Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  Before Dillon could respond, there was a single sharp rap on the door.

  "Come!" Dillon said.

  Colonel Freeman, the OSI chief, opened the door halfway and leaned in. "General Cobb is on the line, sir, General Westmoreland's exec. He wants to talk to you right now."

  Dillon felt the pulse of his own blood, but he clamped it and showed nothing.

  Freeman glanced at Bowers, undecided, but only for a moment. "I told General Cobb that you might have left already."

  "You were right, Pete. I did leave. I'm gone already. Tell General Cobb that you heard me say I hope to meet with General Westmoreland tomorrow morning."

  Freeman nodded and left.

  Dillon looked at Captain Bowers. "I want copies of your memos."

  Bowers leaned in on Dillon again. "I'll get them for you tonight. Will you show them to Westmoreland? Will you say they're not getting—?"

  "Captain, you have to trust me to handle what you give me. I don't want you talking about it, that's all. I don't control your assignment here, but I need it."

  "But you have to tell Westmoreland. He'll listen to you."

  "I said, you have to trust me. You may not care about Washington, but that's where I can make a difference. I need your numbers. I want you to get your own current I Corps estimates down on paper for me, and if possible sound out your counterparts in the other sectors. I want regular reports from you. I don't want Flynn to know. I don't want him dumping you, or MacAuliff either."

  "But General, what about the battle order? I can't just slip the real numbers off to you in CONUS while guys here keep getting the bullshit. Here is where our guys are getting killed. You're asking me to just go along with that?"

  Richard again. Dillon kept seeing Richard.

  "You're not going along with it now, are you?"

  "No, sir."

  "You're doing something about it by telling me, aren't you?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Captain, you're going to have to trust me on this. It's my job to make the best use of what you give me. Will you trust me?"

  After a moment Bowers answered, "Yes, sir."

  Dillon nodded. "Colonel Freeman will channel your paper to me. He's OSI, not DIA, but he has full clearance. You have complete discretion to say anything you think. But the harder your numbers are, the better. What I need are data, anything you can get me about enemy numbers. I'm not ordering you to do this, because it involves irregularities that could cause us both problems. You just saw that in my response to Cobb. But I will promise you this: I will be out on the limb with you if anybody tries to cut it off."

  Bowers laughed. "General, that's enough for me. I was hoping for this." His face darkened. "Desperately hoping."

  "I sense that, Captain. Pull in on the desperation if you can. Cut back on the booze. I don't want you getting sent home on detox. I need you."

  "Yes, sir," Bowers answered firmly. "All I needed was a reason to quit."

  Dillon smiled, the kindly old confessor. "You don't have to quit, Captain. Just slow it down." He picked up a blank index card. "And what about your folks? Can I call them for you when I get home?"

  "Yes, sir. Please."

  "What's the name?"

  "Dr. John Bowers, Fort Wayne—"

  "Your father's a doctor?"

  At first Dillon had no idea why that particular detail should have struck him with such force. But then he knew. Another man who'd trusted him, Riley, Richard Riley, the doc.

  Nineteen

  "I can't believe he's really dead." Cass was looking away from Sean, out her window. She didn't want him to see that she was near crying again. The red-tinged leaves of the September trees passed in a blur. They were in Sean's long blue car, riding in back with a stretch of the soft gray upholstery separating them. Sergeant Kingfield was at the wheel. Richard was in the front passenger seat. He had graduated from Georgetown two springs before, and was a second-year law student at the University of Virginia now. As if it would help to fend her emotions, Cass looked at the back of her son's head. The fringe of his hair brushed the collar of his dark suit. Usually he wore his hair longer. She knew he'd gotten it cut for her, for this, not that she cared, really. He was her rock. She was so grateful to him for getting here.

  They were on Michigan Avenue, passing the wooded vale at the foot of the hill on which the Old Soldiers' Home sat. Up ahead the Shrine had just come into view, the huge blue beach ball of a dome, the needle spire of the K of C belfry, the largest Catholic church in North America. Ordinarily Cass felt a lift on first glimpsing the great basilica, but this morning her heart sank. They were coming here for the funeral of the man who'd built it, her oldest friend in Washington, Archbishop Barry.

