Lizzie's War

by Tim Farrington

  Germaine hadn’t registered many of the tactical details. He just ran when everyone ran and ducked when they ducked and did what he always did in combat—

  If we charged or broke or cut,

  You could bet your bloomin’ nut,

  ’E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear

  —shadowing the corpsmen, making his way to the wounded, the dying, and the dead. He was already hit by that time: a bullet had creased his forehead and nipped his ear, which was bleeding inordinately, and a mortar round had made something like raw hamburger of his right leg. But all of them were bleeding one way or another by then, and Germaine was barely conscious of his shredded limb except as a hindrance to his movement.

  He was terrified but strangely calm, as he often was under intense fire. Combat was the world, and he was in the world but not of it. There was even an exhilaration to the experience; he’d never felt so free, so true and so real. The blazing adrenaline made him simple as a flame, all radiance and quiet heat, a lit place where everything was clear and all he could see, in perfect focus, was the next man in front of him in need of care and comfort. He didn’t think much about dying himself. Death came, in such a place, or it didn’t. That was in God’s hands.

  The battle had been chaotic and their position desperate. Germaine had never seen Marines put bayonets on their rifles before, and he didn’t register what that grim action meant until, as darkness fell, their ammo began to run out and the hand-thrown grenades fell among them and the open space between the river and the trees erupted into spectral shapes, a surge of shadows, the muzzle flashes of the AK-47s braiding the night with flickering necklaces of savage light. As the North Vietnamese reached the foxholes, the Marines leaped to meet them, and in the darkness Germaine could hear the unspeakable sound of blade meeting body, of rifle butt crashing into bone and flesh.

  They’d been overrun twice, the hand-to-hand fighting ratcheting back and forth by terrible degrees. At one point a flare sizzled upward and burst into uncanny illumination, revealing a circle of hell more vivid than any imagined by Dante or Bosch, dozens of men beyond all but the most naked ferocity, grappling ferally.

  And then the flare expired and the nightmare vision subsided once more into a rage and flux of desperate shadows, anonymous flashes and explosions, the sickening impact of unidentifiable woundings, and the screams.

  Germaine had no recollection of how he’d tumbled—or plunged, or been shoved—into the shell crater. The battle had caught him up as a tornado would and whirled him until he knew nothing and finally flung him like debris into the arms of the wounded Marine.

  The kid was shot through the abdomen. A teenager, thin and pale, his hollowed cheeks smeared with mud in an attempt at camouflage. His lips were moving, and Germaine recognized the rhythm of the “Our Father” and murmured his own prayer with the boy’s. He did what he could, stuffing the kid’s wounds with all that remained of his battle dressings and using up the kid’s morphine, and then the last of his own.

  The battle had moved on by then, a fitful, impersonal fireworks show now a few hundred meters to the south. As Germaine’s night vision cleared, he became aware of figures moving quietly and methodically in the darkness around them: NVA with bayonets, finishing off the American wounded.

  So that was how it would be, he thought. He realized how desperately he wanted to live, how unreconciled he was to dying here. My God, if it be Your will, take this cup away from me. So much for faith, the life surrendered wholly to God’s work, the priestly Gunga Din bringing the water of life to those in desperate need. That all ran dry in the last moment, it turned to dust. He’d been offering phony comfort all along, and congratulating himself for the generosity of counterfeit gifts.

  One of the dark figures approached. Germaine shifted his body, trying to shield the wounded Marine, but the North Vietnamese plunged his bayonet through the flesh of Germaine’s shoulder into the young man’s chest, brusquely, workmanlike. It took him a moment to work the blade free, but he yanked it clear at last, and it was Germaine’s turn.

  Thy will, not mine, be done.

  Germaine was conscious suddenly of the stars, of the river’s quiet murmur, of the fleshy weight of blood in the night air, and the tang of cordite, and of the warmth, the intimacy of the dying Marine beside him. Of the weird, deep beauty of it all, the way it touched a heart so easily stopped. It wasn’t faith, he realized, nor hope; it was just the reality of an utterly superfluous and extravagant love. This peace had been here all along, occluded by everything he’d thought he was accomplishing, shut out by all the nonsense of what he’d believed he knew of God and life and service, of meaning and of truth.

