Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "Welcome to the first all-university teach-in of the GU Committee of Concern—"

  The microphone squealed suddenly, sending an ear-piercing screech through the hall. The student organizer jumped back with a faint yelp of his own. He was acne-faced and rumpled. Dillon sensed that he'd misread the guy's slovenliness as rebellion. He was just a slob, an incompetent slob. He had no idea how to deal with the runaway mike's feedback, and Richard found it impossible not to feel sorry for him too, even as he aimed his camera and snapped.

  While the second student came forward to help tame the microphone, Richard opened the mimeographed leaflet he'd taken at the door. Only then, with a potent jolt of adrenaline, did he realize, from the bold words on the top of the page, what this meeting was. "A Teach-in," he read, "Against the U.S. Escalation of the War in Vietnam."

  "Shit," he said under his breath, and he looked around for Cooney, who was just coming down the aisle toward him. Cooney was holding his ears against the feedback screeching which was intermittent now. When Cooney slid into the chair next to him Richard said, "They're peaceniks."

  "I know. The priest is going to say the war is immoral."

  "That's Father Gavin!"

  "Huh?"

  "You had him for religion, asshole. Freshman year. What do you mean, 'immoral'?"

  "That's what the kid at the door said."

  "What, he wants the Communists to—?"

  "The Just War Theory. He's going—"

  "Sorry, folks," the student organizer said. The sound system bucked once more, then settled down. The other student took his seat next to the priest. "Thanks for coming. We're really glad you're here. We know the turnout is down because of exams, but we wanted to hold this first teach-in anyway, because at campuses all over the country students and professors are meeting to consider the terrible realities of the..."

  Cooney wrote furiously, trying to get down everything as the kid shifted into third.

  Richard was struck immediately by the contrast between his appearance and his crisp, fluid expression. The kid was speaking without notes. Richard wondered if he was an organizer from another school.

  ". . .There are three questions to consider when we decide to inform ourselves more fully about Vietnam. One concerns Russia, one concerns China and one concerns the nature of the conflict inside Vietnam. Is it a civil war or not? That is perhaps. . ."

  Richard turned in his seat to quickly survey the hall. For the first time he noticed a tight knot of blue-clad students at the right side of the last three rows. They were a dozen ROTC cadets, and the sight jolted him. Except for the insignia on their epaulets, their uniforms were exactly like his father's, and Richard felt a rush of guilt for being there.

  Strange how, when he faced forward, what sprang into focus in his mind was not the stage or the speaker but a clear image of his father's profile, framed against a dark automobile window beyond which, across the river, were the twinkling runway lights of National Airport. Richard was driving his father home from the Pentagon late one night, and they were cruising along the ridge of Anacostia Drive above the river valley. Serving as his father's occasional night chauffeur was a favorite chore of Richard's, and on this night, just a week before going off to Georgetown as a wide-eyed freshman, he had a question to ask. He always had a question for those rides, but this one seemed fraught.

  "Dad, I have to decide something."

  "About school?"

  "Yeah."

  "What is it?"

  His father looked at him easily. Richard often had the sense that his father listened with a small part of his mind, the larger part having remained behind in the Situation Room where the JCS were staving off war in Berlin or Cuba.

  "There's a form in the registration packet asking if I want to join the ROTC."

  "Do you?"

  Richard looked away from the road toward his father. Their eyes met.

  "I don't know," Richard said, and it felt like a confession. He stared forward out the windshield again.

  "Would it be air force?"

  "They have all three. Air force, army, navy. There's a drill team. And the air force teaches cadets how to fly."

  "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  "Sure."

  "What's the problem then?"

  "Well, Rot-see, it's sort of like 'tin school,' isn't it? Compared to the Academy, I mean. Aren't reserve officers second class? Don't the regulars—?"

  "Richard, that's a career issue." His father laughed. "Are you worrying about your career?"

  "Yes."

