Prince of Peace (7 page)

Tucci, Pace and O'Hara ran swiftly ahead. Fifty yards from the riverbank Maguire and Brown with the lieutenant between them came upon the corpses of the two engineers who had been stringing the detonation wire. One of them had his arms around the black plunger-box. The other members of the platoon mustn't have realized what it was because they'd run right by.

"Get it!" Lieutenant Barrett ordered. "Leave me and get that plunger!"

"No, sir," Maguire said. "We're getting you out of here."

"Fuck you, Maguire!" The lieutenant wrenched himself out of their arms and fell violently to the track. His blood had soaked even through the heavy winter jacket, turning the olive-green to black. He looked desperately at Maguire. "You've got to get off the bridge and blow it!"

Maguire looked behind him expecting to see the Chinese soldiers, but the wave of Korean refugees, having swarmed over and around the halted train, was rushing at them again. The fucking refugees! They'd overrun the Chinese too!

Eddie Brown picked up the wire-wheel and began to string it out, moving backward toward the shore. Maguire picked up the plunger-box with one hand and with the other hoisted Barrett over his shoulder. He ran as well as he could. He and Brown reached the far end of the bridge at the same time. Tucci was there and once his buddies were clear he began firing back into the onrushing refugees again.

It took several moments for Brown to cut and attach the electrical wire to the terminal in the detonator. When it was ready he looked up at Maguire. "Okay!"

Maguire reached over and grabbed Tucci. "Stop firing! Stop firing!"

There was no need now. Let the poor bastards make it, a few of them anyway.

Tucci obeyed Maguire. He stared at him dumbly. Tears stained his face. He'd been weeping all the while. He'd also wet himself.

Maguire felt a shocking sense of control. It had all somehow come down to him. When the first set of refugees rushed past him off the bridge, a token quota of survivors, he pushed the plunger without hesitating.

For an instant, long enough to turn toward the bridge but not to see the faces, thank God, of the Koreans who hadn't quite made it, there was no explosion. Then it came as a simple loud clap, followed by a muffled dull roar. The earth of the riverbank registered the shock. It moved.

The iron girders of the bridge's three central spans were tossed into the air, along with mammoth fragments of the locomotive and millions of splinters of metal and wood. The dust of tons of enginecinder and the smoke from the huge combustion billowed. Yet through that chaos of debris and noise Maguire swore that he saw severed limbs arching through the air and heard the cries of babies.

 

"Hey, hey, LBJ!..." At his side in demonstrations years later I was always aware of Michael's refusal to utter such taunts. "...how many kids did you kill today?"

W
HILE
Michael went to Korea, I went to college. I hastily set about putting away, in Saint Paul's phrase, the things of a child, including, I'd have said with worldly relish, the phrases of Saint Paul. The idea—and it is the perennial idea of freshmen, one of the few they can be counted on to grasp—was to reinvent one's personality. For a punk from Inwood newly arrived at NYU in Greenwich Village, the quickest way to do that was to claim the fiercely romantic identity of the fallen-away Catholic. That meant having to learn at once to disdain above all others the figure of the Roman Catholic priest, that embodiment of smug sterility and intellectual vacuity.

And then, of course, almost immediately, I fell under the spell of Gerard Manley Hopkins. My attraction to him would be permanent and his aesthetic would even be the subject years later of my dissertation—"Instress and Inscape; the Diction of G. M. Hopkins." In those days it embarrassed me, as I was sure it did his Balliol friends, that he'd become a Catholic and a priest. I agreed with critics who asserted that his religious vocation had come at the expense of his literary one. What a waste! we said as if we were horny schoolgirls discussing the handsome curate. If Hopkins hadn't been a priest, we agreed in every seminar, he'd have been a lesser great poet instead of—how these distinctions mattered!—a great lesser one. When he called himself "Time's eunuch" we knew he was bewailing the mistake he'd made, the trick God played on him.

Now I understand that of course his priesthood was precisely what drew me to him. For my kind the priest is the linchpin of belief. In all my religious phases—whether I was fallen away, newly found or only, in current argot, user-friendly—priests have been at the center of my consciousness, and that's part of what's made me Catholic.