  An airburst somewhere to the south lit them for an instant, and Germaine saw the soldier’s eyes register Germaine’s collar and the cross on his armband. The Vietnamese stopped himself, then pulled his rifle back and shook his head at Germaine, almost playfully. He crossed himself, whether out of mockery or actual reverence, Germaine could not tell; then he waved a finger at the priest, in admonishment or benediction, turned, and moved away to continue with his brutal work.

  In Germaine’s arms, the young Marine’s chest gurgled around the fresh bayonet wound. The kid’s eyes were wide and pleading, baffled by the puzzlement that breathing had become. Germaine reached for the boy’s hand and held it, wincing at his own slashed arm; there was nothing else he could do. He was beyond prayer. They lay together like that through the night, until the Marine was gone.

  It was strange by then to hear no labored breathing; it was easy for Germaine to imagine that his own breath had ceased as well, and to feel the liberation in that quieting. As the heat of the expired life seeped into the bloody mud and the body stiffened in his arms, Germaine let his own pain settle into the stillness and listened to the river, watching the stars creep across the sky. Beyond prayer. Beyond, quite beyond, utterly beyond.

  When he finally disentangled his own hand, the boy’s arm remained upright, the fingers curled in their final gesture. And still Germaine held him, their bodies laced together, their blood commingled, and when the remnants of the demolished company returned near dawn the next day, as he had known they would—the Marines never left their dead behind—they found the two of them entwined like brothers in a grave and were startled by the frozen supplication of the dead man’s hand under the flicker of a fading star.

  LIZ CAME BACK to herself with a sense of almost unbearable poignancy, as if waking unwillingly from a dream so sweet and ethereal that daylight hurt. The silence of the church was like the atmosphere of a different planet, thick with the unfamiliar substance of alien air. She’d really lost track of time. She wondered if that was what happened to saints. They lost track of time and never quite found their way back, and the world turned as strange and holy to them all the time as it felt to her right now.

  The candle she had lit for Mike flickered in its red cup. Liz was relieved to see that the church was still deserted; she felt naked and undone and needed time to ease back into being Mrs. Michael O’Reilly. She crossed herself and rose, feeling her knees creak, and would have passed before the altar again and left by the side door. But she realized suddenly that she was not alone after all. It took a moment to spot the single figure kneeling in the far back pew. The man was completely absorbed in his prayer; she had sensed him less because of the buzz of another presence in the church than than through the absence of the usual buzz, as if the quiet of St. Jude’s intensified where he knelt.

  It was Germaine, looking at home in his ill-fitting medieval black for the first time since she had known him. Liz stood uncertainly for a moment. It would have been easy enough to just slip out, but she found that she didn’t want to. She even realized, with some chagrin, that she had been half hoping all along to find the priest at St. Jude’s.

  As she stood there, Germaine’s eyes opened and met hers. Liz felt the shock of their gazes meeting in the hush and understood that he was as she had been, emerging from pray
er, undone and naked. As she still was, apparently, because she felt none of the usual anxiety at holding someone’s gaze.

  After a moment that was much too long, Germaine stood up and moved toward her, limping more than she had seen him limp before. He smiled as he approached, in gentle recognition. It all felt frighteningly right and easy, as if they had arranged this in advance. But they hadn’t, Liz assured herself. It was all on the up-and-up. Parishioner and priest, crossing paths by chance at church. A pastoral exchange.

  “Hello,” he said.

  No “Mrs. O’Reilly,” Liz noted. The greeting seemed thrillingly intimate, stripped of the formalities, and she answered, brightly, “Hello, Father Germaine,” because anything else would have been way too much.

