Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  Last year, in Nicaragua, I thought a lot about Vietnam. There were no exact analogies, of course, but in the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, I remembered walking through the same kind of lobby in Saigon, talking to correspondents fresh from the fields of battle, exchanging the small talk of war. Late at night, I recalled the faces of soldiers I’d met long ago, marines in the hills and jungles of I Corps, grunts traveling through the treacherous passes around Bong Son.

  Talk about Vietnam to old soldiers, meet an old reporter, and they’ll remember another thing: the beauty of the place. One afternoon, in the lovely hills of Nicaragua, where the contras now roam, I remembered an afternoon near Dalat when a group of us saw a flock of birds, white against the bottle-green hills, move slowly to the north. They looked like doves, and we laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on. It’s difficult to explain to people how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside. Seen from a helicopter, the natural green feminine beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue and brown rain-filled pools had been made by B-52S; those ghastly dead forests, as skeletal as Giacometti figures, were created by Agent Orange. In the night, you could hear hot wind blowing through the trees, as sibilant as Asia, a wind with its own language, its own sound, atonal; that was Vietnam too.

  I’m never surprised when I meet once-young men who want to go back. For a day, a month, an hour. They want to see Vietnam when its beauty does not hold the potential of death. They want to know if the con men and hustlers still deal on Lam Son Square. And what about the whore named Ly, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who lived in the blue room and never smiled? Are all those women now graduates of re-education camps? What do they remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and hootches and people? How many Vietnamese listen now to Aretha and the Doors and the Stones? Who lives in Soul Alley, out by Tan Son Nhut, where black soldiers danced to Marvin Gaye, where deserters lived with their Vietnamese women? Have the Communists sealed the tunnels of Cholon? Does anyone live on Hamburger Hill? Who sits by the pool of the Cercle Sportif, or drowses on the veranda of the Continental Hotel, drinking “33” beer? What has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where in 1966 you could see the gravestones sinking into the dark earth? Do children laugh in My Lai 4? The ghosts whisper.

  Vietnam, they say.

  Vietnam, Vietnam.

  VANITY FAIR,

  April 1985

  IRELAND

  I.

  BELFAST

  We spent the first night high up on Finaghy Road North in streets completely devoid of light. IRA guerrillas waited in the darkness behind barricades made of sheet-iron and paving stones. The Falls Road, the main street of the Catholic district, was sealed off. There was heavy fighting in the White Rock Road. Finaghy was deadly quiet. There was no moon and occasionally the stillness would be punctuated by a distant burst from an automatic rifle.

  The lads want the Army, an old friend said, they want to have a go.

  Now, finally, everyone seems to want to have a go. The men of the IRA are fighting a civil war against 12,000 heavily armed British troops. In addition to the British troops there is the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) built on the remnants of the old discredited B-Special militia. Since Saturday at least 25 people have died in the fighting, hundreds have been injured. Almost 4000 refugees have traveled across the border into the Irish Republic. Factories have been demolished, homes put to the torch. More than 300 men have been arrested and held without arraignment under provisions of the Special Powers Act, a law that the Greek or South African government would love to have for themselves. The city is in a shambles and still the fighting goes on.

  Yesterday the fighting was sporadic. A light drizzle fell through the day. There was shooting from the Divis Street flats, a brief battle made more complicated by the presence of UVF snipers. Most of all it was a day in which all sides caught their breath. The English Prime Minister Edward Heath had finally finished the yacht race he had been on while his subjects died and was back in London. There had been a call from Dublin for a three-party conference and some wanted to see what would develop. But nobody had any real hope.

  In the light of day the signs of the bitterness and blood were everywhere on the Whiterock Road which leads to the largely pro-IRA housing estate of Ballymurphy. The walls of the city cemetery had been torn out in big gaping piles for use as barricades. Along the wall of the cemetery one of the “lads” (frequently a euphemism for the IRA) had painted in two-foot-high letters the ultimate question of an oppressed people: “Is There A Life Before Death?” It stood there in the gray morning light at once very Catholic and very revolutionary while children played in the rubble which had been pushed aside by the British bulldozers. Is there a life before death?

