"In China," he said, "the guards told me that World War Three had started, remember that?"
"Yes."
"They told me New York had been hit with the A-bomb and for a time I believed them. I believed that everyone I knew and loved was dead and that half the cities of Europe and America were ash and that a cloud of radiation was hanging over the world. I believed all that, Durk, but I still believed in God. I still believed He loves us and takes care of us. But now..." He fell silent.
I became increasingly desperate. He gave me the feeling that somehow I had to rescue him—his faith!—with what I said. I wanted to recite a whole litany of reasons for belief, but I could not think of one. After several swallows of gin I swept my hand toward the horizon grandly. "But look at the view, Michael. It's the fucking world at our feet. You see any fucking radiation cloud? Hey, you wanted to give it to me as a token of your gratitude, right?"
"That's right."
"Well, that's how God feels. There it is. Mountains, valleys, rivers, trees, animals, Vermont, New-fucking-York, Cana-fucking-da, the whole fucking earth!" I slugged his shoulder. "And God puts it there for you, hero! Out of gratitude!"
"You're not listening to me."
"Because you manifest His conscience for Him, hero. Nobody does that like you do it. That's why He put you here."
"Durk, listen to me, will you? None of that means shit to me!"
"So you're having a little Dark Night of the Soul, that's all."
"No, that isn't all."
I put my hand on his shoulder. "Look, Michael, if I were you I'd be sick thinking about what's coming up. But I'm not you. More to the point, you're not me. You can deal with it."
"And you couldn't? Why the hell am I special?"
"I don't know. But you are. That's the fact of it, Michael. You have a strength the rest of us lack. You're stuck with it. And that's why more is asked of you."
"No, more is asked of everybody. If we filled the jails the war would end."
"If we filled the jails we'd fill the jails, that's all."
"Well, that makes me a chump, doesn't it?"
"Why? For manifesting God's conscience on earth? What better thing for a priest to do? You're a priest, Michael! That's the difference between you and me. It's a big difference. Priests sustain the rest of us. We draw on you for courage and for gentleness and for moral example. Maybe we suck life out of you. That's what we need you for. I see the problem; I see your problem. Who do priests draw on? Who do priests suck life out of? Who sustains the sustainer? Well, you have to answer that one. I can't."
"In theory, God does."
"He always has, right?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"It's different this time."
"Why?"
This was when he could have told me. He was silent for some moments, then took a hit of gin. "I guess because I'm older. I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid of dying. I told you. When we were kids we didn't know how easily things get lost."
I put my arm around his shoulder. "Michael, you won't lose me."
He looked at me sadly. This was the last time we got drunk together. "Just don't call me 'hero,' all right?"
When the appeals process had finally run its futile course, Michael was ordered to begin serving his sentence on the first day of December 1969.
And he might have.
But in late November news stories began appearing about an "alleged massacre" of civilians that was reported to have taken place in a Vietnamese village variously referred to as "Pinkville,"
"Songmy" and "My Lai." The story came out in disjointed pieces and at first without sensation. Courts-martial of certain junior officers were discreetly under way, and that was what began attracting the attention of reporters. At first the civilian death toll was put at forty-three, then at "somewhat over a hundred." By the end of November more than ten American GIs who admitted participating had given reporters their accounts of the incident.
For most of a day in late March of 1968, dozens of American soldiers, acting under orders of officers, had herded more than five hundred old men, children and women into the village square, into fields and into a large drainage ditch where they fired their automatic weapons on them at close range. This was not the act of frenzied, panic-stricken boys, but of lucid soldiers who had come to regard every Vietnamese person—every "Dink"—of whatever age or position as the enemy. There was one American casualty, a GI who shot himself in the foot rather than obey. The "Combat Action Report" about the incident, filed by the lieutenant colonel who supervised from his helicopter, called it an "attack that was well-planned, well-executed and successful."
