Prince of Peace (49 page)

The Constellation stopped. Groundcrewmen ran under it with blocks for the wheels, while others pushed an aluminum staircase against the fuselage. A caterer's truck coasted forward to nestle inside the wing. Its hydraulic lift, holding wheeled stretchers instead of food containers, rose slowly. Finally the airplane's doors opened.

The Terre des Hommes representative was the first to mount the stairs, followed by the doctor, Monsignor O'Shea and Michael.

An air force steward saluted each of them inside the aircraft entrance, and that was the first sign—that he was military—that something was wrong.

Monsieur Hurot was speaking animatedly in French to a woman dressed in nurse's whites. The doctor squeezed by them toward the after-cabin where the children were. Michael followed him while O'Shea, who was fluent in French, remained with Hurot and the nurse.

It was Michael's first time in an airplane outfitted with pallets instead of chairs. It reminded him of those submarine movies, the walls lined with double-bunks, naked bulbs casting garish light, but only over the aisle. In the bunks all was shadow, and the children stirring under sheets were like creatures hiding in alcoves. No, it wasn't a submarine, he thought suddenly. It was a cave, a catacomb, and the bunks were the niches into which the martyrs were rolled. The Catholic tradition of embedding saints' relics in the altar began in that first generation when all Masses were said in secret and, because there was no other space in the tunnels under Rome, upon the tombs of the slain. In places, he thought, like this.

The doctor was leaning into a bunk, examining a child. He turned away abruptly and leaned into another to examine the child there.

Michael saw the face of a girl, her eyes hard upon him. To his relief, her face had not been burned, and though he sensed her fear and her discomfort he found it possible to smile at her. She was covered to her throat with a heavy woolen blanket, and belts strapped her in. The second sign that something was wrong.

The doctor went quickly down the aisle, bobbing from cot to cot. A pair of nurses stood aside for him, and a Vietnamese civilian, a man in a white shirt open at the throat, waited at the far end of the cabin. It was to him that the doctor finally blurted, "But they are not burn victims!"

Michael was right behind him. "What?"

"These children have not been burned. There isn't a burn case in here."

"What do you mean?" Michael's eyes fell to another child, a little boy perhaps eight years old whose ravaged face was so thin it seemed his cheek bones were devoid of flesh altogether. His eyes were lost in their sockets.

"They're sick, obviously. But they're not burned." He faced the Vietnamese. "What is this?"

The man seemed shocked. "Why, these are the children for Terre des Hommes. They are cardiac patients and victims of polio and leukemia. They are to receive treatment here."

Monsieur Hurot burst into the cabin behind them. "They have switched the children! There are no wounded children on board here at all!" He pushed past the nurses and past Michael and confronted the Vietnamese. "Are you Doctor Nguyen?"

"No. Doctor Nguyen was not able to come. I am Doctor Cao."

"I've never heard of you! You haven't been working with our people."

"Nevertheless—"

"But this is incredible! Where are the war-wounded? Our agreement with Doctor Ba Kha was quite explicit. We were not airlifting the chronically ill. This was not to be mere pediatrics! We were airlifting war-wounded children!"

"Doctor Ba Kha has been replaced."

"What?"

"Doctor Ba Kha is no longer minister of health." The Vietnamese doctor leaned toward Hurot and began to talk in French.

"Speak English!" Michael ordered. He understood already what had happened, and though his shock was total, he was not surprised. Neither Johnson nor Khanh, that month's ruler of Vietnam, could allow children mutilated by U.S. firebombs to come to New York. It had been naive to think they might. Still he had never felt so angry. His fists and jaw were clenched, his body rigid, as he held himself utterly in check. What? He should have hurled himself against those stricken children, as if it was wrong of them to have polio and not third-degree burns? Or against the nurses and the doctor who had cared for them? He was just learning what was truly maddening about the Vietnam war, both for those who fought it and those who fought against it: the real "enemy" was never there when you were ready to attack.

"My government approved this project," the Vietnamese said gravely, "because certain cases require treatment we cannot provide as well as hospitals in America." He gestured down the line of bunks. "These cases. Other illnesses and other conditions we handle adequately. Your organization wants to help our children. If you think these children do not need your help, examine them."

