An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  I remember looking at the other bright, uplifted faces. One was my brother Dennis, who before this year was out would be a draft fugitive. Another was my brother Brian, who before Dennis returned from exile abroad would be an FBI agent, catching fugitives like him. I remember the beveled edges of the wooden lectern inside my clutching fingers. The Scriptures in front of me were open to a text I had chosen myself, departing from the order of the liturgical cycle. And I remember:

  "The hand of Yahweh was laid on me, and he carried me away and set me down in the middle of a valley, a valley full of bones. He made me walk up and down among them. There were vast quantities of these bones on the ground the whole length of the valley; and they were quite dried up."

  A mystical vision? The prophet Ezekiel in an epileptic trance? Yet news accounts not long before had described just such a scene in the valley below a besieged hilltop called Khe Sanh. Curtis LeMay had proposed using nuclear weapons to break the siege. Casualties had mounted. Ten thousand men had been killed in a matter of weeks, and that carnage was in my mind when I presumptuously chose Ezekiel's text as the starting point of my first proclamation as a priest.

  Dry bones: the metaphor rang in the air, a double-edged image of rebuke, cutting both ways, toward the literal Southeast Asian valleys of the dead and toward the realm of crushed hopes about which some of us had never dared to speak. "Can these bones live?" I now asked in my excursus, repeating Ezekiel's refrain. "Dried and burned by time," I said, "and by desert wind, by the sun and most of all"—I paused, knowing the offense it would be to use a word that tied the image to the real, the one word I must never use in this church, never use with them—"by napalm."

  It was as specific as I dared get—or as I needed to. Others in that congregation may not have felt the dead weight of that word, but I knew my father would, and so would the other generals. No one but opponents of the war referred to the indiscriminately dropped gelatinous gasoline that adheres to flesh and smolders indefinitely, turning death into torture or leaving wounds impossible to treat. Napalm embodied the perversion of the Air Force, how "Off we go into the wild blue yonder" had become the screeches of children. There was a sick silence in the chapel that only deepened when I repeated, "Can these bones live?" Only now the meaning was, "Can they live after what you have done?"

  That was not a real question, of course, about the million Vietnamese whose bones the men in front of me had already scorched, or the more than twenty thousand Americans who had fallen by then. They were dead. And even a timid, metaphoric evocation of their corpses seemed an act of impudence. "Can these bones live?" I realized that I had unconsciously clenched my fist and raised it. All power to the people! Hell no, we won't go! My fist upraised, as if I were Tommie Smith or John Carlos on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics, as if I were Bobby Seale. I recall my stupefaction, and now imagine my eyes going to that uplifted arm, draped in the ample folds of my first chasuble. "Can these bones live?"

  I answered with Ezekiel's affirmation of the power of Yahweh, the great wind breathing life into the fallen multitude—an image of the resurrection hope central to the faith of Christians. I reached for the spirit of uplift with which I had been trained to end sermons, and perhaps I thought I'd found it. Yes, we can live and love each other and be on the same side, no matter what. "Peace," as LeMay's SAC motto had it, "is our profession." None of us is evil. God loves us all. Who am I to judge? Coming from one who'd just spit the word "napalm" at them, what crap this must have been to those generals.

  Can these bones live? The answer to the question that day was no. We all knew it. In my mind now I look down at my parents, stiff in the front pew, my mother staring at the rosary beads in her lap, my father stupefied like me, meeting my eyes. He must have known that I had chosen this text. That violation of the liturgical order would have been enough to garner his disapproval. But a biblical battlefield? He must have known exactly what it meant. Bones? Vietnam? To ask the question was to answer it. My fist was clenched in my father's face. "Prophesy over these bones!" Yahweh commanded. And, coward that I was, I did.

  In the Catholic Church to which I was born, the theology of the priesthood affirmed that the effect on a man—always a man—of the sacrament of Orders was an "ontological change," a transformation at the deepest level of one's essence and existence. It is an absurdly anachronistic notion, I would say now, but that morning I was living proof of it. My ordination in New York the previous day by His Eminence Terence Cardinal Cooke—himself the military vicar, the warriors' godfather—had given me an authority I never felt before. In my first sermon as a priest, it prompted me to break the great rule of the separation of Church and State, claiming an expertise not only about an abstract moral theology but about its most specific application—an expertise that my father, for one, had never granted me. "I was not ordained for this," I would have said, sensing the wound that my timid reference had opened in him. "But I can't help it."

  After Mass there was a reception at the Officers' Club, and I was not the only one who noticed when my father's fellow generals did not show up. They had no need to pretend, apparently, that my affirming peroration had undone the damage of my impudent reference to the war. My father stood rigidly beside me in the boycotted reception line. We were the same height, but his posture was better than mine and I thought of him as taller. Typical of me. Looking at it from his side, as I was conditioned to do, I saw that his presence next to me displayed a rather larger portion of parental loyalty than I deserved. I had already begun to see what I had done in referring to Vietnam not only as an act of smug self-indulgence but, conversely, as yet more proof of my cowardice. I had said enough to offend my father, and also enough to make me see what I should have said.

