Prince of Peace (53 page)

"This is like going over Niagara Falls," he called to the machine gunner next to him, a perspiring black sergeant who was braced between his weapon and the steel frame of the lurching chopper, but half-leaning out of the open hatch. He nodded, but in the noise he hadn't heard what Michael'd said. He rode as if he'd been in helicopters all his life; he knew better than to try to make small talk.

Michael leaned into the wind a bit, to cool himself. He wore a short-sleeve white shirt, open at the neck, and black cotton pants. His face and arms were a deep red from four months of the fierce tropical sun. He'd arrived in Vietnam in March, at the beginning of the hottest season of the year. On his feet he wore the ubiquitous tire-rubber sandals of the Vietnamese. Soldiers, like the gunner, rarely saw mufti-clad Americans outside Saigon—even reporters were required to wear khaki in the field—and they assumed he was a CIA man. Despite his black pants, which Michael made a point of wearing as a vestige of the clerical, no one guessed he was a priest. Occasionally, in fact, he was chided for wearing the uniform trousers of the Viet Cong.

Despite the rigors of his itinerant, unsettled life and the wearing frustration of endless blind alleys and the numbing effect of what he saw when the alleys led somewhere, he looked and felt far healthier than he had when he arrived, a sallow-faced dogooder, a citified stranger to physical exertion. Four months in Vietnam was long enough to make him feel that he hadn't left in the first place, but also long enough to dull the shock he'd felt at first at how different the country was now that an American army occupied it.

In four months he'd discovered only handfuls—hundreds, not thousands—of war-wounded children. He had encountered the maddening intransigence of GVN officials, the glib optimism of the American mission, the condescending detachment of journalists and the refusal of Vietnamese pacifists, the Buddhists and the students, to trust him. All the while he had watched as hoards of GIs poured into the country, and everywhere he went he saw bases and barracks under construction. And everywhere he heard rock'n'roll—"I can't get no ... no, no, no ... satis/action!"—blaring from AFN Radio.

One scene in particular stood out in his memory. After his first weeks of searching the countryside for the burned children, going from hospital to orphanage to refugee center and finding none, he'd become convinced that hundreds if not thousands of mutilated children were being kept hidden by the government. He'd returned to Saigon in a frenzy of anger and concern, as if the burn cases were prizes he was being cheated of. He could think of only one man who could help him find those children, John Howe, who by then was the deputy chief of AID at the American embassy. Without even stopping at the rectory where he was staying, Michael went to Howe's office, but Howe wasn't in. He was playing tennis at the Cercle Sportif. Michael went there.

He found Howe sitting at a table on the veranda with three other men in tennis whites. They'd obviously finished their match some time before, but their necks were still draped with towels. They were smoking and sipping drinks. As Michael approached, he saw that Howe looked thin and sickly. His gaunt, bony body contrasted with the healthy suburban look the others had. It was a shock to see Howe's decline. The country had worn him down.

When Howe saw Michael crossing toward them he stood up. "Father Maguire! My God! I'd heard you were back!" The warmth of Howe's greeting surprised Michael. What he'd remembered about the man was his aloofness.

"I'm sorry to come on you like this, Jack, but I have to talk to you."

"Sure. Sure." Howe looked at his partners, then said, "Fellows, this is Father Mike Maguire. He's, uh..." He looked at Michael. "Are you still with CRS?"

"Actually, I'm here for Caritas now. The Council of Volunteer Agencies."

"I thought you'd have come to see me before this."

"I've been in the countryside, Jack. That's why I want to talk to you."

"Are you the padre," one of the others asked, "who's been looking for the burned babies?" He was a lanky Southerner whose voice was implicitly disdainful.

Michael bristled, but controlled himself. "Burned babies?"

"Well, isn't that what you folks call them?"

"Father, this is Colonel Tom Vintner," Howe put in. "He's the chief public affairs officer for the air force here."

The colonel sipped his drink. Michael noticed now that it was straight whiskey and it was probably not his first. "That's right, padre. I'm the guy who reporters come to for their burned babies. Reporters just love burned babies."

"And what do you tell them, Colonel?"