  MIKE CALLED IN fixed-wing air strikes on Hill 93, and it was beautiful. The Marine F-4s coaxed in just above the treetops dropped “snake eyes” first, two-hundred-fifty-pound bombs of fiendish accuracy, winged with special tail fins that slowed their fall and gave the bombs themselves an oddly lyrical soaring quality in the air, like fat flying fish. The explosions blossomed upward, squat mushrooms of orange and black, showering dirt over Hotel Company in their positions at the base of the hill.

  While the debris was still settling, the next wave of Phantoms roared in and loosed waves of napalm, and the air turned eerily cool for an instant and stank of gasoline before the hillside was swamped beneath a terrible tide of flame. Glancing up, ill-advisedly, Mike felt his eyebrows sear and his face scorched tender with the heat. A glimpse into the heart of hell, he thought, awed. And also, succinctly: Good. Better them than us.

  He was on the radio before the flames stopped crackling, sending Dermott Edmonds’s Third Platoon up the hill, charging them literally into the fire. The apocalyptic completeness of the air strikes was illusory, Mike knew. It was a truth close to the heart of this war: all the technological superiority and firepower in the world couldn’t eradicate that final moment of naked human necessity when determined men with guns fought other determined men with guns for whatever piece of scorched earth was up for grabs, for whatever reasons had brought them there, and the most determined won.

  “Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle,” Edmonds said before he took off. Too cocky, compensating with Basic School macho.

  “Godspeed, Dermott,” Mike told him, and thought, God help us all. It was way too late to fine-tune the young lieutenant’s attitude. It was one of those sobering moments when Mike was painfully aware that he was playing God on the local level. He was sending Edmonds, his shakiest platoon leader, into the teeth of whatever the NVA had left to shoot because the Third was his best platoon and they needed this hill, and some of Edmonds’s men were almost certainly going to die.

  LIZ AND FATHER GERMAINE left the church together, pausing self-consciously on either side of the font to dip their fingers into the holy water and cross themselves before slipping out the door. The Indian summer sunlight and the brisk normality of the traffic on Little Neck Road came as a small shock; Liz felt as if she were emerging from a matinee double feature to the surprise of the world still solid in uninterrupted dailiness. She was conscious of the hush lingering even now from her prayer, of silence sifting from her like the fragrance of incense from clothing steeped with holy smoke.

  They stood uncertainly for a moment on the step.

  “Buy you a drink?” Germaine suggested, and it took Liz an unnerving instant to realize he was kidding. It was like him, she already understood, to both name the moment’s dangerous dynamic and somehow to make it seem manageable through the suggestion that it was absurd. She wanted so much to talk, but she had no idea how to even begin. If they were to talk as she wanted to talk now, to carry the live egg of this extraordinary silence into the coarse country of words, she needed Germaine to be something more than merely a standard-issue priest. If he said something banal and reassuring about God right now, she might begin to scream. But she did not want to see him as a man, with all the hazards of that.

  “It’s a little early for cocktails,” she said. “But it would be nice to sit and chat a bit.”

  Germaine glanced left and right, hesitated, then made his decision and nodded to her to follow. Liz had a sense that he’d had a spot in mind all along. They crossed the entry plaza, slipped between a pair of bedraggled camellias onto ground deep in spent flowers, and turned the corner of the building into the torn-up area beside the gap in the wall where the new stained-glass window was being installed.

  Like two kids sneaking off to smoke, Liz thought uneasily. Or, God forbid, to make out. Leaving the sidewalk with Germaine felt a little outrageous. Standing in front of the church beneath the doleful statue of Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes, she was obviously a parishioner talking to her priest, even on a weekday afternoon. Crossing the churned dirt to sit together in the shade of the construction site, things got less clear-cut. Liz wanted nothing of what lonely men and women so easily blundered into; she’d seen enough as a military wife to know how quickly it happened. She didn’t know what she wanted here, really. She had never spoken to anyone of her soul.

  Germaine took out his handkerchief and, with a show of gallantry, dusted off the top of a pile of cinder blocks then bowed broadly, offering her a seat.

  “I have a confession,” Liz said preemptively, as they settled on the blocks.

  “Ah.”

