Peg Mullen; wrote of son's death

LA PORTE CITY, Iowa - Peg Mullen, 92, an author and former Iowa farmwife who hounded the U.S. military to find the truth about her son's death in Vietnam, died Friday at a nursing home here.

Mrs. Mullen wrote the 1995 book Unfriendly Fire: A Mother's Memoir after her son Michael died at age 25 when a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him on Feb. 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh.

"This is the first book you've got from the family side of a Vietnam story," she said in a 1995 interview before the book was released.

"All you've read everywhere is the blood and the guts," she said. "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."

The autobiography was a follow-up to Friendly Fire, a book by C.D.B. Bryan and a television movie of the same name that starred Carol Burnett and Ned Beaty.

Almost from the day Mrs. Mullen and her husband, Gene, who died in 1986, learned that Michael had been killed, she tried to get more information about their son's death from the U.S. military.

Her full-page ad in the Des Moines Register protesting the war and her marches in antiwar demonstrations put her on par with more notable protesters of the day.

She received many letters, phone calls, and notes from other parents who had lost sons, and from combat veterans who told her they knew and had served with Michael.

The book includes 40 letters from her son, along with an account of her conversation one night in 1989 with the man who told her he had fired the fatal shell.

According to the University of Iowa library's Iowa Women's Archives, Mrs. Mullen was born in 1917 in Pocahontas, about 140 miles northwest of Des Moines. She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.

She is survived by a son, two daughters, and grandchildren.