  The night before, sitting in someone’s parlor on Finaghy Road talking to the women, who were fearful for their men, one middle-aged woman burst out, “If I was a man I’d get a gun myself. I was never bitter before. I thought you could take this life here and hope for the best. Well, there’s a lot of us here now just won’t wait. The men on this street are all unemployed, every last one of them and they’ve got nothing to lose. They feel disgraced in front of their women and children. Now they’re fighting. They’re goin’ after something and even if it’s all bloody hopeless, at least they’ll go like men.”

  The women have been extraordinary. In the afternoon on the Falls Road at the corner of Broadway about 300 women and a few dozen children gathered around a Saracen tank and battered away on it with the metal tops of garbage cans until it left. Across the street a knot of men gathered in front of the Beehive, an ornate saloon full of brass and wood. They wore the sullen masks of men who had been too long unemployed. But the women were firebrands, led by a red-haired, tight-lipped young woman who gripped a stick in her hand.

  “If the nationalists was all together, see, they’d be able to do it,” she said tossing her hair in the drizzle. “Too many of the men are Jilly-Jaries. They wear the skirts. But the women, we’re not afraid to die for the country.”

  She talked about the First Presbyterian Church, a great orange-brick pile that stood in silence a few doors away. “We haven’t done anything to the Protestants. We haven’t touched that church of theirs. They’ve burned our churches. They’ve driven our people out of their area. But we know it’s not the Protestants. It’s the politicians.”

  “I don’t know where it’s goin’,” the red-haired woman said, “but they can’t put the best of our men in prison. They can’t keep doing this without a fight. It’s a war now and I don’t care because I’m not afraid to die.”

  The clouds moved slowly through the sky. The rain fell. An empty hearse from O’Kane’s Funeral Parlor came down the Falls Road. Someone else had been buried at the cemetery up on the hill and standing in the strange chill you were certain that before it was over Mr. O’Kane would have a lot more customers.

  II.

  BELFAST

  From 8000 feet it looked like the same old Ireland; the green, placid rectangles running off to the Atlantic, as if the earth were celebrating its own sweet order; farm houses and hedgerows and cattle decorating its face; mists lacing the low hills. But as we descended into this hard northern city, that old Ireland began to fade, as the cold smoke of revolution twisted up from the red-brick streets, and the faces of the other passengers tightened into masks. The Belfast face is an anthology of masks.

  “Too long a sacrifice,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “can make a stone of the heart.” And moving into Belfast in this desperate week, you saw that too long a sacrifice had already taken place: too many years of bigotry, too many years of being offered humiliation or exile as the sole choices of a life, and finally too much blood.

  Instead you saw the skeletons of transmitting towers rusting in the countryside; suburban houses reduced to rubble; great gaping holes in the once tigh
t-packed walls of the downtown avenues; plywood and tin covering a thousand shattered windows. Belfast was a town at war, its heart turning to stone.

  And as we walked into customs, at Aldergrove Airport, for a long and tedious search, everyone there knew that the crunch had come. The day before, 13 Irishmen had been returned to the Irish earth, while 20,000 people stood in lashing rain and sleet outside St. Mary’s Church in Derry. Inside the church, the bishops and lord mayors and aldermen sat in silken mourning beside the families of the dead. But Ireland flowed up the hills of the Catholic ghetto called the Creggan, made up of men with cloth caps, women with worn faces, the working people of Derry, scattered under umbrellas holding off the rain. Bernadette Devlin stood outside in the rain, with Ireland.

  That ceremony was at the heart of the crunch. Those 13 had been shot down on Sunday Bloody Sunday, and the Irish tragedy hurtled forward in a series of jump cuts: Bernadette Devlin slamming Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons; the British Home Stores in Belfast being blown apart at dawn; the Republic withdrawing its ambassador from London and sending Foreign Secretary Hillery to New York; and then 30,000 people in Dublin burning out the British Embassy. After Sunday there was more happening in Ireland than the IRA.