And priests, as you know already, will be at the center of this narrative.

None more so, beginning in Korea, than Tim O'Shea.

 

Father Timothy O'Shea—he answered neither to "Padre" nor to "Major"—was born in Tipperary. His parents emigrated when he was a child and he grew up to become a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He was trained in philosophy to be a seminary professor. Though overage he had entered the army with Cardinal Spellman's blessing when his brother Ned was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. It was an impulse born of grief and patriotism and also of guilt at his exemption, but he never served with a combat unit during World War Two. Perhaps that's why he felt obliged to stay in even when the war ended. After two tours at stateside VA hospitals he'd hated to admit it but he welcomed this new war, and he'd had Spellman pull strings for his assignment to the 27th Infantry in Korea.

Father O'Shea wanted to be with lads in their extremity, the way he hoped someone had been with Ned in his. He wasn't prepared to find that at the front most GIs ignored him and what the commanders expected of him was help with the USO tours. Still, he had not adopted that ingratiating and implicitly apologetic manner typical of military clergymen, as if they were by virtue of their calling not quite manly enough to keep company with soldiers. Father O'Shea knew what contribution he had to make, even if the men didn't. An army's effectiveness depends most on the ability of its members to believe in the justice of its cause. Since Augustine and Thomas, the Church had considered every implication of each question concerned with that very element of warfare. Once the morality of going to war
(jus ad bellum)
had been established, then participation in war
(jus in bello)
could be encouraged. Once the criteria of the Just War Principle had been met, in other words, it was important that the warriors knew it. Father O'Shea would hold your hand if you wanted, but mostly he wanted to help you think about what you were doing on a bleak spit of land between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. He wanted to help you do your grim work there as well as possible, and he wanted you to be proud of yourself for doing it. He resented the commanders who required him to arrange the USO events, but in fact he epitomized what they wanted from their chaplains. He was the best goddamn morale officer in Korea.

"God," he said, quoting Emerson's line as a motto, "will not have His work made manifest by cowards."

 

Most vocations to the priesthood are inspired ultimately by the example of another priest. The priests of Good Shepherd parish in Inwood had a reputation, as a group, for kindness, and the junior curate was widely considered to be terrific with kids, but the parish clergy had made no more overt impression on Michael than they had on me. Priests had certainly been a fixed part of his world—his mother was a volunteer at the rectory—but they were far less central to it than, for example, coaches had been. He was very young when his father was killed, or it might have been different. Until Korea he'd never needed a priest for more than encouragement from the bench at basketball games.

Father O'Shea found him sitting on a campstool outside the quartermaster's tent, futilely trying to warm himself by a small portable kerosine stove. It was late in the afternoon and the crisp blue of the sky was softening. The 3rd Battalion, Maguire's unit, was holding a perimeter position of the makeshift encampment. The regiment, about a thousand men, was dispersed on the four peaks of a hill mass that dominated the main road south. Its mission was to cover the 24th Division's flank while it dug in at Osan. The four hills overlooked the rugged valley that had been cut over eons by the Han, and the regimental patrols were on the alert for signs of enemy activity. Word, though, was that the Chinese had stopped at the river.

What remained of Maguire's platoon had been split up. He, Brown and Pace were assigned to Second Platoon in B-Company, and it was scheduled to go on patrol at dusk. The other members were sleeping or playing cards in their tents. Maguire wanted the fresh air more than he wanted the rest or the warmth.

"Soldier, how are you doing?"

"Fine, Father." Maguire stood up and saluted, but it was clear from the priest's abbreviated return that he needn't have. Father O'Shea's bearing was lackadaisical. Not even his imposing uniform—the helmet with its white cross, the silver cross on his lapels, the major's gold leaves on his shoulders—overcame his air of informality. He pulled up another canvas stool and sat. He extended his gloved hand toward the stove.

Maguire stood awkwardly over him.

"Take your stool, soldier."

"Yes, sir." He sat.

"Cut the 'sir' crap with me, son. You're an Irish lad who ought to know better."