  “Seriously.”

  Germaine was silent a moment. She wondered if he was disappointed, if after all he had his hopes for something else. But then he reached into the inner pocket of his ridiculous jacket and drew out a white linen scarf with crosses embroidered at both ends. He kissed it, then draped it around his neck.

  His priestly stole, Liz realized. She hadn’t meant things quite so literally, but he’d taken her at her word. She couldn’t help but notice the rusty stains on the vestment. Old blood. It must be the one he had used in Vietnam. She wondered whether there was some kind of weird canonical proscription against cleaning these things, then decided no, it just meant something to Germaine that way.

  The priest was looking at her quietly, and Liz could feel the different quality of his attention. Waiting, simply.

  “This counts?” she said. “I mean, you can just do it here, just like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wow. Well, okay, then…” Liz hesitated, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. Maybe it would have been easier if he’d just made a pass at her. She gathered herself, made the sign of the cross, and said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been—Jesus, how long has it been?—call it a year or two, since my last confession, and these are my sins….”

  She trailed off, not certain where she was really going with all this. Germaine waited patiently. Liz realized she’d expected something different from him, some sort of wink at the process, but he was placid and steady and quite serious. A priest, who needed a shave.

  “I’m afraid I’m a lousy wife,” she blurted at last. “I’m afraid I’m a lousy mother.”

  Germaine smiled. “It’s not a sin to be afraid.”

  “I’m afraid I’m a lousy human being.”

  He shrugged.

  “Seriously,” she said.

  “Lousy human beings are the state of the art. That’s sort of the point, actually.”

  “Not like this. I’m appalling. My husband’s off fighting a noble war I really couldn’t care less if we won or lost. He’s been training his whole adult life for this, and he’s happy as a pig in shit. And I could just kill him. I’m in there praying for him to just dodge the goddamned bullet of history and get himself back in one piece, and part of me is just completely pissed off at him, and I’m thinking, Honey, you idiot, what are you doing? Come home, for Christ’s sake. Be a father to your children. Fight the goddamned North Vietnamese when they land in North Carolina. And meanwhile here I am just running around in my station wagon. I’m nothing, I’m a cipher. I can’t even fight racism in the local Bluebird troop. At least Mi
ke’s willing to die for something. I can’t even live for something.”

  Germaine said nothing.

  “Look, are we going to do this or not?” Liz demanded. “I’m a sinner, goddammit. I’m pouring out my heart here. Say something priestly. Peer into my soul. Give me a bone-breaking penance or something. Consign me to hell. Invoke higher powers. I don’t know.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little more specific. I haven’t heard anything yet that can’t be addressed with a long hot bath, some brandy, and chocolate.” Germaine hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure this is what you wanted to talk about anyway.”

  Liz startled herself by beginning to cry. Germaine amazed her further by doing nothing. Any other man she knew would have panicked and tried to talk her down. Tears were way too scary, way too real. But he just sat there quietly. It was disorienting.

  They sat side by side as she sobbed. When the wave had passed, Liz snuffled and said, “Christ, I’m a wreck.” She rummaged in her bag, looking for a Kleenex.

  Germaine offered her one end of his stole. The nonbloody end, she noted. What delicacy. She looked at him, saw that he was at least half serious, and laughed.

  “God help me,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what the hell I wanted to talk about.”

  “That’s no sin either,” Germaine said.

  CHAPTER 12

  OCTOBER 1967

  MIKE SAT BESIDE Dermott Edmonds on the truck ride back to Dong Ha. Every jounce on the rutted road hurt; Mike’s rib cage was turning purple and green from a round that had slammed into his flak jacket, and he’d strained something badly in his right arm, throwing a grenade. So much for his major league pitching career. But Edmonds, who didn’t have a mark on him, was in even worse shape. The young lieutenant had lost eleven men killed and fourteen wounded, almost half his platoon, because he’d walked into an ambush with his eyes wide open. He’d screwed up royally and he knew it, and he was sunk back into himself now like a collapsed cake.