  Sean reached across to touch her. Unconsciously, she covered his hand with hers, holding it on the seat. She was still looking at her son. "I was thinking last night of his baptizing you, Richard. He did it here. Do you remember that? At the Shrine."

  Richard turned and looked at his mother. He smiled, but with a touch of self-mocking solemnity. "What I remember is that I was just a baby, Mom."

  "Archbishop Barry was the rector. He was the first priest we knew here. He made our coming from Chicago seem all right. He gave me..." Cass took her hand back from Sean to open her purse for a fresh Kleenex.

  Richard glanced at his father. They saw each other rarely these days. It had been so long since they had talked that Richard knew there was no point in trying, here, to indicate anything. Should he say, for example, that his mother's sadness was upsetting to him, but that he hardly shared it? He had come from Charlottesville for her, not for Monsignor Barry and not for his father.

  The silence into which his mother's grief had taken them drummed unpleasantly in Richard's ears. "Actually, Mom," he said, "my favorite memory of Monsignor Barry will always be when he went to give you that medal from the Pope, but he didn't know where to pin it."

  Cass smiled wanly. "Archbishop," she said softly, correcting the title Richard had used. She went back to looking out her window.

  Sean reached up to touch the back of Richard's seat. Richard was sure his father was going to find fault with him. For recalling a moment of the archbishop's awkwardness? For calling him Monsignor? For hair that was too long? But Sean said, "I'm glad you could get here." Richard turned around in his seat, unable to keep the surprise from his face. But then he remembered, it was not true that his father could read his mind. Perhaps his father did not know how alien he felt. He almost said something to explain himself, but instead he glanced at the driver, who was new to him. The driver's presence, like that of how many other drivers and orderlies before him, guaranteed that they would not speak of anything that mattered. With Mack he might have, but Mack was retired, and now Richard knew enough to measure what they had been to each other, despite the fondness, by the fact that he had never known Mack's first name. He had never known any of their first names.

  Richard thought of those nights when he had been the one to drive his father home. He had not done so in more than a year now. He could see it: the two of them staring out into the moving lights of the darkened city, stone silent, as if they had each begun to believe that Richard too was the general's servant. It was their silence when they were alone that Richard had come to find unbearable.

  At Fourth Street the driver steered the car into the Shrine's broad entrance circle. Policemen lined the curving drive like posts. The shadowless Romanesque church loomed above a row of arriving automobiles, many of them limousines. Senators, congressmen, lobbyists, Establishment lawyers and stars of the administration were leaving their cars and heading up the long flight of bright stairs.

  Richard saw a four-star army general getting out of an olive-green staff car, and from a car behind, a pair of admirals. Archbishop Barry, with Cardinal Spellman of New York, had taken recently to staunchly defending the war in Vietnam. The more strident the war's critics had become, especially among the liberal clergy, the more pointed had become Barry's expr
ession of support. No wonder the military brass were here. Richard wished for a way to set his father apart from them. My father knew this priest before he was a bishop, before my father was a general! Richard glanced back at the stars on his father's shoulders. When had it ever occurred to Richard that those stars would cause him to feel ashamed?

  The mourners, moving in a steady stream up the stairs, all carried themselves like VIPs, except for the nuns and priests, who were alike in hiking their robes to go up. As Sergeant Kingfield slowed their car, Richard looked away from the church entrance. Beside the Shrine was an oblong green, a tranquil stretch of tidy lawn, and beyond that were the pseudo-Gothic buildings of Catholic University. He recognized in the distance the oblivious bustle of students going to and from classrooms. Richard envied them their rightful indifference to this event, but Catholic students were known for their indifference to civil rights and peace marches too. Did he envy them that? To Richard's surprise, though, he saw on a nearby sidewalk, opposite the K of C bell tower, a moving circle of twenty or thirty protesters who were carrying hand-lettered signs he could not read. Not students, he realized, but mature people, Quakers or Catholic Worker types probably. They were separated from the throng of funeral goers by a thin row of policemen, but unlike the ceremonial guard lining the driveway those cops had their nightsticks ready. To Richard's relief, neither of his parents seemed to notice the demonstrators, and to his further relief, once he'd left his father's car, none of the demonstrators seemed to notice him.

