Prince of Peace (52 page)

Neither acknowledged it, but they were praying.

 

"What's my penance, Father?"

"Some breakfast, now, with me. Let's blow this place." They went down sixty-five floors to the coffee shop in the mezzanine. They took a booth. Michael insisted on Nicholas's eating, and to encourage him he ordered bacon and eggs himself, despite his obligation to fast before Mass. Nothing provoked the Lord's wrath more quickly than the heartless observance of ritual law. The people who'd left the wounded man in the ditch were on their way to church.

Nicholas touched a napkin to his mouth. "You were going to tell me why you called Dorothy."

"I wanted her to pull you off the story. I guess I didn't need to bother, huh?"

"I'm still on it, Father. I want to find out what happened to those other kids."

"You won't find out from me, Nicholas."

"I have an appointment with Monsieur Hurot this afternoon. He said last night he'd tell me everything he knew. I'm also meeting with Doctor Levine."

"They won't talk to you. They were stunned last night like I was. But they're still committed to the project. Publicity now will wreck it."

"Well, I'm committed too. I think America should know what's being done in its name. We have to get people's attention, and I think this will do it."

"But who would you write it for?"

"Don Thorman." The publisher of the
National Catholic Reporter.

Michael calculated. He had met Thorman in Kansas City. In fact, Thorman was on the Midwest committee for the Children's Relief Fund. He was a gruff, amiable man, jealous of his prerogatives as a layman and a publisher, but also a responsible journalist and, beneath the irreverent mode, a traditional Catholic. Michael would talk to him. He smiled at Wiley. "You know you guys have been causing trouble since New Testament days."

Wiley looked at him quizzically.

"'Jesus was speaking to the multitudes when his mother and his brothers appeared. They were anxious to have a word with him, but they could not draw near in that crowd, because of the press.'"

Wiley laughed, but only briefly.

They sipped their coffee in silence.

Nicholas said eventually, "I have to admit I'm disappointed. I thought we had a deal." He eyed Michael steadily, demonstrating, given what he'd been through, a remarkable resilience. Michael had not expected to be called to account for his broken promise.

"All deals were off after what happened."

"You mean because the army reneged on you, you could renege on me?"

"It wasn't the army, first of all. We were dealing with the government of South Vietnam."

"You're not responding to me, Father."

"Frankly, Nicholas, I'm not interested in a relationship with you that's defined in terms of an issue, even
this
issue. I'm aware that something personal has happened between us."

"I am too. And I'm grateful for it. You have me back on my feet. But now that I'm there, you've got to deal with me."

"Do you know what Jesus said to Peter after he forgave him?" Michael lit a cigarette, then gestured at the dishes on the table between them. "They'd just finished breakfast on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus said, 'If you love me, feed my sheep.' He said it three times, once for each time Peter'd denied him. 'Feed my sheep. Feed my sheep.'" Michael stared hard at Wiley. He wanted very much to win him over. "He didn't talk about issues or about saving the world or about converting Rome or about ending wars. He talked about a concrete, immediate, simple need. Someone's hungry, feed them. See, Nicholas, you and I can go on until we're blue in the face about the war. But meanwhile there are these kids with an immediate need for medical care, and I'm going to get it for them. And you know what? I've got three problems: I've got the government in Saigon, and I've got the U.S. Army, and I've got you. All three of you do the same thing. You put issues—whether it's stopping Communism or stopping the war—before people. Take those pictures out of your bag again. Look at those kids. Don't stop me from getting them to a doctor, Nicholas. Don't use them to make a name for yourself as an antiwar reporter."

"That's not it, Father."

"Are you sure?" Michael realized that now he was doing to the kid what Dorothy Day had done, accusing him of thinking only of himself. Michael knew, like Dorothy did, how vulnerable Wiley was. Before Michael had been urging him to let go of his guilt, but now Michael was using it against him. But he had to. At bottom, for all his Karl Rogers, he was just another Catholic priest controlling the behavior of a boy by undermining his belief in himself.

Wiley looked away. "Well, who does that make you, anyway? This isn't exactly the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And you're not Jesus."

"I know that."