"Why, the truth, padre." Vintner leered at Michael contemptuously.

Howe took Michael's arm. "Let's go, Father."

"Hold on, Jack," the colonel said. "You want the truth, padre, right? Even if it's unpleasant?"

Michael was aware that people near by, including the first Caucasian women he'd seen in many days, were watching them.

"Does the good padre have the stomach for the truth? That's the question."

Michael leaned down to him, placing his hands on the table, bringing his face close to the colonel's. "So what do you tell them about the napalmed children?"

"Why, that the only napalmed children in this country are the little thieves who burn themselves with pilfered gasoline when they try to cook with it, and those fuckers deserve anything that they get."

Michael reacted without thinking. He smashed the man in the face, knocking him backwards off his chair.

The bathing beauty on the diving board froze, the play of the doubles match at a nearby court stopped, the people at the surrounding tables fell silent. Everyone stared at Michael Maguire. Michael was more stunned than any of them.

Colonel Vintner struggled to his feet, dazed, and only the sight of his own blood flowing from his mouth, staining his shirt, seemed to make him realize what had happened. He lunged toward Michael, but Jack Howe stopped him.

"You were off base, Colonel," Howe said.

Vintner shook his fist at Michael across Howe. "You stay the hell away from me. I'll tear you apart."

Michael didn't move.

Finally the colonel's other friends coaxed him back to the table. Howe took Michael's elbow. "Come on. Let's go."

Outside the compound Michael faced the AID officer. "Christ, Jack, I didn't mean to put you on the spot."

"He had it coming. I've wanted to do that myself a dozen times." Howe grinned. "I don't have your flair or your right jab."

"Or my short fuse. It's the one thing I can't stomach cracks about. Jack, you've got to help me. I've been all over the damn country. I can't find those children. There have to be thousands of them. The government is hiding them, and I have to find them."

Howe shook his head. "Father, that's cockeyed. You're completely wrong."

"What, you think the only kids getting burned by napalm have stolen it to cook with?"

"Of course not." Howe looked away, and a pained expression unlike any Michael had seen from him before crossed his face. "I guess you don't know how bad it is here now." He looked fiercely back at Michael. "When the air force dumps its shit on a village, Father, nobody lives, get it? It's so fucking lethal that if it touches you, you're wasted. Women and children? Hey,
pas de problème!
Because we got a body-count going now, and it's how we know we're winning. That means every dead Asian, even a child, is tagged—literally on his toe—as a Communist. Get it? That's why there are no civilian casualties. Colonel Vintner will tell you all about it. I wish you'd killed that fucker."

Michael took a step back from Howe. Once he'd longed for an expression of feeling from this man, but now Howe's emotion frightened him. His eyes were distended and perspiration poured down his face. The buttoned-down, ever-cool aristocrat that Michael had known before was gone; in his place was this hothead. Such anger seemed, in Howe, like madness. And it revealed as much as anything what the war was doing.

Howe took a handful of Michael's shirt. "Vintner will tell you! Because of our incredibly accurate targeting and our humane warn-and-clear techniques! No civilian casualties whatsoever! Because every dead Slope is
ipso facto
a dead Cong!" Howe was shaking Michael now, and Michael saw that it wasn't perspiration only on his face, but also tears. "And
that's
why there are no wounded children for you to rescue. Because they are all dead!"

 

The chopper dropped. Michael turned to look out the small window. The dramatic green mountain peaks past which they swooped seemed like the props of a boy's model railroad. Nestled at the base of one of them was a brilliant blue lake—an oval sheet of mirror—and on its shore Michael glimpsed the flat white roofs, each emblazoned with a red cross, of the hospital compound. The adjacent town, a collection of bamboo huts clustered around a large, twin-spired Spanish-looking church, was An Hoa, the Vale of Peace, an ironic name now since the fighting had recently come here too. An Hoa was only fifteen minutes by helicopter from the huge new air base at Da Nang, and the Americans had selected it as the site of a supply depot and light aircraft landing field, both of which were even then under construction on the shore of the lake opposite the hospital. It was toward the construction site that the chopper angled. Acres of jungle had been cleared and already a runway was being poured. Heavy green machinery—bulldozers, graders, dump trucks—crawled around on the rich dark earth like beetles. Still the region hadn't been cleared of Viet Cong, and Michael had been warned that the An Hoa Hospital—run by a group of German volunteers, not the government—was known to treat Communists.

