Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "We must not tell anyone. And we must not let him know that we know. Otherwise—" Crocker stopped as a cloud of fear darkened his face. He closed his grip on Dillon's arm so fiercely that it hurt. "You won't tell him, will you? You won't tell him what I said, will you?"

  Dillon shook his head. He covered Crocker's hand with his own. "No, sir. I won't," he said. The image of James Forrestal came to the threshold of Dillon's mind, but he closed the door on it. Not Forrestal, no. He would not think of Forrestal. And he would not think of craziness.

  He himself had been crazy for a moment, paranoid, only that morning. "In fact, Mr. Crocker, what I wish, on a personal level, is that you would come with me and stay with us, stay with Cass and me for a while."

  "To Washington? No, I could never come to Washington now. Not to Boiling."

  "You have friends there, sir. You know in what esteem the air force holds you."

  "No, no." Crocker sat back, away from Dillon. "If I came to stay with you, Richard would think—"

  "Richard?"

  Crocker's face softened with embarrassment, a slip.

  "Was it Richard who called you about the Shrine this morning?"

  "He's a good boy, Sean. He reminds me of my son."

  Crocker's poignant statement went through Dillon like a bolt, for he remembered the life-changing affirmation it was when he himself had been the one to touch Crocker there, in that wound. Crocker's son who died at the Rhine, leaving a crack in his father's heart that had opened then to a young man who stank of the Chicago stockyards.

  But that crack had not healed, not in all these years. Times had changed otherwise. And now Sean was on notice that in Crocker's view he, Sean, was no better than the gung-ho killer generals whom once they both despised. Well, Randall Crocker was not who he had once been either. Life has a way of disappointing us; where is the surprise that we disappoint each other?

  But Crocker was still a man of enormous magnetism and also, still—Sean saw this as for the first time—a man of enormous need. The thought of Sean's own son, his vulnerable, self-doubting Richard, being drawn into the crack of this old man's heart filled him with alarm.

  Dillon remembered standing with Crocker on the steps of Congress, watching his little boy playing in the distance. He remembered feeling, without knowing why, that his son was in danger. What could it possibly have meant to him then, had he known, that the danger would be from the very man next to him, whom he had come to love? "What did Richard want?"

  "He spoke to me in confidence, Sean. You can understand that."

  "You didn't encourage him in this peacenik stuff, I hope. Did he tell you the effect of what he did on his mother?" At long last, anger at his son—his son not vulnerable and self-doubting, but cruel and stupid and selfish—overwhelmed Dillon. Did Richard think he was the only one in this family with a conscience? Did he think the President and the President's men didn't want peace? Did he think peace would ever come to Vietnam if Hanoi saw American students carrying Ho's picture in American streets? Dillon's own rage hit him as if it had been thrown by someone else, and for an instant he was knocked completely off balance by it—like a man falling inside a dead helicopter, and yes, for that instant, everything was upside down, and he saw himself as the crazy one, the paranoid, the man who'd lost the balance of his mind.

  Randall Crocker, with a steady, sane eye, peered back at his one-time protégé. "And the effect on his father? The question I asked before, I think it is Richard's question. He knows how Cass was. You, Sean. How were you?"

  Twenty

  Richard had his arms linked with a boy and a girl he had never seen before. He and Cooney had come here together, giving each other nerve, but they had become separated early on, during the speeches. Cooney was somewhere close behind, almost certainly. Richard hoped so, because he'd never believe this singing. That section of the vast throng was singing a Dylan song with the gusto of stadium drunks. "How does it feel?" they chanted. The driving rhythm of the music had them swaying in step as they slowly moved across the pristine white bridge, a knot of several hundred kids, complete strangers who'd come here from all different parts of the country, yet all wearing denim and cousin T-shirts in the warm October sun. They all knew the words, had known them forever.

  In their minds, thrilling to the way they knew instinctively to claim that exact song as the day's anthem, they all supplied Dylan's whining harmonica and his scat-scat-scatting tambourine and his dynamite guitar.

