Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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 silver-grey casket...
...Mullens bled, but they also fought. They were unsatisfied at the Army's official, terse and unfeeling explanation that Michael was killed by U.S. artillery, so they began to send off letters--to officials on all levels of government, to soldiers in Michael's outfit who were still in Vietnam, to others left with empty spaces in their lives by the continuing carnage. They placed advertisements in Iowa newspapers protesting against the war. Peg attended antiwar rallies, including the 1971 Mayday march on Washington, while Gene, more retiring, argued with local American Legionaries and doubters at the tractor factory where...
...days after graduation, Endicott Peabody Jr. '71 went out to Colorado and joined the Colorado National Bank as a management trainee. "There was a lot of ferment and people who were restless and anxious to do something about the Vietnam war in some form," Peabody said last week about his undergraduate stay. "I kind of feel sorry that it happened when I was there or that it happened at all. We got away from the college experience--we were nationally oriented...
...mostly a polemic agitating for a third party. Whatever leftist baggage she may have had when she went in to the White House, she apparently lost much of it coming out. She has produced a work that is devoid of any political scrutiny of Johnson's trangressions in Vietnam. Instead, we find a portrait of a president deeply saddened that the war will tarnish his place in history as a great domestic leader. With Lyndon Johnson, Kearns earns an undistinguished berth among those former White House officials who expect us to agonize over the personal grief of the president...