  The familiar aroma of wax hit Richard's nostrils as he entered the church. Thousands of votive candles flickered eerily in the pale morning light at side altars up both sides of the length of the nave. More than any other detail, that smell evoked what was left to him of Catholic feeling. Adorning the concave wall at the far end of the church, dwarfing everything but the stone structure itself, was the sparkling mosaic of a Byzantine Christ. The figure's huge oriental eyes burned into everyone else's face, perhaps, but not Richard's. He remembered that the gaze of that Christ was famous for following the guilty no matter where they went in the vast space. But now the eyes seemed flat and unthreatening, like the religion itself.

  Richard looked at his mother, knowing how wounded she would be to know her son was an apostate. He wished she could take it as a sign of his deep love, that he was not here for God either. He was here only for her. He squeezed his mother's elbow, sending her a pulse of affection and concern.

  An usher recognized them and led the Dillons up the long aisle, directly to reserved seats in the fourth pew on the epistle side, well in front of Cabinet secretaries and national politicians, including the two senators Kennedy. Others already seated in the fourth pew included the former vice president, the heavy-browed Richard Nixon, Martin Donne, the wealthy Irish contractor who had built the Shrine and numerous other buildings for the archdiocese, and former mayor Robert Wagner of New York. Richard noticed that after genuflecting his father glanced back several rows at Secretary McNamara, who did not acknowledge him. To Richard it seemed that his father had just been snubbed, but that made no sense.

  The first two pews were occupied by far more ordinary-looking people than the illustrious VIPs next to and behind the Dillons, and Richard sensed that they were the archbishop's relatives. The third pew, the one immediately in front of the Dillons, was vacant.

  The organ was playing softly.

  Cass sat holding each of her men by the hand. Behind them, well back along the aisle, mourners continued to file into the pews.

  Finally, all was still except for the organ, and soon it too fell silent. The vast church, thronged by more than two thousand people, was hushed. Nothing to do but float into the luminous eyes of the mammoth Savior. Richard became impatient for the procession to begin, but the sudden commotion came then not from the distant rear, where the clergy and pallbearers had gathered with the casket, but from the small doorway to the left of the Dillons' pew. Three men in dark suits came swiftly in, each darting down a different aisle. Two others entered, taking up positions in front of the first pews, staring out over the congregation with such undisguised hostility that Richard thought the show of it must be part of their strategy.

  An ear-splitting blast of trumpets, coming on the heels of the arrival of the Secret Service, made many in the congregation jump. The trumpets sounded almost angry, and they were followed on the organ by an agitated liturgical flourish, which led into the first bars of "Veni Creator Spiritu."

  The congregation's attention flowed backward in a wave toward the long line of clergy and the coming casket. Everyone in the church stood like one huge stirring animal. Richard continued to watch the small side door, and it was just then, as most heads had turned away, that two more agents came in, leading the President and one of his daughters. They slipped into the vacant pew and moved toward the aisle until they were in front of the Dillons. The girl, the convert to Catholicism, knelt down for her brief prayer, but the President turned as others had, to face the rear. He seemed to draw all the color in the surrounding space to himself, even that of the towering mosaic behind him, as if he were a Technicolor figure having intruded by mistake on the set of a black-and-white movie. Johnson's blue suit, his red tie, his tanned skin and the tiny American flag in his lapel all shimmered brilliantly. Richard had never seen him this close before, or any President, and he felt ambushed by the power of the man's presence. Johnson's lachrymose expression, reminiscent of the one he used on television to talk of the war dead, revolted Richard, but when his eyes and the President's met for an instant, Richard nodded, an act of pure, instinctive, affirming subservience for which he instantly hated himself.