  Richard was taller than most; he stretched himself to his full height, looking back for his buddy, but Cooney, even with the flamboyant orange bandana tied hippie-fashion around his forehead, was not to be picked out from the mass of faces. The stream of marchers extended all the way back through the pillared bridge gate that featured the huge bronze pair of nude amazon horse handlers, their erect breasts, the horses' asses. Then the throng broke into half a dozen smaller streams on roads that fed Lincoln Memorial Circle. Halfway back was a huge, black-on-white, road-spanning, moving banner. "Support Our Boys In Vietnam," it read. "Bring Them Home Now."

  A hundred thousand, one speaker had said. Jerry Rubin swore there'd be a million, Cooney had instantly groused, but what did Cooney want? Richard was awed by the mass of the crowd, now that he had the whole bridge to measure it by. Ahead, it disappeared into the fold of the Virginia hillside. A hundred thousand! All linked to Richard himself through the arms of these two on either side of him, all joined by words they knew to sing, by wearing pants and shirts that showed they had bodies, by not being afraid to touch each other. But all joined first, today, he told himself, by how they hated this fucking war.

  Singing louder than he ever had before, Richard longed for Cooney's back to slap, Cooney of all people, who once, when a McLuhan-struck professor asked what binds the world together now, had piped up "Music!" and only the professor had thought him wrong.

  The boy next to Richard, without breaking stride, pulled his arm free. Richard saw that the boy was accepting a joint that had been moving through the crowd like the sacramental cup. Still walking in rhythm to the song, the boy took a quick pull on the marijuana, held the smoke for a moment, then, with a practiced flourish, blew it through his clenched teeth. Grinning, he passed the joint to Richard, who accepted it without hesitating, but also with a strange dual sense of the sacred and the sinful. He took a pull of his own, his first hit of marijuana ever, and the smoke went right into the bone hollows behind his eyes. He held the two-inch cigarette in front of his face as he had seen others do, taking in the sweet aroma which reminded him of the smell of the scorched air after small jet planes took off from the runway at Boiling, on the weed-ridden, off-limits fringes of which he had done his teenage brooding.

  "How does it feel?" they all sang and half cried.

  And Richard, passing the joint along to the girl beside him, cried back from farther down in his throat than his voice had ever been—the dope?—"Great! It feels great!"

  Why did he love this so much? On that bridge, with Lincoln's Doric temple behind him and Robert E. Lee's graveyard estate ahead, with the towers of his uptight alma mater, Georgetown, to his right and the blue water under him that would flow in moments down to the riverside air base that had been his only home, he felt at last that he was not on his own. He had thought only he loved the Dylan lyric for that paradox, how it celebrated loneliness while simultaneously offering in itself a way out of loneliness, but he sensed now that his whole generation felt that way about it.

  "It feels great!" he yelled again, glancing left for Cooney, his one friend from all those years at GU, they should stick together more, they should stay in closer touch, he felt the rush of his affection, not understanding that the shot of dope smoke to his brain was freeing him from the grip of inhibition.

  The feeling—oh the feeling—was he did have direction, and he did have a home. Not D.C. or GU or Boiling AFB, not UVA Law School either. These one hundred thousand friends were his direction. They would be his home. Bob Dylan
himself was probably here; how could the Hibbing Hippie not be? Robert Lowell, the new-age foster father, was here, and so was SANE and Snick, the Student Mobe and the American Friends, Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman!

  "Not Paul Goodman, love," the girl next to him said, and until that moment Richard had not known he was speaking any of this aloud. "Mitch Goodman."

  "Who's he?" He laughed and accepted her offer of one more toke before she sent the joint along its sacramental route. Now he smelled her aroma, as well as the marijuana—Hindu incense and the perfume of sex.

  "My name is Dylan!" Richard said hilariously. "No, really, honest to God. D-I-L-L-O-N."

  She was so pretty. She had braided daisies into her flowing golden hair.

  "I'm Sonja," she said.

  He knew it wasn't her name, and the feeling was, Dillon was not his name either. He felt free, free.