When Life magazine, the last week in November, published nine gruesome photographs, eight in color, showing corpses of babies piled on one another, of toothless old women and Pappa-san men strewn in paddies, of hundreds of villagers stretched along a ditch, the world was stunned. The photographs had been taken secretly and held back until now by a disgusted but frightened army photographer. His pictures and his testimony were the most damning revelations of the whole war.
Only two weeks before, on November 15, a quarter of a million Americans had marched on Washington, the largest demonstration in the capital's history, demanding an immediate end to the war. They had thought that they grasped its horrors in full dimension, but they didn't. Now suddenly the rhetoric of the radicals, crazy youngsters who threw stones at cops and broke windows at peace marches, seemed justified. The first shock of My Lai would lead to others, and it would take months before the full story of that and related atrocities became known. But in those first weeks of the My Lai disclosures Americans grasped viscerally, finally, what the Vietnamese had long known. The war itself was the atrocity.
Still, I was surprised that that was what Michael wanted to talk about. It was snowing lightly, but neither of us paid much attention to the weather. I was aware of Michael's weighty mood and thought he had a right to one, since this was his last day of freedom. We were walking across the plaza at Lincoln Center. It was where we habitually strolled when he came to see me at my office in the new Fordham building on Sixtieth Street. The huge Chagall tapestries dominated the square even from inside the glass facade of the Met. Ahead of us snowflakes dusted Henry Moore's reclining nude, that massive stolid sculpture which I'd come to think of as the steely heart of New York City. It was noontime.
Why the hell was he going on about the war? He was on his way to jail! Wasn't Vietnam someone else's problem now?
"Did you read that about Calley? How he tore that infant from the Buddhist priest's arms so that he could shoot the priest? And then how he shot the infant? His M-16 must have cut that baby in half."
Michael's agitation made me impatient, but it alarmed me too. I hadn't felt it at such a pitch since Nicholas Wiley's death. We turned the corner at the far side of the reflecting pool in front of the Vivian Beaumont. In reply I was reduced both by my concern for him and by my despair at the war to saying simply, "It's grotesque."
"No, no, Durk! You miss the point if you think of it as grotesque. Don't you see, it's ordinary! It's commonplace! Calley is what this war has become. The army is full of Calleys now. He's no exception."
"Come on, Michael. Don't go SDS on me."
"Calley does it up close, that's all. But it's the same thing."
"I don't think it's quite—"
"Ask the Vietnamese! It's the same to them!"
"The point is, Calley's being court-martialed, isn't he?"
"Yes, because some kid blew the whistle and forced the issue. So they string up an imbecile lieutenant and a few Pfc's from Tennessee..."
"And Captain Medina."
"...when it's the generals who should be hung, especially Sennett."
"Who's Sennett?"
"Brigadier General David Sennett, the commander of Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn."
"I don't get it."
"He was the Eleventh Infantry Brigade commander in March of sixty-eight. Calley was
his boy. My Lai was his operation."
"Look, Michael, if you think the brass will be held accountable for this thing you're wrong. You might as well hope they bring Agnew and Nixon to court for it. Somebody has to be tried for shit like My Lai. Why not the animals who actually did it?"
"Durk, listen to me!" He took me by the arm and pushed me to a low, concrete parapet. We sat. "My Lai gives us a brand-new chance to force the American people to look at what this war has become, what it's been for years. I'll tell you who's responsible for My Lai: we are! Goddamnit, isn't that the point, finally? We rejected this war as a people two years ago, but it's worse than ever! So everyone marches on Washington. But Nixon ignores it. Thieu uses his army against his own people. Agnew rants about the kooks. A few of us timidly break the law and get locked up. And we all throw our hands in the air and say, 'Well, we tried!' But meanwhile our boys keep going over there by the thousands after raising pet rabbits in boot camp so the DI can snap their necks. And yes, then they're animals! And they will do anything! To anyone! Do you hear me? That's what this war has done! Our soldiers will do anything to anyone! Do you hear me?"