"But the napalm victims!" the young American doctor said. "Where are the napalm victims?"

"Napalm?" The reference seemed to mystify the Vietnamese doctor. "Napalm is used against the Communist soldiers."

Michael looked down at the boy beside him. From inside the caverns of his eyes he pleaded, as if he were a healthy child like any other, but only asking to be released from the tomb of his body. Michael touched him. "Lazarus," he thought. "Come out."

Y
OU
were there, Tim, damnit! You know what they pulled!"

O'Shea turned his chair slowly toward the window behind him. The view from his office on the sixty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building was hypnotizing, but the rain from the night before had continued and intensified. Sheets of it blurred New York. Queens was gone in the mist. He wondered if airplanes were flying at all. "We're lucky this isn't snow," he said in what remained of his smooth Tipperary accent.

"Tim!" Michael leaned across his desk. "Will you not talk to me about the weather!"

"Oh, Michael," O'Shea said mournfully. "I hate it when you go all earnest on me. It's how I know how young you are." He continued to look out the window, and his silence was absolute.

But this was a pretense of detachment on his part, one Michael saw through. He had a reaction of his own to what had happened the night before, but it certainly was not anger at the South Vietnamese government. He'd let Michael draw him into something he had no business with. He wouldn't have gone near that evacuation airplane if he had thought it was controversial. Whether knowingly or not, Michael had tossed him a hot potato, and O'Shea hadn't gotten to where he was—or, rather, where he'd be in a few weeks when he was consecrated bishop—by juggling those. But he wrapped his uneasiness in his tough-Irish-priest demeanor, as if the only issue that morning was his young assistant's emotionalism. He said, disarmingly, "Did you hear about the hippie liturgy they had at the Paulist church? They sang Negro spirituals and the priest gave a flower to everyone, along with rye bread Communion. God knows what they did at the kiss of peace. Probably passed around a—what do they call it?—fag."

Michael knew he was not expected to respond and he didn't.

"If they consecrate rye bread, what does transubstantiation do to the caraway seeds, do you suppose? You were good in theology." He continued to stare off vacantly.

Michael sat down in the chair facing the desk; all right, Monsignor, I'll wait until you're ready to talk to me.

Finally O'Shea faced him. "Your friends got their facts wrong. Something was lost in the translation."

"That's not it, Tim. The Vietnamese welshed. They fired the man who'd made the deal. Somebody got to them."

"And who would that be?"

"I'd like to know, Tim. Wouldn't you?"

O'Shea shook his head. "No. To what end? Michael, if the evacuation of children is a political problem, then we can't help with it, can we?"

"That wasn't my thought."

"Well, you'd better make it your thought."

"Why is it 'a political problem' to want to take care of wounded children?"

"It shouldn't be."

"It is, because their presence here would pose an obvious question, and there isn't a good answer for it."

"It is not your job to ask that question, Michael." O'Shea leaned toward him. "We talk about love and tolerance all the time around here, don't we? Maybe we've had it easy. I mean, love and tolerance toward refugees and children, that's a snap. But what about love and tolerance toward the men who are trying to keep Vietnam from sliding into the Communist pit?"

"These are the thoughts of a man who's preparing for a new job," Michael said.

"Don't insult me, Michael. It's how I feel regardless of my appointment."

"But as auxiliary bishop for the Ordinariate, you'll be paid not just to love and tolerate the military, but to bless it."

"That's right. And I'll do that with enthusiasm because I believe in the American military, and I accept the essential justice of our cause in Southeast Asia." After waiting for a comment from Michael, he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands at his chin. "Don't you?"

To Michael's surprise, it was not the interrogatory of a moral philosophy professor, nor even of an ecclesiastical superior, but the concerned question of a friend. No one had put it directly to Michael before, and he knew that his inability to answer with a simple yes was, in the arc of his life, literally momentous. He said carefully, "It's dawning on people that maybe the V.C. can win this thing. And if that's what they're thinking, well, you know what happens then. 'Justice' goes out the window, and what comes in are all the air strikes and artillery headquarters will give you."

"That's war, Michael. We've been through it."

"Not against guerrillas, we haven't. You're kidding yourself if you think the just-war categories still apply."

