Word: mullen
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...explained that he began receiving letters as soon as the first part of a serialization of Friendly Fire appeared in The New Yorker. Readers all over the country wrote that they had been moved to tears by Bryan's description of Michael clearing land with a tractor on the Mullen farm in Iowa the day before he left for Vietnam, the fumbling goodbyes in the local airport the next day, and the shock and horror six months later when Michael returns to the farm-country worked by his forefathers for over a century "in a U.S. Army issue twenty-gauge...
...Reading about the Mullens made me glad that I engaged in some of the marches and some of the antiwar protests of the late '60s," a high-school English teacher from Chicago wrote Bryan. And, she added, in a theme echoed by others, "I'm ashamed that I didn't do more." A New York man wrote that Bryan's articles had "penetrated the confusion and shame which prevented me from thinking about the Indochina War." A woman from Pennsylvania wanted to write the Mullens; she explained that she had lost her job in part because she wore a black...
...deserves every bit of praise he will undoubtedly continue to receive for this book--for its sweep and beauty, for his faith in its importance which sustained him, and for the honesty which informs it. He is explicit: he writes that Friendly Fire depends on "the exploitation of Peg Mullen's grief" and he is ambivalent about that, as he should be. Bryan last week recalled a visit he made recently to a Western college where, to his surprise, the discussion centered around the "style" of the book. Bryan, a low-keyed person, blurted out, "Style is not what matters...
Bryan chronicles the Mullen's struggle, which soon consumed their lives, and reminds us of the horror of the Vietnam years. He quotes at length from the cold government form letters which responded with hazy platitudes to the Mullens' anguish. At one point, Peg resorted to a dictionary to look up the word "prolong"; she was trying to determine how long it took Michael...
...there were in fact guilty men who must answer for the larger mystery the Mullens faced. Implicit in Friendly Fire is the understanding that Vietnam was more than a tragic mistake, an error in the limited sense that the shell which exploded in the trees above Hill 76 and killed Michael Mullen was an error. It defies logic to believe that the long years of blood and napalm were merely a tragic series of mistakes dizzily succeeding each other. Men, powerful, arrogant and lying men, plucked Michael Mullen out of graduate school and put him on Hill 76. The piece...