  "Rich..." He reached across the car to put his hand on Richard's leg. "It's your freshman year. You're just getting started. When I was your age I'd already decided to be a priest, and look at me now. I was way ahead of myself." His father's gesture, his free hand back toward his chest, was humorously self-deprecating, as if his general's uniform showed how far short he'd fallen. "Nobody expects you to make career choices now. You just concentrate on getting your education, and the Jesuits will see you get the best. I had the Jesuits, Rich. And you know how pleased I am you'll be at Georgetown. I want you to make the most of it. Big choices come later."

  "But I have to decide about ROTC now."

  "Make the decision based on now, then. Not on the rest of your life. Don't worry about Academy graduates looking down on you ten years from now." His father laughed again, and Richard realized condescension like that was something he had had to deal with. He could not imagine anyone looking down on his father.

  "ROTC is a good way to get your commission. When you go in the service, whether as a career or not, you'll want to go in as an officer. But you can also do that through OCS later. Same with learning how to fly, if that's what you want."

  "I thought you'd want me to do ROTC."

  His father shook his head. "It's up to you, Rich."

  Richard was silent for a long time. His father shifted in his seat and Richard saw in reflection on the windshield the flash of his gleaming silver stars, three on each shoulder. He was not sure, even, that his father was waiting for him to declare himself. At last, without daring to look across, he said, "I love the air force. You know that, Dad."

  "I know."

  "But I think I'll skip Rot-see for now."

  His father nodded. "That's fine."

  No problem. No fucking problem at all. Why then had Richard's immediate impulse been to find a sink and rinse out his mouth?

  Richard raised his Nikon and discreetly aimed it at the cadets in the rear of the auditorium. He snapped a picture, then poked Cooney. "Look," he whispered. "Fly-boys."

  Cooney swung around. "Jesus, what are they doing here?"

  Richard faced the stage once more.

  The student at the microphone was concluding his introduction. "So those are some of the questions. If it is a civil war, why are we interfering in it? If the Geneva accords said the boundary between North and South was to be temporary, how can we consider the North Vietnamese as foreign aggressors? And why wasn't the Geneva conference election held in 1956 when the boundary—"

  "What about the terrorists in the villages?" a voice yelled from the rear of the hall. "What about the Red murder squads?"

  Richard did not have to swivel to know it was one of the ROTC cadets.

  The student at the microphone was flustered at first, then, after glancing back at his comrade, began, "There will be questions and answers after."

  "What about our obligation under the SEATO treaty?"

  "And Ho Chi Minh was trained in Moscow!"

  The student held up his hands, but instead of calming things, he shouted back, "Ho Chi Minh quotes Thomas Jefferson!"

  The priest stood up at his chair while the cadets continued to yell at the student, but as the priest approached the microphone, even they fell silent.

  The student looked sheepishly at the priest whom it had been his responsibility to introduce. This Jesuit was the only faculty member who would agree to appear at the teach-in. The student stepped
aside for him, saying audibly, "I'm sorry, Father."

  Father Gavin put the sheaf of papers on the lectern and slowly took his eyeglass case out from the mysterious folds of his cassock.

  Through the lens of his camera Richard saw the flecks of dandruff on the priest's shoulders, and he remembered from theology class how Gavin had reeked of tobacco. His fingers were still yellow with nicotine, and now they shook slightly as he unfolded his glasses and hooked them around his ears.

  By the time he began to speak, the silence in Gaston Hall was absolute. "Those of you who had my moral theology course know the distinction..." He peered out across the hall as he had over countless classrooms. A filmy vagueness in his eyes gave him an eerily distracted air, as if he weren't sure where he was. He looked old to Richard. "...between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Moral reasoning about war requires two separate judgments: a judgment as to the justice of the war itself, and a judgment as to individual actions committed in the course of that war. Lacking full knowledge about the true character of the various aggressions in Vietnam—whether they derive from an invasion or a civil war, whether a violation of proper accords or fulfillment of treaty obligations—no one here is qualified to make an informed moral judgment as to jus ad bellum, but even a just war must be conducted according to the natural law which is manifest in positive rules of engagement, and on that score, in the matter of jus in bello, sad to say, the American government, mounting evidence suggests, is behaving barbarically!"