"Yes. So does half of Manhattan."
We stared at each other. Steam puffed from his mouth and nostrils. Finally he said, "West Point is playing basketball against Saint John's tomorrow night at Madison Square Garden. The local commander always attends Army games as a kind of presiding officer. General Sennett's going to be in the front row at midcourt. There's going to be a demonstration and I am going to be a part of it."
"But you can't! You go into custody tomorrow!"
"That's what I wanted to tell you. I'm not turning myself in. I'm not cooperating with the government anymore, Durk. Authority has to be legitimate." Michael smiled. "Even Saint Thomas said that. If this government wants me to obey it, then they can stop the war. If they won't call the real criminals to account, then we will. If they want me tomorrow, they can come to Madison Square Garden."
At first, so domesticated—housebroken—was my mind that I did not understand what he was saying. Had his lawyer obtained an extension from the court? Of course not. Even before I spoke I grasped in its full dimension the enormity, the audacity, of what he'd said. "You mean you're going to...?" I didn't have a word for it.
But he did. "Resist, Durk. I'm going to resist. Not out of rebelliousness. You know me. I'm no revolutionary. I hate what I've come to. But I see now what we have to do—challenge and if we can, destroy America's faith in people like General Sennett and General Abrams..."
"And Nixon?"
"As far as the war goes, yes. GIs have to stop obeying their officers. Teenage boys have to stop obeying their draftboards. And peaceniks have to stop obeying the courts."
"Michael, you've lost me. Honest to God, you've lost me. The last time we talked you told me you'd had it. You were through. You'd done your part."
"I was indulging myself, Durk. I'd become obsessed with my anxiety about prison. What's that next to the sacrifice of the Vietnamese? My Lai reminded me, that's all. At first I thought I was doing this because I am afraid of prison, but that's not it. I'll go to jail eventually, but not before I strike a real blow at the war. Americans, if you face them with it, won't tolerate this thing. And that's what I'm going to do, face them with it. Before we're through, Durk, it won't be that kids refuse induction, but that their mothers and fathers won't let the army near their kids."
"Where will you go?"
"To America," he said, utterly without self-consciousness. "If the government wants me they can come out there and catch me, where everyone can see."
The melodrama of his statement, the cartoon-talk about "America" so typical of the time, stands out starkly now as I repeat it, but then it seemed eloquent. His bravado simply took my breath away. My God, I thought, it's the old Michael Maguire, the boy-soldier hero hurtling down a hill against an enemy patrol to save his wounded buddies and their priest, the young idealist handing over the rest of his life in one wrapped package to the Lord, the priest off to Vietnam to rescue children, then defying the cardinal to bury Nicholas Wiley. Yet now Michael seemed readier, as if every previous act of boldness— "L'audace! Toujours I'audace!" —was practice for this one.
"And this means," he said, "I'm going to owe you a lot of money. I'll be forfeiting bail. That's your twenty thousand dollars. That's what I'm here to talk about. I'm telling you right now that somehow, someday I'll see that you're repaid."
For a moment I felt sick at the thought of all that money, which was all of my money, going up in smoke, the smoke of his sacrifice. I couldn't reply.
He said, "I feel terrible about it," and I saw that he did.
But then it hit me, what was money, even that sum, in such a context? Michael was talking about an ultimate act. He had become, in a way, an ultimate man.
And I? At that moment I was like everyone. I forgot what he'd shown me in secret, the cost of his world-saving, charismatic integrity, the cost in loneliness and self-doubt. I rejoiced instinctively to see him large again, unyielding, the rock of our rejection. My reservations—I thought his decision was quixotic, foolhardy and dangerous—were obliterated by the pride I felt just to be his friend. I thought him right about the war, about America and about My Lai as the turning point we'd been awaiting.
