Margaret Ellen Mullen (née Goodyear; June 11, 1917 – October 2, 2009) was an American antiwar activist who was motivated to protest after her son was killed in Vietnam by shrapnel fired from friendly artillery in 1970.
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.
[1] 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.
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.
"[2] Journalist C. D. B. Bryan turned the Mullen family's intense pain in the wake of Michael's death into a series of articles published in three installments in The New Yorker during March 1976 and then released in book form that year as Friendly Fire.