"Am I the sheep you're feeding, is that it?"

"No."

"Well, you want me to act like one. You want me to just close my eyes and forget about the war."

"No, I don't. I want you to go after them, Nicholas, aggressively, responsibly. I think you're right to raise questions and to try to make people think about it. But find another way into it, that's all I'm saying."

"A way to make people pay attention, because it has to stop."

"You can do it. Write about your experience as a C.O. People need to hear that story."

"What are you going to do?"

Michael hesitated. He had to overcome an instinctive reluctance to tell him. "I'm going to Vietnam. I'm going to organize the rescue operation myself."

"Let me come with you," Wiley said instantly.

"No," Michael said. "You wouldn't help, Nicholas. I'm going to be dealing with the army. You'd have to get your hair cut."

"Why the army? I mean, Christ, they're the ones who are dropping the shit on them."

"Nicholas, I'm not coming back until it's army policy to care for the civilian casualties they cause."

"No way, Father."

Michael shrugged. "It's the only way we can fight a war like this and not lose our souls."

"Father, I don't believe you! A war like this can't be fought, period. What, first the U.S. spends a fortune dropping napalm on people, then it spends a fortune flying them back to the States for good old Blue Cross-Blue Shield? You're wacky! I thought I was wacky! The thing is to just stop it!"

"They won't just 'stop it,' Nicholas. Like it or not, that's the fact. Given that, what do we do? We have to conduct ourselves as humanely as we can."

"You'll be their window dressing. They might just latch on to your idea. It would be the perfect way to whitewash what they're doing. Jesus! At first I thought you were naive, but now I get it. You're right. They just might do it! A humanitarian airlift of wounded women and children. It would be brilliant!"

"That's right."

"But they'd be using you, Father."

"I'd be using them, Nicholas. I don't give a damn about anything but those wounded people."

"You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you."

"I'm going at their jugulars, at their weak point. The commanders in Vietnam learned to think of themselves as soldiers in the war against Hitler. They're the original boys in white hats. They'll kill you, but only if they can think of it as an act of virtue. Honor, Nicholas. That's the deal with these guys. Honor, duty, country. And that's where you go after them. Honor, not guilt. Think of them as soldiers, not Catholics."

"You love soldiers."

"When I read about the V.C. assault at Bien Hoa, it was easy for me to imagine it: the shouts, the chaos, the absolute terror you feel at a burst of explosions right by your head, and guys you ate breakfast with falling over in front of you with their guts spilling out in the mud. At a moment like that the orders officers give don't mean shit. Soldiers just react, and you know what? They react for each other as much as for themselves. In a battle, soldiers have an instinctive generosity. Each man's own survival includes as the same thing the survival of his friend. The whole world should live that way. We should all be like soldiers in the heat of battle."

"But you're talking about killing."

Michael studied him. "Which makes it bullshit, doesn't it?"

"I guess. Except..." Wiley pushed crumbs with his little finger.

"Except what?"

"I wish I had friends to look out for, friends to look out for me."

Michael nodded. The kid wanted to go with him to Vietnam. But it was impossible. Nicholas Wiley belonged in Vietnam less than anyone. He had just been kicked out of his womb, the
Worker,
and now he was wandering around with his umbilical cord in his hand, looking for another to plug into. If not a womb, a cause.

Why then was Michael ambushed by the urge to take him along? Come with me, kid. Write the story. Be my partner. Let's take them on together.

But Michael knew. Through his shirt he fingered the cross that Wiley had made for him, that had so soothed him once. Michael was going into combat of his own, and he could have used a buddy too, someone whose survival was intertwined with his. A Lennie Pace.

Lennie Pace. Michael hadn't thought of him in years. But Lennie, despite Michael's explicit promise—"I'll take care of you! Depend on me!"—had not survived. Was that when Michael had begun going his way alone?

He nearly asked Nicholas to come. What adventures they'd have shared! How different things would have been for both of them!

"Look," he said. "I'll tell you what. We can watch out for each other in another way." Michael grasped Nicholas's forearm across the table. "We can pray for each other. Let's pray for each other every day. You know that line of E. E. Cummings? I'll carry your heart, Nicholas. I'll carry it in my heart."

