Writer Peg Mullen was born in Pocahontas, Iowa in 1917. She wrote the book Unfriendly Fire: A Mother's Memoir (1995) about her search for more information about her son Michael's death at age 25 when a U.S. artillery shell fell short and killed him on February 18, 1970, near the South Vietnamese village of Tu Chanh. Her memoir was a follow up to Friendly Fire, a book by C. D. B. Bryan and a television movie of the same name that starred Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty. In 1997, she was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame. She died on October 2, 2009 at the age of 92.