"Sorry, Father." Michael grinned. It came as a strange relief that this priest rejected martial despotism in favor of ecclesiastical.

"Where do you come from?"

"New York, New York, Father. Same as you."

"What parish?"

"Good Shepherd."

"Inwood? Is that right? Monsignor Riordan is an old friend of mine."

"Monsignor Riordan baptized me."

"No wonder you're good." The priest slugged Maguire's shoulder. "I hear you've been working on the railroad."

Maguire didn't react. At mess that noon some of the GIs sang the old folk song when he joined the tray-line, an indirect acknowledgment of what he'd done. It had made him uncomfortable.

When Maguire said nothing the priest was silent too for some moments. Then he said, "Lieutenant Barrett told me about it."

"How is he?"

"He needs to be evacuated. They're hoping for a chopper before we have to move."

"Is he...?"

"He'll pull through. He's one tough soldier."

"I know. We'd still be over there if it wasn't for him. They mobbed us."

"I heard."

Maguire looked up sharply. "Did you hear what he did?"

The chaplain nodded.

Maguire wanted suddenly for the priest to say that what the lieutenant had done, ramming that crowd with the jeep, was all right. But he veered away from that. "How's Jones?"

"He died this morning."

"Oh." Maguire exhaled slowly. It troubled him that he didn't feel more than a vague disappointment at that news. He'd liked Jones, though they'd never talked. He resolved to write his mother. "That's three," he said. "Plus the engineers; how many of them bought it?"

"Four. But Bean's okay. Just a flab-stab. Two other men have wounds that need more attention than they can get out here. Once the chopper comes..."

Maguire grunted and forced the mandatory irreverence of tone into his voice. "Tickets home."

"I guess those Chinese just showed up out of nowhere. Nobody thought they'd be in boats. You did damn well to get that bridge. Otherwise they'd be on us now. They could have eaten the whole division for lunch yesterday."

Maguire leaned forward to fiddle with the flame lever. He was grateful to have the chaplain's company, but he didn't feel like talking. That was why he'd left the tent.

Father O'Shea removed his gloves and offered him a cigarette. When they were both smoking he said, "I just wanted to be sure it wasn't bothering you."

Maguire stared at the cinder of his cigarette. "Shouldn't it?" "It's got to bother a man some, a thing like that, but not so it gets in his way. I wanted to tell you about the principle of double-effect, in case you're interested." He waited for a reaction from Maguire. Emotional numbness was a sign of shock. The lad just worked his cigarette. "Lieutenant Barrett said it was pretty rough."

Maguire nodded.

"In many actions there's the intended good effect and the unintended bad effect. If the intended good effect—say, the blowing up of a strategic bridge—is justifiable, then the unintended bad effect—say, the deaths of civilians—can be considered moral."

Maguire looked directly at the chaplain for the first time. "That's it in a nutshell, eh?"

"You don't seem convinced."

"To tell you the truth, Father, I didn't think about it. Any of it. And I wasn't thinking about it now."

"Just a fighting machine, eh? A burp-gun with legs?"

"Isn't that the point?"

"Hell no! We're Americans, soldier." Father O'Shea instinctively adopted a brisk authority as he spoke now. Nothing irked him more than the kill-and-masturbate mentality of drill instructors, as if that was all soldiering was. He was "one of the guys" until a moment like this, but now he was an oracle. His authority was what rescued men from their confusion. "Americans, you hear me? We
think
about what we do. We know right from wrong and we stake our lives on the difference. Goddamnit, we bury men in the difference. That's what this war is all about. You want to be a burp-gun with legs, you join the other side. You want to be responsible for your actions, make humane decisions even in the heat of battle, always looking out for your buddies, then stay right where you are."

"I see what you're saying, Father. But I don't think it matters much to the people who got blown up."

"We pray for the dead, son. But we watch out for the living. It sure matters to Lieutenant Barrett. He's damn grateful to you for not leaving him out there."

"I didn't think about that either."

"No blame, no credit, eh?" The chaplain surprised Maguire by grinning at him and putting his hand on his shoulder. "What's your name?"