O
N
the Vietnamese calendar, 1965 was the Year of the Snake.

That year saw the first outbreak of racial violence in American cities and the beginning of the massive rejection by American young people of their parents' values and prejudices. It was one shock after another. In the spring the American embassy in Saigon was blown up and we saw in that flash the fate of the entire enterprise. In the summer James Meredith was shot on his walk through Mississippi; how familiar such fire from ambush would become. In the fall David Miller burned his draftcard at a demonstration in New York, and with it our traditional assumption that the Law was the friend of Justice. In the winter was held the first large, celebrity-studded antiwar rally in Washington; those pioneer marchers would not have believed—so momentous did the occasion seem to them—how little they and their millions of successors would affect the course of the war.

Nineteen sixty-five was the year in which Pope Paul VI visited the U.N., crying, "No more war! War never again!" But that year also, as if to remind us what else he stood for, he formally absolved the Jews of blame for the death of Jesus.

By the end of the year American troop strength in Vietnam would be approaching two hundred thousand, the air war—"Rolling Thunder"—against North Vietnam would have succeeded only in solidifying the resolve of Ho Chi Minh and his people, the underpinnings of the American economy would be destroyed, and it would be apparent to many that the Vietnamese Communists' willingness to die ran far deeper, even, than the obvious American willingness to kill. Tragically, it would take eight years and the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, the destruction of the Indochinese environment and the obliteration of ancient Vietnamese and Cambodian culture before the American government saw that too. Nineteen sixty-five was the Year of the Snake all right; we didn't know it yet, but the snake was us.

"Ah, dear man," you say, "you sound like what you are, a fugitive monk in the throes of memory."

It is true. Once, at an earlier point in history, men like me came into their own, bewailing the disintegration of standards and blaming it ultimately on the unfettered human appetite for war.
They
were fugitive monks in the throes of memory exactly, Benedictines like myself in point of fact. And for a thousand years they made slaves of themselves to an idea, an ideal, a hope, that human beings can live with each other charitably, at the service of learning, art, a just society and God. They preserved the greatest of human thoughts—Aristotle's, Plato's, David's, and Saint Paul's; invented the most humane of social organizations—the jury, the monastery, the university and the modern city; sang the most exquisite music—chant; and created the most beautiful artifact of all—the Gothic cathedral. And when their era was over, their Enlightenment successors, the direct antecedents of the pragmatic humanists who brought us Vietnam, looked back upon it with disgust and called it—that time of fugitive monks in the throes of memory—the Dark Ages.

 

What Vietnam in 1965 reduced to for Michael Maguire was the noise of helicopters.

At first he found it frightening and disorienting, and if there'd been another way of getting around the country he'd have taken it. But he was a hitchhiker. He had to take what he could get. Having clambered aboard a command copter or an empty Medevac or one of the giant troop-carrying Chinooks, he could close his eyes and think he was in Korea. But in Korea helicopter use had been sporadic, limited to evacuation functions. In Vietnam, helicopters, massed in formations of dozens of aircraft, were at the heart of American strategy. The Air Mobile technique of swooping in from the sky while Cobra gunships covered and great clouds of dust rose above GIs leaping from their Chinooks like young gods reinforced their sense of being lost in a surreal world that had nothing to do with them. Michael didn't ride on
those
helicopters, of course, but still the machines disoriented him and came to embody everything sinister about the war, just as they did for GIs.

And oh, the fucking noise! Michael compared it to being inside a commercial clothes dryer, an analogy you'll find unhelpful unless you too have climbed into one of those giant tumblers, as he and I did in the basements of Inwood apartment houses. Once you braced yourself against the ribbed tank, you hollered, "Yo!" and your partner dropped in the penny and pushed the button. The trick was to hold yourself rigid at all points so that, as the tank revolved, you didn't bump. The game was to see if you could make it through the entire seven-minute cycle. Michael and I were a team because neither of us trusted anyone else to shut the machine off when through dizziness or fatigue we let go and began to bump. We called it "Niagara Falls."