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

She looked next at the sergeant, who avoided her eyes by glancing at the priest whose job it was to tell them. But Father Shimon would not stop wiping his glasses, and Peg, feeling herself wanting to scream, to kick over a chair, to thrash about, to do anything rather than listen to this awful silence a moment longer, saw her husband’s lips move as if to say, “It’s Mikey,” but no sound would come out.
    Peg scowled at the Army sergeant and said, “Michael died on Thursday.”
    Thursday morning, upon waking up, Peg had burst into tears for no apparent reason. Off and on that entire day she had cried, and so that Gene wouldn’t know, she had spent the morning by herself down in the sewing room. She decided to make new curtains for the boys’ room, and she sewed and sewed but would have to stop because she would begin crying again and couldn’t see the material through her tears. She would wait for the tears to pass, pull herself together and sew some more until finally, a little after two o’clock, when she heard Gene leave for the John Deere plant in Waterloo, she stopped sewing altogether.
    The following day, yesterday, Friday, Peg had awakened not sad, just angry. No matter what Gene said to her she snapped back, contradicting him, defying him. And seeing the hurt and confusion in his face, she wanted to apologize but instead became angrier still for feeling that need. At noon Peg felt she simply had to get out of the house. She drove off to spend the day with friends who shared her feelings about the war, with whom she could talk about how worried she was, how frustrated she felt trying to find something meaningful to do.
    Before Michael had been drafted, the war had appeared so far away, so purposeless and distant. But when Michael was sent to Vietnam, the war no longer seemed remote. A month after Michael was assigned to the Americal Division, Peg wore a black armband on October 15, Moratorium Day, to indicate her opposition to the war. The same day, in La Porte City, an American Legionnaire backed her up against the post office wall, told her she was a disgrace to the country and ordered her to take the armband off. Peg brushed his arm aside and told him, “You better get with it, you sonuvabitch!”
    Still, Peg realized, she had never actively campaigned against the war. She had written letters to Jack Miller, Iowa’s hawkish Republican Senator to express her opposition. Each time the Des Moines Register carried an account of an Iowa boy’s death in Vietnam, Peg would forward the clipping to the Senator’s office in Washington with the note: “Put another notch in your gun, Jack.” She had written several letters to President Nixon, pleading with him to end the war. She joined Another Mother for Peace, but really, Peg had to concede, her opposition so far had been limited and ineffective.
    Yesterday she had not returned to the farm until dusk and, to keep busy, had begun to clean house. For the next six hours she scrubbed and dusted, waxed and polished, pausing only at ten o’clock for the late evening news on television, There was an account of an accidental shelling at Bien Hoa by South Vietnamese artillery resulting in the deaths of about a dozen American men. The story stuck in Peg’s mind when she went back to cleaning, and at midnight she called one of the friends she had seen that afternoon to ask if she had watched the news. They talked about how the accidental shelling seemed to epitomize the stupidity and wastefulness of the Vietnam War. Peg told her friend how busy she had been cleaning, that she had felt this compulsion to polish the house from top to bottom. The friend asked Peg if she were expecting visitors.
    â€œNo, none that I know of,” Peg had said. “I don’t know what’s going on with me—I really don’t. But whatever it is,” she added, “I’m ready.”
    The Army sergeant did not