"Forget the money, Michael," I said, "I mean, please. And tell me now exactly what I can do to help."
TWENTY-NINE
And when our work is done
Our course on earth is run
May it be said, "Well done;
Be thou at peace."
E'er may that line of gray
Increase from day to day,
Live, serve and die we pray,
West Point, for thee.
After the robust, throaty rendition of their alma mater, the cadets, a thousand strong and concentrated, a gray mass, in the upper seats, let out one of their startling, sustained roars. The noise, like a balloon expanding in a box, pressed against the walls and girdered ceiling of the Garden. West Point cadets make the best roars in sport because of all that pent-up energy and their acquired knack for unison. Only seminarians could match them in those traits. Seminarians, of course, do not learn to roar since they are not, most of them, being trained for battle.
The roar did not fade until the referee tossed the ball into the air at center court. The Redmen snagged it and immediately moved on Army's basket; three quick passes, a feint, a shot, swish! Saint John's would never lose the lead. By halftime the score was 42—28. Even the automated cadets in the stands had gone slightly limp. The Saint John's fans across the arena looked like long-haired hippies next to the Corps, though in fact they were relatively conservative Catholic kids from Queens and would have looked downright square at Dupont Circle or Haight-Ashbury or, for that matter, in Greenwich Village. But by now even to most of them, the army was the enemy of their generation, and the cadets were traitors to it. They wanted their ballplayers to beat West Point mercilessly.
It was because of the abuse Military Academy teams regularly took at other colleges during the late sixties that the local commanders compulsively attended the games. They always sat, bedecked and accompanied by aides, in a prominent seat. It was like setting up a commandpost on a ridge so that both your enemy and your own forces would behold your nerve and be, in one case, shaken and, in the other, reinforced. At halftime General Sennett stood in his place in the first row at center court and greeted well-wishers, old friends, retired officers and celebrities.
When the priest walked out onto the court with a microphone in his hand, the general assumed, as the guards had, he was some functionary from Saint John's about to begin the halftime program. He looked innocuous in his Clark Kent spectacles, black suit and Roman collar.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "may I have your attention, please." At first the crowd ignored him. Sennett took his seat, however, and the cadets, seeing that, fell silent. Soon the quiet spread across the Garden. The priest was alone in t
he middle of the court. "Please come forward," he said. Suddenly from seats and aisles in all parts of the arena, men and women filed onto the court. They moved with ceremonial dignity, donning white conical hats as they did so. Sennett was among the first to recognize those as stylized Vietnamese peasant hats, and he was close enough to read what was written on them: "Old Woman,"
"Infant,"
"Buddhist Nun,"
"Village Elder," and so on. The priest, Sennett realized, was staring at him as he said, "Think of these four hundred and twenty-two people as the old men, women and children who lived in a small village in Quang Ngai Province until March 16, 1968. That was the day that you, General Sennett, as the commanding officer of the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, sent Task Force Barker, led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, including Charlie Company, led by Captain Ernest Medina, including a platoon led by Lieutenant William Calley, against their village, which was called My Lai." By this time the several hundred demonstrators had joined the priest on the court. They stood rigidly, like figures in a mime, pointed in every direction, their faces obscured by their conical hats. After a long silence during which there was no sound from anyone in Madison Square Garden, the priest said, slowly and distinctly, the sound system carrying every nuance of his voice, "General Sennett, we accuse you of and charge you with the murder of these people."
At that all four hundred and twenty-two demonstrators—the "infants,"
"elders" and "nuns"—fell to the floor, limp. Like that, snap! They were a mass of corpses! Only the priest remained standing.
After an initial gasp, the crowd was absolutely still, too stunned to react, with the exception of photographers, whose cameras clicked and whirred.
Sennett stared at the priest. His face was a blank mask.
The priest said, "May God forgive you. We do not." And then he took off his glasses, his gesture toward disguise. He walked off the court, stepping around the "corpses" as he did so.
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