"But I think exactly that."

"And if what you call 'unintended side effects' have become the means?"

"Look, Michael, get off your high horse. Vietnamese civilians are getting mauled. I know that. But what can we do when the V.C. disguise themselves as peasants?"

Michael stood up. The older man's cool rationality seemed suddenly obscene to him. "We can admit that the rules of war simply don't apply. Obviously that has become policy. Why don't they say it instead of denying that it's happening?"

"You know why."

"Yes, because Americans don't want to be told they've become barbarians!"

O'Shea made a point of not responding to that.

Michael felt stupid suddenly. In 1965, even among the opponents of escalation, it was still unthinkable that we should simply abandon to the Communists the country we'd helped to create. (Of course, years later we did.) Michael sat again and tried to deflect the feeling that he'd made a fool of himself. It was a common experience of ours in those early convoluted conversations about the war, that what began as a clear instinctive revulsion at the endless escalation ended in a suspicion that one simply was not tough enough or pragmatic enough to see the thing through. We dreaded above everything the accusation that we suffered from, as the Bundys were always describing it, a failure of nerve. We were always eyeball to eyeball—not with the Russians; what did they care for the punji trap of Vietnam before we fell into it?—but with ourselves.

Michael forced a grin. "Maybe you were right. Let's talk about the weather."

But now O'Shea was serious. "You don't think I should take my new job, do you?"

"No, that isn't what I think." Michael was confused. What made this impossible was the way in which talk about right and wrong seemed increasingly out of place. Was that so in the thick of every war? Maybe the just-war theories were for the homefront folks, to spice their conversations. "I think it's a minor miracle that Spelly appointed you. I think you can make a difference, Tim. The chaplains will take their cues from you. They are the guys on the spot. You can help them remember what they're for besides saying Mass on jeeps."

"Maybe you can help me remember."

Michael leaned forward. "Everything I think about it, I learned from you."

The two men held each other's eyes, both aware of the strong, manly feeling that bound them. "So remind me," O'Shea said.

Michael nodded and responded as if elaborating the point of a dissertation. "Chaplains are for helping GIs and officers to do what's right. Right action, Tim. That's the main thing. Chaplains are for preaching a clear morality even in the middle of an ambiguous war." Michael smiled and raised a finger. "They should say, 'Don't fuck over innocent people. If you do, God fucks over you.'"

"So to speak."

"Keep the boys nervous about their immortal souls."

"You learned that from me?"

"Tim, I'll tell you, in Korea we were never nervous enough about that. You no doubt remember a lieutenant who drove his jeep right into a crowd of refugees. He had his reason. At the time I thought it was a good one. But we didn't think twice about it, and we should have, because the next time you don't think even once."

"The DI would say that thinking twice interferes with the soldier's job, and maybe makes it riskier for him."

"And he'd be right. In a firefight it might slow the soldier down just enough to make him lose. But that risk is worth it if other times it slows him down enough to prevent murder. It's a risk I'd take."

"Would you have fifteen years ago?"

"You tell me."

O'Shea nodded. "You were sensitive to this stuff. But frankly that's what set you apart."

"It's what you call 'going all earnest.'"

"It is, and I admit it. And it's why I keep you around, despite your fucking foul mouth." O'Shea grinned. "You're my barometer, Michael. You've always been. How will I know the weather without you? Maybe I should bring you along. Want to work in the Ordinariate?"

Michael shook his head.

"Of course not; silly thought."

"Actually, my next job is what I wanted to talk to you about, Tim."

"Good. Because it's on my mind too."

"I'm resigning from the Children's Relief Fund."

"What?" O'Shea was genuinely surprised.

"It's the right time, Tim. The Relief Fund's in good shape. Anybody can run it now. I want out." Something in O'Shea's expression startled Michael, a glimmer of hurt perhaps, a wound. Michael thought about the difference in their ages, more than twenty years. Once it had seemed an infinite stretch, but now Tim O'Shea seemed not all that much older. That meant both that Michael was getting up there—he was thirty-three—and that Tim, having begun as a surrogate father, had become a friend. This was going to be difficult. "And the man who takes your desk will want his own people."