  In the afternoon we went to the Lombard Room of the Royal Avenue Hotel, where officers of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Assn. announced to a packed smokey press conference that Sunday’s march in the border town of Newry would go on as scheduled. The British reporters practically interrogated the civil rights people as if simply showing up in a public place in Northern Ireland was a guarantee of violence. But in Derry last Sunday the only dead were Irishmen, none of whom were armed. If this Sunday’s march turned violent it would be the British Army that turned it violent, not Irishmen asking for civil rights.

  At nightfall, a dense brown fog mixed with the smoke of burning buildings seeped through the city. We started to move towards the Catholic ghetto in the Lower Falls Road. British soldiers edged their way through the fog, their blackened faces looking as blank as the nose of a machine gun. In the distance, we heard a burst of automatic weapons fire, muffled shouts, and men running in the fog. There was no edge to the buildings, no conventional geography in those darkened streets.

  We were put up against a wall and searched. There was the tap-tap-tap of a rifle again. Up ahead, a mangled pile of vehicles burned an orange hole in the brown fog. The British were trying to clear the barricades, which had been built to prevent them from having easy access to the area, and from the Divis Street flats, Irishmen with guns were shooting back. A knot of young people, grim and almost insanely courageous, heaved rocks and curses at the Saracen light tanks.

  “Bastards, murderin’ bastards,” someone shouted from the darkness. There were more voices in the dark, running feet, smashing glass, isolated shots, and still the fog moved down the Falls Road. The British laid down a barrage of 4-inch-long rubber bullets from grenade launchers and the young people scattered. More shots came from the Divis Street flats. Two rounds slammed into the plywood covering of the shuttered bar where I was standing. And then suddenly it was quiet. The fog covered everything, and the British soldiers started to withdraw.

  It was Friday morning and the night belonged to the IRA.

  III.

  BELFAST

  You see them shopping along the Shankill Road in the dull grainy Northern afternoons: tidy women pushing baby carriages, men in wool suits, children playing with plastic guns. The side streets are bristling with Union Jacks and red, white and blue bunting, and you can see the gray iron wall of the “peace line” at the end of some of the streets, and the spray-can graffiti of the Protestant ghetto: “IRA Beware” and “No Pope Here” and “Home Rule Is Rome Rule” and “No Surrender.”

  These are the Protestants of Northern Ireland, and seldom has a majority ever acted more like a minority; these are people who inhabit a fortress, their minds in a state of siege.

  “We’re British,” a man told me one afternoon, standing angrily on a corner of Sandy Row, with the stunted slum houses of the Protestant working class ghetto spread out behind him. “We’ll remain British, even if Heath sells us out, even if Faulkner sells us out.”

  The man was a welder in the Harland and Woolf shipyards (in which there are only 100 Catholics in a 9000-man work force). He spoke in the hard, heavy accents of the Belfast working class; his tone, with all its cargo of intractable resentment and suspicion of betrayal, was unmistakably Irish. In London, he would be labeled “Paddy” along with the rest of the Irish. But here in Belfast, this city strangling on the stale meal of history, he was insisting that he was British; it was as if a can of tomato soup, through some act of pop alchemy, could describe itself as a ham sandwich.

  “The basic confusion here,” a British reporter said to me one night, “is that they’ve got their notions of lunatic patriotism mixed up with their notions of lunatic religion. They’re sick with religion.”

