Ten years ago Tad Bartimus wrote War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam, about the effect that war had on its participants. She had reported from Vietnam but was also assigned to cover an R&R reunion in Hawaii of Vietnam combat troops and their wives. “I expected to find happy, vacationing couples reuniting,” but instead she watched “traumatized men and distraught women,” the soldiers crying “as their stricken wives sat beside them, unable to comprehend what had transformed the boys they’d married into these grim-faced soldiers returning to war.”
It has never been any different, as Dale Maharidge discovered. From an early age Maharidge knew that his father Steve, a former World War II marine veteran of the battles of Guam and Okinawa, was different from other fathers. Often inscrutable, he was given to sudden eruptions of anger (once striking his wife, Dale’s mother), drank heavily and would be silent for long periods of time, so unlike the young man who went to war, his family said.
And then there was a photo of himself and a marine named Mulligan, which his father always kept near him. One day, after staring at the photo his son heard him scream, “They said I killed him! But it wasn’t my fault!”
In the end, Mulligan, it turned out, was Herman Walter Mulligan, a twenty-two-year-old Southern-born Baptist, part-Jewish, part-Irish marine who was killed when he tossed a grenade into an Okinawan burial place filled with Japanese explosives, which the grenade inadvertently detonated. Steve Maharidge had not killed Mulligan but obviously felt that in some way he had contributed to his death. When Steve died, the photograph of the two ex-marines was buried with him in Arlington National Cemetery.
Bringing Mulligan Home is also filled with anger at official unconcern about the killing of civilians and inept military leaders. But most of all it should prompt some Americans to wonder when and where our next generation will be sacrificed in yet another of our many wars.