  When Richard slid his hand back inside her arm, he inadvertently brushed her supple breast under the thin cotton of her T-shirt, which was pale blue and featured the words "Diggers Free Store." The form of her breast kept the r's of her shirt moving happily, and though the sight had struck him before, now it staggered him. His hand tingled to be touching that fabric; in his mind it felt like lingerie. He saw the form of her left nipple riding erect and proud. He felt wholly turned on, full of lust for that Sonja and for all the Sonjas around him, in their ass-hugging blue jeans and underwear shirts and the daisies in their hair.

  And that quickly, the exhilaration of the Dylan song and the march across the Potomac and the loosey-goosey feel of his legs moving in step with two hundred thousand other legs, all riding up in the hot-air basket of the dope bubble—the exhilaration became completely sexual. It was sexual, he realized, for all of them. He laughed out loud again. Oh Sonja! He hugged her, choked with happiness, tasting also, however, a sweet distress at how close he had come, over weeks of worrying, to deciding he could not in conscience do this.

  Only moments later he wondered what all that feeling, the exhilaration and the lust and the freedom, had been. The marijuana? His namesake's song? The pretty Sonja, who then disappeared as the crowd surged at the end of the bridge, pushing through the pair of majestic white towers under the guardian eyes of giant eagles?

  As Richard's section of the march wheeled through the traffic circle, turning upriver, he heard the roar rolling back from those ahead, a deep, round, soccer stadium kind of sound. In realizing what it was, he realized also that the high he had felt there for a brief eternity was totally gone. The protesters ahead were letting out their throaty shout in a steady back-flowing wave as each rank advanced to the point where the four-lane Jefferson Davis Highway rose at Boundary Channel, giving them a view. Until Richard, on his toes, scanning the tops of all those mother-displeasing scruffy heads, could see it too. The Pentagon.

  Like a dreamwalker then, Richard advanced as one of the throng. He had never been a part of such a crowd before, never, never, but to himself he was now radically alone. The building became a point of fixation for him. All its most impressive aspects, its size in the flat river valley, the simple, yes, elegance of its proportions and the becolumned grandeur, all of this was familiar to him. What gripped Richard for the first time ever, what he saw mounted above the mall entrance, taking up the space between the second and fifth floors in the dead center of that side of the building, was the eye, wet and veiny with blood, alive, the single huge Cyclops eye that was staring hard at him. His father was in that building.

  The eye was and would continue to be, had to be, he wanted it to be, his secret. No one of the tens of thousands around him could know or begin to understand what this moment was for him. He was no longer linked to them at all. He allowed the current of the crowd's movement to carry him. The main body of demonstrators funneled into the vast north parking lot, where this phase of the rally was to take place. Speakers at the Lincoln Memorial had explained that government permits had been obtained for this second gathering, that it was perfectly legal. Those hoping to challenge the war by committing acts of civil disobedience would move on from the parking lot to cross the well-marked boundary onto the forbidden apron of the Pentagon proper. As they approached, Richard, still craning, saw that that boundary was marked by a length of yellow rope behind which stood a row of club-bearing military policemen. He saw their white helmets and knew, even from that distance, who they were.

  Not Richard. He had not come here to get busted, and already he wanted to cry out, at the mystical eye that only he saw, what was now true, that he was not one of these people, that he had come here for reasons of his own, that while he too hated the fucking war, he did not hate the men who had to fight it.

  You. I don't hate you, he said, perhaps aloud. He had his stare fixed on that spot on the side of the Pentagon, which was approximately where his father's office was. As he drew steadily closer it seemed to him he could distinguish among the numerous windows, picking out one window and drifting toward it.

  Without realizing it, Richard's preoccupation took him to the edge of the crowd, away from the temporaiy platform in the middle of the lot on which a rock band was playing. Soon he found himself actually approaching the limit of the parking lot among a column of wild-hearted Yippie radicals who, it was quickly apparent, were here to make trouble. Just a few dozen yards ahead Richard saw kids taunting the stoical MPs. One was waving a small NLF flag directly in the face of an impassive black soldier, and several girls were dancing lewdly in front of another. Richard heard the catcalls and obscenities that the protesters were shouting at the soldiers, and he began to shout too, but against his fellow demonstrators. "No," he cried, "don't do that! Not like that!"