  The phrase was apt. If Belfast is not precisely sick with organized religion, it is certainly sick with churches (the buildings, not the faiths). The churches are everywhere: 55 for the Church of Ireland (Anglican), 65 for the Presbyterians, 35 for the Methodists, 4 for the Reformed Presbyterians, 17 for the Baptists, 9 for the Congregationalists, 6 for the Evangelical Presbyterians, 24 for the Roman Catholics, 4 for the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, 8 for the Elem Pentecostals, 1 for the Christian Scientists, 13 for the Salvation Army, 2 for the Society of Friends, 2 for the Moravians, 5 for the Apostolics, 1 for the Plymouth Brethren, 2 for the Emanual Mission, 5 for the Free Presbyterians, 3 for the Church of Latter Day Saints, 1 for the Seventh Day Adventists, plus 1 Railway Mission, 1 Coalmen’s Mission, and a number of smaller gospel halls. There is one church for every 1000 adults. And in the 1961 census, only 64 people in all of Northern Ireland (pop: 1,500,000) described themselves as atheists.

  The result of this overdose of organized Christianity has been destruction, bigotry, fear, hatred, paranoia and death. Walking the streets of this town, where the smoke from the bombed-out buildings hangs in the air for days while church spires stab at the skies like the spears of pagan armies, it is difficult to understand what Christianity thinks it is doing here.

  There are, of course, thousands of Protestants who are neither bigots nor Bible-thumping fundamentalist lunatics, and a number of them have finally begun to talk about the inevitability of a 32-county Ireland. But down in those Shankill churches, many of the less educated are continuing to lock themselves into the prison of dogma.

  The phrases have the high keening tenor of apocalypse about them: “Roman Catholicism is the Anti-Christ, Greatest of all Harlots, and Cause of all Our Present Discontents. Bernadette Devlin is the Pope’s Whore.”

  The mixture of lurid sexual metaphor with statements of moral purity laces the language of the Protestant ghettoes; the language is accompanied by an almost touchingly naive belief in the now-forgotten slogans of the past. Consider the words of one Protestant battle hymn (“Ye Loyalists of Ireland”):

  Ye Loyalists of Ireland

  Come, Rally round the Throne!

  Thro’ weal or woe prepare to go,

  Make England’s Cause your own;

  Remember your allegiance,

  Be this your Battle Cry,

  “For Protestant Ascendancy

  In Church and State we’ll Die!”

  It’s a measure of how removed some sections of this city are from the rest of the world that grown men can still sing that song and mean it, in the last third of the 20th century. They can still march in the great Protestant parades on the 12th of July, festooned with orange sashes, crowned with bowler hats, in some pathetic imitation of their old rulers, talking as if the Battle of Boyne, when the Protestants smashed the Catholics, had taken place the week before and not in 1690.

  “Rem. 1690,” of all things, is still scrawled on the crumbling walls of the Protestant ghettos, and wonderfully decorative paintings of William of Orange appe
ar everywhere.

  The terrible thing, of course, is that when all the festive marching has finished, and the dread invasion of the Papists has been repulsed, and all the defiant songs have been sung, the men of the Orange Order retreat back to Sandy Row and the streets off the Shankill Road, and they are poor again and wondering whether their sons will have to quit school and go to work, and whether their daughters will go off to England, and whether this week they might actually have a piece of steak.

  There is much talk now in the North about the possibility of a violent Protestant backlash. In effect, there has been no fighting here between Protestants and Catholics since 1969; the fighting has really been between the IRA and the British Army. All arms searches have been in Catholic areas; no members of the Protestant militant groups — the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Tartans and others — were interned last Aug. 9th.

  One reason for the ferocity of the Catholic and Republican resistance here is that the British Army’s task appears to be to disarm the Catholics, thereby leaving them at the mercy of a heavily armed Protestant majority. There are 100,000 licensed guns in the hands of Protestants, and one Belfast reporter told me that the number of unlicensed ones might be double that.

  “This is what the backlash is supposed to be about,” the reporter told me. “It won’t actually happen, of course. You won’t get 100,000 Protestants fighting the Catholics any more than you ever see 50,000,000 Arabs assembling to fight Israel. But it serves the political ends of the people in power to keep talking about a backlash. They might, though I doubt it, actually talk it into happening.”