  The priest's voice rose so shrilly on the last word that Richard heard Cooney gasp. Richard's camera sat in his lap, a dead weight. Father Gavin's abrupt display of feeling—so much dense emotion packed in that one condemning word—landed with such weight that Richard wanted to stand up and declare, I'm just here as a photographer. I don't buy this bullshit!

  Father Gavin was holding sheets of paper over his head. "These are copies of letters," he said, "provided to the head of Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, letters from American soldiers, not statements by the President or the generals or polemic, for that matter, from irresponsible and unpatriotic radicals, but testimony from GIs themselves, men your age who are over there right now. They are the ones who lay bare the true character of this mismatch between the greatest power on earth and one of the poorest nations. Listen"—the priest found an exact page—"to this, from a young marine. 'The Vietcong aren't the only ruthless ones. We have to be too. Have to. You'd be surprised to know that a guy you went to school with is right now shooting a nine-year-old girl and her mother. Or throwing a Vietcong out of a helicopter because he wouldn't talk.'"

  "Oh, bullshit," Richard said in a whispered exhalation, but the word carried and Father Gavin looked up abruptly to see who'd said it. Richard stared right back at him, formulating his rebuttal. The caption under his photo: "Priest Discovers War Is Hell." Big fucking deal. If GIs throw prisoners out of helicopters, then they get court-martialed, and fast. It is that simple. Richard Dillon knew better than this old-fart priest what the American military was about, and that certainly did not include shooting nine-year-olds and their mothers.

  Father Gavin rifled his pages, then read from one. " 'In fighting over here I have seen things done that I know are war crimes. I have seen people killed that had their hands in the air. I have seen a man killed that was already hurt and had no weapons; the sergeant just cut his head off. Also a lot of people here are carrying around ears of people...'"

  Richard stood up and climbed past Cooney, who was writing furiously. He stooped to Cooney's ear. "Don't dignify that crap by copying it down. It's bullshit."

  Cooney whispered right back, "He's a priest." Father Gavin whipped his glasses off and fixed the two obnoxious students with a glare.

  Once more Dillon looked right back at him. A priest should know better. Then, clutching his camera and meter, he turned and headed up the long aisle, aware that the faces of the other students were frozen with the shock they had in common. It was one thing to hear such accusations from an SDS kid ranting from a bench at Dupont Circle, but another entirely from this figure of the absolute.

  Behind him Father Gavin resumed reading. " 'Before I start this letter, I want you to promise to forget it as soon as you've read it. Yesterday I shot and killed a little eight- or nine-year-old girl with the sweetest, most innocent little face, and nastiest grenade in her hand, that you ever saw. Myself and six others...'"

  As Dillon approached the last rows of the auditorium, where the ROTC cadets were sitting, he looked over at them with contempt. Why are you letting him say this shit?

  The cadets were cowed, shrunk in their chairs. One was blushing furiously, as if with shame, and that was too much for Richard. He stopped and leaned over the guy. "You don't believe him, do you? Why are you sitting here as if you believe him?"

  The cadet looked up at Richard. There were tears in his eyes.

  Richard shook his head, then wheeled toward the door. He saw the two leafleteers still standing there, and now he saw what he had missed on the way in: propped against a chair was a large poster of a Vietnamese child whose skin had been bubbled by napalm. Under the hideous photograph were the words "Why Are We Burning, Torturing, Killing the People of Vietnam?" Richard knocked the poster down as he went by it. It fell with a clatter. The two antiwar ushers leapt back. Richard gave one of them the finger, then looked toward the stage to see if, as he hoped, the priest had noticed.

  Father Gavin was resolutely reading on. " '...isn't on one side. A week ago our platoon leader brought in three prisoners...'"

