[Friendly Fire is an] interesting work, which is concerned, finally, with more than just whether the army misled grieving American parents from a wish to conceal its own errors, or simply through the ineptness and bureaucratic insensitivity which the author sees as characteristic of war; or whether the judgment of the parents was distorted beyond reason by their sorrow. From the interaction of the reporter, C.D.B. Bryan, the Mullens, and the military, there emerges a significant and subtle reflection on the moral conditions of the society which produced, and variously tolerated or rejected, the war in Vietnam. (p. 41)

C.D.B. Bryan wrote the Mullens' story because, concerned about Vietnam, he felt

there had to be some way to articulate the people's discontent, their estrangement from their government, their increasing paranoia and distrust…. If the government of the United States had lost the loyalty and support of an Iowa farm family, then it indicated, to me at least, that the government was in very grave trouble indeed.

Eventually, Bryan was astonished at the intensity of the Mullens' indignation, and by the "seemingly inexhaustible volume of sources their outrage fed upon."… (pp. 41-2)

Bryan seems to be suggesting that in questioning the workings of these institutions, just as they questioned the workings of the military, the Mullens have failed to accept, or to grasp, that "manipulations," "inequities," "machinations," and the like are words which appropriately describe the modern world. Bryan seems to patronize them for resenting what he, on the other hand, appears to accept, though no doubt does not approve of.

I first read Friendly Fire in three parts in the New Yorker, the first two parts with sorrow for the death of Michael, sympathy for his gallant parents, troubled by the meaning of these events for our country, perhaps even at knowing how evil had come to innocent Iowa farms like the ones where I grew up. Everyone must have found a great deal to identify with in Bryan's careful and compassionate account.

But I read the third part very uneasily. It was as if the Sinister Force had come and finished Bryan's book for him in the night. Qualified, now, was the generous, sympathetic tone. A note of condescension had crept into his voice when he came to explain to the Mullens the "truth" of what he had discovered about Michael's death. (p. 42)

Despite some minor questions and inaccuracies, Bryan's conclusions will probably be the reader's conclusions too. Why, then, should the reader find himself so dissatisfied? The problem may in part lie in the nature of New Journalistic accounts, in which truth is attested to, verified by third parties, taken from tapes, and so on, but dramatized like fiction. The reader experiences such accounts as both truth and fiction, that is, as adequate accounts of the real world, but also as having certain formal qualities we expect in art. If we complain that somehow coherence, integrity, unity have been violated in the work, the journalist can protest, like the student in a beginning creative writing class, "but that's the way it really happened," and to a certain extent we have indeed contracted to believe him.

Perhaps, when applying the criteria of both art and reality you find tension or contradiction, you must just accept it as characteristic of this queer genre. Yet nothing in our experience of reality or of this book prepares us for, or can reconcile us to, the conclusion of the author that the officers were "fine men," and that Peg and Gene were, finally, tired fanatics whose obsession with their son's death was only their personal tragedy. One may object to these conclusions on the grounds of art—they seem capricious, unprepared—or one may accept them, and along with them the intransigence of facts in general, or one may simply feel, as I do, that the author betrays his work, like a painter who tires of his picture, and, in abandoning his work too soon, leaves awkward blank patches.

For the reader, in this case, the effect is devastating. From the painstaking chronicle of official mendacity, mortal blunders, and moral evil, the shape of the circumstances of Michael's death emerges with a certain clarity: the certainty is that because of inadvertence, muddle, contingency, and waste, precise questions of guilt and accountability become impossible to ask or answer. The difficulty lies not in the fact that Bryan does accept the assurances of the military, but in the ease with which he does so, and in the suddenness with which he turns on the Mullens, who until now have been sympathetically presented.

This seems to transform him from a careful investigative journalist to something more like an unreliable narrator in a work of fiction, inviting scrutiny of his own motives and character. It is like what must have happened between Marlow and Kurtz out there in the heart of darkness, a realization of affinity, after which Marlow goes back and tells genteel lies about heroism to Kurtz's innocent fiancée. (pp. 42-3)

Bryan presents the Mullens with what he believes to be the truth about Michael's death. "I don't buy it," says Gene. "I don't buy Schwarzkopf, and I don't buy the military." For Bryan the Mullens become no longer prototypical Americans but fanatical, rigid in their hatred and bitterness. But the reader comes to wonder whether Bryan—trusting authority, easily lured by sincerity and surface plausibility, willing to accept "machinations" and "manipulations" as inevitable—is not himself a more representative American….

Everyone agreed that Michael Mullen had been killed by friendly fire about three in the morning by guns shooting "defensive targets" at the request of an unknown lieutenant, and that an error was involved…. [It] seems a fault that Bryan did not do more to resolve the details, for the reader if not for the Mullens. In a chronicle of concealments and evasions, the reporter still leaves us to wonder not only who called in the order for the firing, but why the shots were delayed until three in the morning, which was so unusual that at least three of Michael's comrades wrote the Mullens about it. Or why another letter, signed by sixty of Michael's company, was intercepted by the army and never sent. Or why there were so many other instances of censorship….

[Bryan] concludes the book with a dramatization of what "really" happened, but it is only a very accomplished fiction, leaving the reader, already made skeptical by recent history, in the oddly solitary position of the Mullens, whose refusal to be reconciled to ambiguities mirrors the reader's own….

In the long run, Bryan finds the Mullens "naïve" to believe in an America out of "an innocent history primer, one capable of expressing a faith in a simpler America—an America which probably never even used to be." But that is too easy. It would be nice to think that nothing has been lost in America because there was nothing special there to begin with. But where does he imagine the Mullens got their idea of America? La Porte City, Iowa, is maybe an artifact, maybe a place left over from the past like one of those language pockets where people still speak Elizabethan English, and La Porte city may have been changed out of all recognition by recent events. But it is not an imaginary place. The values the Mullens learned there should not be dismissed as if they had never existed.

Mr. Bryan is certainly to be admired for giving us their story, but the heroes are the Mullens, who by refusing to surrender their grief and bitterness, or their sense of the discrepancy between the America they thought they had and the America they found upon closer inspection, or their struggle to retain the old America, take upon themselves and suffer the true burden of honorable patriotism. (p. 43)