Breaking silence 40 years ago changed history
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20100410/OPINION01/4100313/-1/BUSINESS04/Guest-column-Breaking-silence-40-years-ago-changed-history
4/10/10
Maybe it was the crosses - 714 of them, stark and black across the
newspaper page, one for each Iowan killed in Vietnam. Maybe it was
the question, simple and direct: "How many more lives do you wish to
sacrifice because of your SILENCE?" Or maybe it was a mother's fury,
fueled by grief over the senseless loss of her son.
Whatever it was, Peg and Gene Mullen's half-page ad - published in
the front section of the April 12, 1970, Des Moines Sunday Register -
found a ready audience. Across the state, Iowans clipped the ad and
posted it, some even mailing it to Congress. When Paul Harvey used it
as a backdrop for a television broadcast, the ad captured national
attention. In the face of a mother's moral claim, the Nixon
administration's subterfuge and sophistry began to crumble. And for
many Americans, the ad made silence about the war in Vietnam no
longer acceptable.
Conservative commentators today tell us that "the '60s" (by which
they seem to mean the period 1965-1975) were dominated by spoiled
students acting out, kids high on attention, drugs, or the postwar
economic boom. This line of thinking seeks to diminish anti-war
protests to a kind of ego function, self-serving acts of drama as
guilty of excess as they were disconnected from the real world.
Peg Mullen's story puts a lie to this kind of revisionism. The
Mullens were farmers, family-oriented Catholics who shared the
heartland conservatism of their La Porte City, Iowa, neighbors. Gene
was a World War II veteran who worked a second job by night. Peg was
a Catholic high school graduate who helped with her children's church
youth group and the local 4-H club. She was a homemaker whose
typewriter shared space with her sewing machine.
By all accounts, they shared a quiet patriotism that emphasized hard
work and occasional participation in local politics.
So 40 years ago, when the Mullens spent their son Michael's $1,884.40
death benefit to purchase the Register ad, their protest was deadly
serious. Michael had died in the early morning hours of Feb. 18,
1970, his heart pierced by shrapnel while he slept in his foxhole
near Tu Chanh, Vietnam. The shrapnel was from an American howitzer
shell errantly fired too near American troops. The military listed
Michael's death as a "non-battle casualty" and Peg Mullen feared the
administration would use that category to play down the number of
those killed in the war. "Friendly fire" killed Michael, not the
enemy, the Pentagon insisted, apparently oblivious to the painful
brutality of those words.
The ad put Peg Mullen in touch with other parents whose children had
died, children also listed as "non-battle" casualties. Mullen's fury
burned fiercely, compelling her to write four to five hours each day,
take calls from parents and vets at all hours, and badger the
administration and the military for answers to her many questions
about the circumstances of Michael's death.
On April 26 she ran another ad, 719 crosses to mark the five
additional Iowa deaths in Vietnam since the first ad two weeks
earlier. To her it was a moral issue, a question not only of
misdirected foreign policy but also of the cost, the human cost, of
lives cut off well before their promise could be fulfilled.
Michael had been a biochemistry graduate student when he was drafted,
with plans to return to La Porte City to farm and live as his family
had. That lost future, and the lost futures of the 58,159 other
Americans who fell in Vietnam, remained at the heart of Peg Mullen's protest.
Not everyone treated Peg Mullen well, and she suffered for her
protests. The government tapped her phone. Many in her community
avoided her or, when she refused a military funeral for Michael,
ostracized her. Gen. William C. Westmoreland and Lt. Col. Norman
Schwarzkopf (Michael's battalion commander) sent generic condolences,
and President Nixon's office responded to her many letters by sending
a copy of one of his Vietnam speeches (to which Mullen responded,
"Send it to the next damn fool").
When she protested Nixon's visit to Des Moines in 1971, she was
clubbed by police who attempted to pull a giant protest sign from her
grasp. Like so many others who had tried to silence her, they failed.
Peg Mullen died last year at age 92. She was an American hero. She
spoke out when others did not, and she faced frightening opposition
with courage and a conviction conceived in nearly unbearable pain.
And she never stopped, continuing to speak for peace through the
first Gulf War and even into the current conflict in Iraq.
After Michael's death, silence was never again an option.
.
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