  Sean Dillon had his own reaction to the President's arrival. He did not stare. All through the procession and the first part of the liturgy he found it possible to act as if the man in front of him were nobody, but inwardly Dillon felt the knot of his frustration twisting, and from his own deep irrationality he heard, as if it came from someone else, a cry of, Now! Now! Now's your chance to tell him!

  When concelebrating bishops and priests had taken their seats in the sanctuary and the congregation had settled down for the readings, Dillon let his eyes park on the back of Johnson's head. While verses from Isaiah and from the letter of Paul to the Ephesians rolled out with soothing meaninglessness into the vast air above them, Dillon composed his own epistle.

  "You are not getting the whole story, Mr. President."

  Not an epistle but a speech, one he had been composing for months without knowing it. The reel of his mind spun it off, as if the back of Johnson's head were a prompting device.

  "Mr. President, here, behind you. Listen to me. I'm on your side, Sir. I am one of your loyal officers. I'm trying to help you. Listen to what I have to say."

  Sean Dillon thought of Johnson as a rational man, as a good man, but also as a man tortured by an inability to make crucial things happen, which was like Sean's own inability, Sean's own torture.

  "Here is what is wrong," he imagined himself saying. "By the time intelligence estimates work their way to Washington the rough edges on all the numbers, the pits and flaws and imperfections, have been removed. And by the time they get to you, they are perfectly polished. But it is the pits and flaws and imperfections in those numbers that are killing us. When are you going to get angry at what we're telling you? You keep sending our kids over there, three hundred and twenty-two thousand of them now, and then we turn around and tell you it isn't quite enough. When are you going to ask us why we keep doing that to you? When are you going to get angry at what we are not telling you? Ask us, Mr. President, what the problem is! Demand to know! And some of us will admit we have one. We will explain it."

  Dillon's impulse was to sit on the edge of his pew and touch Johnson's shoulder and whisper, "Mr. President, may I see you for a moment after?"

  But if Johnson were to turn his face toward him, Dillon realized it would be uncomprehending, and he would have to add, "I'm your director of DIA. I'm o
ne of the men who never gets near you. I put queries beside half the numbers I'm obliged to send you, but I know those indications of doubt are removed before you see them. You deal in summaries, but the summaries never include the questions that nag at men lower down the line or the dissenting footnotes of the few skeptics that are left at my level or even the cautiously expressed misgivings of men who are on the fringe of your circle. So the summaries on which you base your decisions—four hundred thousand now, five hundred thousand next? six hundred thousand?—never include the most important part, the fact that no one really knows what's going on in Vietnam. Between you and the real war stands a bureaucracy that blocks out that humiliating brutal truth. Well, for once no bureaucracy stands between us, Mr. President, so here it is."

  Dillon's one fist was clenched at his side. His other was squeezing his wife's hand so hard it hurt her, but he did not know that. He did not know for certain, either, that he had not begun to speak these words aloud. They came with the fluidity of a crafted speech, not because his mind ordinarily worked that way, but because, in his unconscious, he'd been working these words over for a long time. The words unscrolled as on a prompter, and indeed, his lips were moving. If anyone noticed, perhaps they thought he was praying.

  "I am presiding over the production of bad intelligence. My basic job for you, unlike CIA's or NSA's, is to count the enemy. That is the essential function of military intelligence, and I confess I am not doing it. I don't know how to do it. I would admit failure and resign, but no one else knows how to do it either, and I would be replaced by a sycophant general who regards the dogged skepticism of those below him as bad morale, instead of as a clue that must be followed.

  "I used to think we were producing mere guesses for you, but lately I'm suspicious even that overstates what we are doing. We produce wishes for you in the form of data, wishes about the number of enemy dead and wishes about the numbers of enemy soldiers coming in from the North. Wishes that make you happy when you first hear them, but more and more, Mr. President, they've been making me nervous. What happens when they explode?