Friendly Fire

Putnam’s, $10.95

“Friendly fire” is the Army’s quaint euphemism for those lethal screw-ups that occurred with such frequency during the war in Vietnam. An artillery round falls short, say, and lands in the midst of its own troops—death by friendly fire.

When Peg and Gene Mullen of La Porte City, Iowa, learned that their son Michael had been killed in Vietnam by “artillery fire from friendly forces,” they refused to accept this bureaucratic imbecility. They undertook an impassioned investigation of their son’s death, determined to make the Army explain the facts to them in plain English. The Army, of course, is not in the business of using plain English. So the Mullens, desperately unhappy over their son’s death and further aggrieved by the government’s apparent callousness toward their sacrifice, turned against the war and against Washington with a vengeance, eventually finding conspiracies in official brusqueness and cover-ups in form letters.

C. D. B. Bryan, a novelist living in Iowa at the time, was attracted by the journalistic possibilities in the Mullens’ story the radicalizing of the Silent Majority, so he thought. He soon found himself recording not the neat political morality play he thought he had discovered but a frantic and unsettling psychodrama. He does not conceal his frustration that his antiwar paragons turned out to be grieving human beings with an increasingly shaky hold on reality.

The Mullens’ obsession is not a pretty one. and Bryan does little to soften it in this overstuffed, melodramatic account, full of unlikely third-person omniscience. But Peg and Gene Mullen were casualties of the Vietnam War as surely as their son was.

Bryan is satisfied that the official version of what happened to Charlie Company on the night of February 18, 1970. is complete, that Michael Mullen died, as reported, in a regrettable military accident. Perhaps Peg and Gene Mullen have come to accept it too. But how Michael died was never the Mullens’ real question, though they exhausted themselves trying to find an answer. Their real question was why Michael died. There is no simple answer to that one, as the Mullens and the rest of us have discovered, to our lasting regret.