Peg Mullen

Margaret E. "Peg" Mullen (née Goodyear; June 11, 1917 – October 2, 2009), was an antiwar activist who was motivated to protest, after her son was killed in Vietnam by shrapnel fired from friendly artillery in 1970. She became an active opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and protested against the Gulf War and Iraq War. Her life story was made into the Emmy Award-winning 1979 film Friendly Fire starring Carol Burnett, which was based on a 1976 book of the same name by C. D. B. Bryan.

Born in 1917 in Pocahontas, Iowa to Clair and Josephine (née Wolfe) Goodyear, Mullen attended Sacred Heart High School, moving to Des Moines after graduation. She was employed as a secretary in the United States Department of Labor from 1937 to 1944.

She married Oscar Eugene "Gene" Mullen (June 27, 1916 - July 1986) in 1941 and lived on a family farm near La Porte City, Iowa, supplementing her income with jobs at J. C. Penney and Santa Claus Industries. The couple had four children: Michael, Patricia, Mary Margaret, and John Kevin. Peg Mullen was an active Democrat who was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions held in 1964, 1968 and 1972. In 1972 she was a McGovern delegate. That same year she was nominated for Iowa Mother of the Year.

Her son Michael was drafted in 1968, and she would later write of her fears of being "in a quiet corner of an airport and say[ing] goodbye to a son in uniform, knowing in your heart that you'll never see him again." He was killed on February 18, 1970, from shrapnel fired by U.S. artillery. She refused to believe the United States Army's description of the incident as an accident and remained skeptical even after evidence was provided to support the official story. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. met with the Mullens in an unsuccessful attempt to address their questions, later writing in his autobiography It Doesn't Take a Hero of the double tragedy of "the needless death of a young man, and the bitterness that was consuming his parents."

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