‘Unfriendly Fire’ Tells Mother’s Point Of View

Peg Mullen says she didn’t have any particular feelings about the 20-year anniversary of the Vietnam War in which her son was killed.

But in her new book about her son’s death, the former farmer has plenty to say.

“Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir,” is Mullen’s sequel to C.D.B. Bryan’s book, “Friendly Fire,” which was made into an acclaimed TV movie that starred Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty.

“There were so many things about ‘Friendly Fire’ - we just broke with that author. It was his story,” says Mullen, who splits time living in Iowa and Brownsville, Texas.

“He wanted to portray us like we were born the day Michael died … as people who never even read a newspaper. You know, the bib overalls, the bandana hanging out. I was always an activist; my mother was county Democratic chairwoman in the 1920s when women didn’t do those things.

“I saw the galleys of that book, but I was so angry, I threw it in the corner and I never read it.”

Likewise, Mullen never did watch the TV movie in its entirety.

“I could not watch it. I remember I went to bed and read and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go out and look at it.’ But I just couldn’t. I just started to shake like crazy,” the 77-year-old grandmother said in a telephone interview from Brownsville.

The 1979 movie generated letters and telephone calls from combat veterans, either complete strangers or those who knew and served with her son, Michael, who died at the age of 25 after a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him on Feb. 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh.

Almost from the day Peg and her husband, Gene, who died in 1986, learned that Michael had been killed, she hounded the U.S. military to discover the truth surrounding Michael’s death.

Her full-page ad in The Des Moines Register protesting the war and her marches in anti-war demonstrations put her on par with more notable protesters of the day - Jane Fonda, Joan Baez and Abbie Hoffman.

“I certainly agreed with all of them. I supported them, that’s for sure,” she says.

Mullen had saved nearly all of Michael’s letters home, as well as notes from other parents who had lost sons, and correspondence from others.

At the urging of her daughter, Patricia, Mullen decided in 1991 to begin writing her recently released book. The task wasn’t as painful because “all those years we never could let it die because of the contacts.”

“They never stopped, and so I suppose I became real hardened to the thing,” she said.

Mullen said she wrote from 5 p.m. until after midnight “night after night after night - sometimes seven days a week.”

“I put 800 pages on that word processor and then didn’t know what to do with it,” she said.

Mullen attended four sessions at the University of Iowa’s writers workshop in Iowa City and received encouragement every step of the way.

“I didn’t know anything about writing, but they kept telling me I could write. I’d go back with a little bit, and I never had anybody to tell me to stop,” she said.

Mullen said she at first wanted the book to be a compilation of Michael’s letters, but it evolved into an autobiography in which she tells her side of the story while lambasting Norman Schwarzkopf, the Persian Gulf War general who was Michael’s battalion commander in Vietnam. The book also includes more than 40 letters from Michael and an account of her conversation one night in 1989 with the man who told her he had fired the shell that killed her son.

“This is the first book you’ve got from the family side of a Vietnam story. All you’ve read everywhere is the blood and the guts. But you haven’t had anything coming out of what went on as far as the family, as far as brothers and sisters and mothers and dads.

“This is behind the scenes,” Mullen said.