  Richard started through the door, but when he heard the priest's next words he froze.

  " 'This guy from intelligence had all three lined up...'" Intelligence? DIA. His father. Sean Dillon, by now, was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Intelligence, that's Dad. Richard turned back to listen.

  " 'One was a woman. He stripped her down to the waist and stripped the two men all the way. He had a little gadget I thought was a walkie-talkie or something. He stuck one end of this wire to the lady's chest and it was a kind of electric shock, because she got a real bad burn. From what she was screaming, my buddy and I could figure she didn't know anything.

  " 'Then they took this same wire and tied it on the lady's husband and brother, but on their lower parts. I grabbed the damn thing and stuck it to the backass of the guy from intelligence.

  " 'Ever since that day I've been sick to my stomach and haven't been out on patrol or anything. My sergeant tells me I'm suffering from battle fatigue and might get sent home.

  " 'We wish we could send you a couple of those electrical gadgets to use on the powers that sent and keep us here. This must end soon or a lot of us will go nuts.'"

  The priest had finished. The silence in the room had the feel of solid mass. The priest was staring at the ceiling, his glasses in his hands, communing with the ghosts, perhaps, of the dead Jesuits. Disapproval and despair, like dark angels, fluttered above him.

  "Father?" Richard took a few steps down the sloping aisle. His hand was in the air, a dutiful petition.

  Father Gavin looked toward him.

  "Father, that's wrong, what you just did." Richard's voice, to his own ears, had an eerie calm. Was he nuts? "You can't slur military intelligence like that because of one—"

  "What's your name?"

  "Dillon."

  "These are not isolated reports, Mr. Dillon. Merely graphic ones. U Thant asserts that more civilians are now being killed in Vietnam by American warplanes than by Communist terror. Our country may have begun with good intentions, but to achieve them we have begun to systematically commit evil acts. Have you had my moral theology course?"

  "Yes, Father, I—"

  "Do the ends justify the means, Mr. Dillon?"

  "No, Father, but—"

  "The evil our nation opposes in Vietnam does not justify the evil of our opposition."

  "But, Father, American intelligence officers are not evil." Richard's voice had become too loud and he checked him
self. What made the moment so strange, so "nuts," was the way it involved both an absolutely unprecedented act of defiance and a simultaneous, gut-reaction defense of the central principle of authority itself, the very spine of his life. "I won't let you just say that as if you were there, as if it's doctrine. American intelligence officers are not evil!"

  "We are what we do, Mr. Dillon."

  "That's right, Father. Including you." Richard turned. The poster showing the napalmed child was at his feet. He kicked it. Then he stalked out of Gaston Hall.

  The cool evening air feathered Richard's hair as he cruised along with the top down. His car was a nine-year-old baby-blue Ford convertible, and even though he lived in the dorm at Georgetown he often drove back to Boiling. The Officers' Club had a dance band on weekends and Richard loved to take dates there, mainly because of Sergeant Foster, who had once been his father's orderly and now worked as a club steward. The sarge would greet him and his date just inside the awn-inged door as if they were VIPs. With the flourish of a continental maitre d' he would lead them to a table on the edge of the dance floor. While the sarge got them drinks, no questions asked, Richard would take his girl into his arms and glide with her across the glassy parquet, waiting a few minutes before looking into her eyes, which would invariably sparkle with delight. At that moment Richard always felt something in him sag; what a phony he was to have brought her there, to have made her think it was his.

  It knocked girls out, too, the way the helmeted air policemen at the main gate brought themselves to attention as Richard's car approached, then as he drove through, how they snapped off a salute. The sticker on the Ford's front bumper had three stars on it, just like the Lincoln, even though his father never drove the Ford and was rarely in it. The air policemen knew Richard and they knew he was no officer, much less a lieutenant general, but they always saluted anyway, and Richard always waved. When the top was down he usually said, "How you doin', guys?" But not tonight.