C. D. B. Bryan, whose 1976 book Friendly Fire about a family’s attempt to prove that their son was killed in the Vietnam war by errant fire from his fellow troops caused a sensation and became an enduring standard of American reportage, and who was portrayed in a movie of the book by Sam Waterson, has died of cancer at his home in Guildford, Connecticut at the age of 73. According to a New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber, Bryan was “an old-fashioned man of letters” who was first urged to become a writer by his step-father, John O’Hara. He “wrote both novels and nonfiction books,” taught at prestigious writing programs including the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and wrote for publications including the New York Times and the New Yorker.

But it was Friendly Fire for which he will be most remembered. The book, which began as a New Yorker article serialized over several issues, traced

the story of the death of Michael Eugene Mullen, a draftee from LaPorte City, Iowa, who, on Feb. 18, 1970, was killed by shrapnel from an errant artillery shell fired by his fellow troops. His parents, Peg and Gene, doubted the Army’s official account of his death. They were frustrated and aggrieved by the shabby treatment their further inquiries received, and the book traces their path “focusing on Peg Mullen’s life-altering outrage” from quietly patriotic Americans, members of what President Richard M. Nixon called “the silent majority,” to antiwar activists.

Reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, Robert Sherrill said “The great war stories do not deal solely with the death of soldiers but with the death of idealism, and Bryan’s handling of that theme is certainly the finest that has come out of the Vietnam War.”

Bryan’s son tells the Times that his father “was a smoker, a drinker and an avid and gifted conversationalist who effortlessly commanded the attention of people around a dinner table,” and that his cremated remains, waiting to be buried after the new year, are meanwhile “stored in martini shakers.”