Word: mullen
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C.D.B. BRYAN is surprised that Friendly Fire has evoked such an overwhelming and enthusiastic response. He met Gene and Peg Mullen, the heroes of his book, five years ago, and instantly became fascinated and obsessed with the story of the death of their first-born son, Michael, in Vietnam in 1970, and their subsequent involvement in the antiwar movement. Bryan wrote 900 pages, decided he had used the wrong approach, and rewrote the entire book, all the while nagged by the conviction that there was growing in America an unwillingness to think about Vietnam, that his book, when it eventually...
...were victims of what the Army called "friendly fire." Back in La Porte, Iowa, Peg and Gene Mullen, Michael's parents, found the term painfully offensive. Moreover, the Army had listed their son as a "nonbattle" casualty, a category that, the Mullens were to learn, was used rather loosely to keep down the weekly figure of war dead...
Truly Sorry. C.D.B. Bryan's Friendly Fire follows the Mullens' travail step by step. A Connecticut-based novelist (The Great Dethriffe, P.S. Wilkinson) and stepson of the late John O'Hara, Bryan spent weeks interviewing the Mullens. He conducted his own investigation to corroborate the official version of how Michael was killed. Muffling his own indignation, he tells how the bureaucracy added insult to loss. An anguished war-protest letter from Peg Mullen to Richard Nixon brought back a note from a White House clerk assuring her the President was "truly sorry" that her son had died...
...Michael's death radicalized his parents-particularly his mother-because their basic conservative values had been shattered. As Peg Mullen became convinced that her son's life was wasted by an accident in a war that itself was a mistake, the line between her grief and fury vanished. She grew obsessed with extracting from the Government every obligation due her. She fought for and won the right to have Michael's body specially escorted home from Viet Nam. When an Army liaison officer told her that it would take 15 more days, Peg replied: "You can tell...
...funeral. Although her husband shared her bitterness, he was too busy to share in all of her protest activities. She traveled to Washington to participate in antiwar demonstrations and confront Senators and Congressmen. She corresponded with other parents whose sons had been killed in Viet Nam. The Mullens also used Michael's Government insurance money to publish a full-page ad in the Des Moines Register. It consisted of 714 crosses representing Iowa's Viet Nam War dead. One of the results was that the family's phone was tapped. Once, when Daughter Mary Mullen called...