"Here we are!" he shouted to the gunnery sergeant, and he jerked his thumb at the hatch.

The sergeant did not bother to watch as the helicopter landed.

Maguire was the only passenger. He hopped out. The rotor wash of air tore at his clothing. There was no reason to run, but he did, from habit. Everyone ran away from helicopters, in that familiar hunchback's crouch, as if they couldn't stand the noise or thought it was going to blow up or draw Charley's fire.

A dozen plastic bags, each with its yellow tag, were arranged neatly in three rows of four on the apron of the square of pavement. Marines began hauling them to the helicopter; American corpses were what it came for.

Michael watched from a distance until the chopper, still brisk despite its sad load, was airborne again. The gunnery sergeant stared at Michael from behind his weapon. Michael checked an impulse to wave at him. An eerie silence—though not really silence, since bulldozers worked near by—filled the air once the helicopter was gone.

A person whom he did not recognize as a woman until she spoke—she wore tan slacks and a loose tan shirt, dark glasses and a floppy white hat that obscured her face—approached and said, "Father Maguire?"

"Yes."

"Inge Holz. I am the nurse from Malta."

Malta was shorthand for the group that ran the hospital, the Aid Service of Malta, a Cologne-based organization of Catholics who did volunteer work in reparation for the crimes Germans inflicted on the Jews. "I come for you with our jeep." She smiled and put her hand out. Her brisk, one-pump German handshake surprised him. A pretty European woman was the last thing he had expected to see in An Hoa.

From the ground, looking up, the surrounding mountains were a rich blue, not green, and the lake along which they drove reflected the peaks against the cloudless pale sky. The near hills had been terraced by farmers, and the neatly hedged walls of piled stones, each defining plots of soil, which grew progressively larger according to the contour, lent the scene the tranquil, tidy air of a travel poster. At the foot of the hills drawing water from canals fed by the lake were rice paddies and at one point the road itself formed the dam between the body of water and the squared-off paddies. The nurse pointed to them and said, "The rice crop has fallen. Do you know why?" She looked at Michael. When he did not reply, she said, "Because it is here in the rice fields that the Buddhists have their dead buried. So many dead, so many killed, the seedlings choke."

Michael no longer reacted to such epiphanies with shock, and he knew why. The corpses were piled inside him too by now, choking feeling. He was afraid of his own numbness. "Around here?" he asked. He wanted to confront directly what she was telling him. He wanted to learn how the local horror was unique. "It's been that bad?"

"Since the marines, yes."

"They're trying to secure the area for their base, I guess."

"Always before the Viet Cong had left us alone. Now there is reason to come. They have something to attack. The marines have made the area less secure, not more. That is very bad, you understand."

"And your hospital treats mainly victims of the fighting?"

"Now, yes."

"And before?"

"Always leprosy."

Michael shuddered despite himself and fell silent.

He found himself thinking that the nurse's accent was wrong. The Europeans in Vietnam were French, not German. Germans were from that other war, that just one. He reminded himself that despite what the Ministry of Health official in Da Nang had said about her hospital, she was not the enemy. Sidelong, he looked at her. She had sharp features, and her face, what he could see of it for the hat and her glasses, was weathered brown. Premature lines at her mouth and eyes indicated the disregarded weariness that was habitual among volunteers. He watched her hands playing upon the wheel and gearshift. She drove with an
esprit
that bordered on the reckless, but which stimulated him almost erotically, even as he held on. The only flesh that he could see besides her face was that of her hand and forearm. He traced its outline until her skin was lost in the rolled sleeve. A perspiration stain emphasized the seam of her shirt. Now he saw the form of her breast. She raised her hand to tuck an elusive wisp of blond hair—how had he not noticed it?—up into her hat.

"How big is your hospital?" he asked, to rein his mind.