  There were several hundred Yippies just there, where the embankment leading up to the building marked the limit of the parking lot. They were a knot of crude and, even to Richard, ugly young people, who then picked up the chant of "Out, demons, out!" Richard remembered that their leader, Jerry Rubin, had promised an exorcism of the war machine, but these kids were hurling themselves on the MPs as if they were devils. The idea of an exorcism had seemed like fun when Richard had heard it, but this frenzy—girls flaunting their bodies, boys waving enemy flags, shouting, "Out, demons, out!"—frightened him.

  He decided to move away. But the crowd of chanters was thick and pressing him, and they forced him forward as the entire column moved steadily against the line of MPs.

  "No!" Richard cried. "Stop this!" And he pushed roughly against a white kid whose hair was styled dramatically in an Afro. The kid punched Richard in the jaw, staggering him.

  "Out, demons, out!"

  When he'd found his balance again, Richard was facing the other way, his back toward the Pentagon, and he began pushing against the crowd, trying to get out. But it was impossible.

  At one point he ripped out of someone's grasp another red and blue, yellow-starred Vietcong flag and quite deliberately threw it to the ground where it was immediately trampled under and lost.

  The frontmost rank of demonstrators, no longer content with taunting the rows of MPs, broke and began running for the Pentagon, tearing the yellow cord down, scrambling up the embankment and, eluding the startled soldiers, actually crossing onto the broad paved apron. The crowd around Richard surged forward. The line of MPs was no match for it, and all at once hundreds of protesters were storming the Pentagon itself.

  Richard, simply to stop himself from being carried forward, fell to the ground, one of the few who did, and one of the few easy targets, therefore, for the white-helmeted soldiers.

  "You motherfucker!" an MP cried as he brought his club viciously down on Richard.

  Richard covered his head just in time and took the blow with his shielding forearms. Instinctively he rolled away, scrambling to his feet and moving with energy and finesse, a halfback eluding tacklers. "Cheer for the Redskins!" The old fight song in his father's voice. Run me, Dad, run me!

  Despite the shocking memory of his father's carrying him like a football, and des
pite the pandemonium around him, his brain snapped into focus, locked on one idea and held it as an absolute: not to get arrested. That was all. I cannot get arrested! But his instinctive move into open space had, in fact, taken him toward the Pentagon, not away from it. He was way over the line of what was allowed, but he was dodging everybody now. The Yippies were as much a threat to him as the MPs were. Cheer for the Redskins! Was it that memory that made him want to cry?

  The first rank of radicals was just approaching the stairs leading to the river entrance proper, storming it like heroes. A Vietcong flag waved above them, and that drew Richard's eye just as the huge doors between the limestone pillars swung open. Out poured a company of countercharging troops, not white-helmeted, club-wielding MPs but combat soldiers in fatigues, armed with rifles. They stormed into and around the Yippies, who stopped cold, instantly overwhelmed. He saw soldiers repeatedly bringing the butts of their rifles down on the heads of the now panicked kids. Their cocky demon chant was transformed into screams of pure terror, and as they tried to fall back in retreat, the troops pursued them. Hundreds of combat soldiers continued to pour out of the Pentagon, chasing down the protesters, who in Richard's mind were transformed once more back into harmless flower children. "Don't," he screamed now, "don't do that!" But instead of at Yippies, he was screaming at a GI who at that moment was brutally clubbing a girl who had daisies woven into her hair. The girl was at the soldier's feet, writhing with the blows. Richard simply forgot his new absolute, that he could not be arrested, and he ran at the soldier. "Stop that, goddamn it!" He hit the GI from the side, with more force than he intended, and it stunned him that the soldier fell to the ground. Richard reached to help the girl. Blood was pouring from her head, and she was screaming hysterically, but instead of allowing Richard to lead her away, she pulled out of his grasp as soon as she was on her feet, and she turned on the soldier who was getting up. "Asshole!" she screamed. "You fucking baby-burner!" She stood over the stunned GI, just screaming at him, "Asshole! Asshole!" The soldier shook with confusion.