Friendly Fire by C. D. B.; Bryan Read Free Book Online

his way through Rockhurst, a small, quiet, conservative Jesuit college in Kansas City, Missouri.
    In 1964, when Michael was twenty and in his Rockhurst sophomore year, he urged his parents to pay attention to Goldwater in the upcoming presidential election because Goldwater was telling the truth. To entertain them, he took his parents to concerts. Michael stood about five feet eight inches then and weighed 145 pounds. He had a dark complexion and the long face of his grandfather Patrick J. Mullen. Even though Michael was handsome in a somber sort of way, he had no serious–girlfriends. Perhaps with his solemn, steady gray eyes, his black hair already prematurely flecked with white and his earnest, brisk demeanor, he seemed far older than his years. His maturity certainly inspired confidence: the summer following his sophomore year, Michael worked for the Iowa State Highway Commission and proved himself so trustworthy and responsible that his employers gave him practically unrestricted use of a state-owned car.
    On the fourth day of August, while Michael was out with his highway survey crew, the U. S. Navy destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy were supposedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. Less than twelve hours later U.S. Navy carrier-based planes carried out reprisal raids, intruding for the first time into North Vietnam. This “important threshold of the war,” as it was referred to in a then-secret Defense Department study, was crossed with virtually no domestic criticism. Two days later, on August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, empowering President Lyndon Baines Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
    Michael Mullen, like his family, had no reason to believe that the previous President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had committed advisers and Special Forces troops to Vietnam for any more sinister reason than that Americans wanted the Vietnamese to have what the Vietnamese were supposed to want for themselves: the freedom to resist Communist aggression, to survive as a nation, to become like us . The Mullens believed we were in Vietnam to defend it. They believed Vietnam was a moral war, that if Vietnam fell, all Southeast Asia would fall to Communism with it. They believed it possible to equate our presence in Vietnam with our presence in Korea and our participation in the Second World War. The Mullens believed, in other words, what they were being told.
    In February, 1965, President Johnson commenced Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained air bombardment of North Vietnam. Michael called his mother from Rockhurst, “You remember kidding me about Barry Goldwater?” he asked. “Well, who’s ‘trigger-happy’ now?”
    That June U.S. military commanders were authorized to send American troops into combat. One month later President Johnson sanctioned the increase of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 men. The Mullens were concerned by the growing war and the escalating troop commitment, but they did not protest. They simply hoped the war would end.
    La Porte City had by this time grown into a predominantly Protestant, Republican town with a population of a little over 2,000. It had more churches than taverns, and the proud brick fronts of its turn-of-the-century stores had darkened and become grimy with age. The town was clearly losing business to the newer, bigger shopping centers on the road to Waterloo. There was little new construction in La Porte, no more than two or three houses a year. The signboard on the outskirts of town listing the churches and the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce meetings had begun losing its paint. One didn’t see many young people lounging about the streets, and La Porte City’s only non-Caucasian was an Indian woman on welfare.
    The citizens of La Porte thought well