Fitzgerald said. “Well, the Father, Father Rahe, thinks he has a
Ralph
Mullen in his parish, but I'm trying to locate an
O. E
. Mullen and I thought perhaps you—”

“That would be Oscar
Eugene
Mullen,” the priest said. “He's listed in the phone book, however, as
Gene
Mullen, hence”—Father Shimon chuckled—“your, ah, confusion.”

“Then this O. E. Mullen
is
in your parish, sir?”

“Yes-s-s, Gene Mullen's in my parish.” The priest did not like this sergeant's tone; he was being altogether too businesslike. “As a matter of fact, Sergeant, the Mullens have always been very good members of th—”

“May I see you this morning, sir?”

“Me? This morning, Sergeant?… Fitzgerald, you said it was?”

“Fitzgerald, that's right.”

“A fine old Irish-Catholic name,” Father Shimon said still trying to be congenial, still fighting down the apprehension rising within him. “You are, I presume, Catholic?”

“No, sir, Episcopalian,” Fitzgerald said. “Please, Father Shimon, it's important I see you this morning. As soon as possible.”

“About Gene Mullen?” Father Shimon asked, his lips suddenly dry. “Is there something, ah-h-h, wrong?”

That morning the sun had finally broken through the flat pearl-gray overcast that had been brooding over the Mullens' farm. Although the temperature hovered near freezing, the week-long Arctic winds had ceased, and at last it again felt warm enough to be outside.

Gene Mullen walked back from the mailbox to the house. As he climbed the stairs into the kitchen, he called out, “Letter from Mikey.” He dropped the bills, the Des Moines
Register
and the second-class mail on the kitchen table and tore open the envelope. Peg wiped her hands on a dish towel and put a kettle of water on to boil.

“What's he say?” she asked. “When did he write it?”

Gene glanced at the top of the letter. “Dated the thirteenth,” he said. “Let's see now ‘Dear Mom and Dad: Went down off the hill to get a haircut and clean up, but ended up hitching a ride to Chu Lai. Went to the MARS station by chance—they were open and not busy—so got a chance to call. Suppose it was midnight at home and guess you were surprised—'”

“Oh,” Peg said, “he must have written this the same day he called.” Gene had not been home when Michael had telephoned from Vietnam eight days earlier. Peg had written “Mike called” on an envelope and left it on the kitchen table for Gene to read following the late shift at John Deere. It was twelve thirty by the time Gene returned to the farm, and after reading the note, he woke Peg up. She told him that she had spoken with Michael for only about a minute and a half and that before hanging up, Michael had said, “Good-bye, Mom, it's so bad here.…” Peg had been so depressed that she hadn't felt like waiting up to tell Gene when he came home and had simply left him a note. She mixed Gene a mug of instant coffee, brought it to him at the kitchen table and sat down. “What else does he say?”