  It wasn't cowardice, I see now. What an unforgiving perception the young man I was had of himself, but he had yet to move through the full cycle of this story, had yet to move away, that is, from seeing the world as populated by cowards and heroes. The point is, despite my act of resistance, my father and I, even at that cold moment, were not unlike each other. And yet we would be separated for good now. "These bones," I saw too late, were also the whole house of our relationship, and no, they would not live. There were two lasting effects of the sermon I gave on February 23, 1969. The first, and most painful, was the breach it caused between me and my father. For more than two years I had feared that if I dared hint at my rejection of the war, if I hinted at my not being "on his side" in the home-front war against armies led by the Berrigans or even Bobby Seale, he would neither understand nor forgive me. In prospect, to a young man such a consequence is fearsome, but abstractly so. I anticipated my father's reaction accurately, yet I never imagined how debilitating to him would be, not my rejection, but all that it symbolized; nor how disheartening to me would be our lifelong alienation.

  The second effect of that sermon was its manifestation of the kind of priest I had become. Alas, the wrong kind. Wrong for the country—both Berrigans would soon be in jail—and wrong for the Church. Pope John XXIII had famously opened the windows to let in fresh air, convening a council that was to end the era of Counter-Reformation rigidity. With the openhearted, beloved Angelo Roncalli on the throne of Peter, the day of a calcified, totalitarian Catholicism was supposed to be over. But Roncalli was gone. I didn't know it at ordination, but Church renewal had already failed a few months before, with Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae condemning birth control. Pope John's fresh air had moved across the valley of dry bones but had not entered them. I think now that my fate as one who, a short five years later, would violate his solemn vow and leave the priesthood was sealed in that inadvertently clenched fist of mine. The strident question "Can these bones live?" found an answer in Jesus' searing words: "Let the dead bury the dead."

  During the Nixon administration, William Rogers defended the team ethic of the Vietnam War by saying, "There gets to be a point where the question is: whose side are you on? Now, I am the Secretary of State of th
e United States, and I'm on our side."

  Because of accidents of my personal history, I associate the forcing of that question with an Air Force chaplain's remark and Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones. For me, the image of the death-littered valley has always overwhelmed the image of a promised restoration, those bones up and dancing. Even in the era when I could rhetorically evoke the magical breath of God, I did so dutifully. I was too innocent to know it, but my cherished version of the Good News was too thin, too devoid of irony, and too cheaply won to sustain me as a preacher, much less to carry the weight of what was coming. The death-littered valleys of Vietnam—within weeks of my first Mass, reports would surface of the one at My Lai—changed the way I thought of my family, my nation, my faith, and myself. Ultimately, of course, it was all a lesson in mortality: my parents died, although not before my infant daughter did. And now I know, as privileged twenty-six-year-old American men never do, that my bones too will be scorched, and the breath will leave my body forever. Far more devastatingly, I know already that I will die as my father did, as a man who fell far short of his first and most generous dream. I will die as the flawed compromiser I was already when I wounded him with a sermon that was not cruel enough. And why shouldn't this soul be sorrowful?

  Yet from here, precisely in this am I seized, not by some falcon-Yahweh who lifts me up, but by the story. I am a writer, no priest. I believe that to be made in God's image is to do this: arrange memory and transform experience according to the structure of narrative. The story is what saves us, beginning in this case with Ezekiel, coming down through valleys and a blue curtain to Jesus, my only God, whose fate was and remains the same as my father's, mine, and everyone's. Telling His story, in my tradition, is what makes Him really present. And that is why this soul, also, can rejoice.

  2. J. EDGAR, JOE, AND ME

  ROGER "TERRIBLE" TOUHY was a notorious bank robber, kidnapper, and killer in gangland Chicago, but he was also the key to my father's fate and then, of course, to mine.

  By 1940, the year my Chicago-bred father joined the FBI, the G-man glory days were over. Al Capone had moved to Miami the year before, and would in time die of syphilis. Most of the other well-known Chicago hoodlums, like Touhy, were on ice in the Illinois state prison at Joliet. My father had only recently graduated from Loyola Law School, a blue-collar night school in the Loop. During the day, for the six years it took to complete the program, he had worked in the Chicago stockyards, first as a shit-kicking steamfitter's helper, then as a meat seller for Swift. He'd grown up in the rancid shadow of the packinghouses, in Irish Bridgeport, "Back of the Yards." Workers never got the stench of the place out of their skin, and it was his nightmare to end up there.

  He was a tall, good-looking dark Irishman, bright enough to have ranked at the top of his law school class. He was a good-humored young man whom others liked, a ball player and a partygoer, even with his tight schedule. His classmates did not hold his summa cum laude law degree against him; they marveled at it. His fellow workers at the stockyards, on the other hand, did not know about it.

  This was an era when fewer than one in twenty Americans attended college, and fewer still went to law school—and of those, most were the sons of the elite. Naively, my father had expected that his success in school would land him a job at a State Street law firm, but after a decade of the Depression, firms in the desolate Chicago Loop weren't hiring lawyers even from the Ivy League. By the time he graduated Loyola, my father felt lucky to land a job with the FBI. He assumed it would take him out of Chicago, and by 1940 that seemed lucky too.

  Chicago was a hard-ass town, and young Joe Carroll had seen the roughest of it up close. As a boy he'd had to scramble for nickels and dimes to help feed his sisters. He'd collected discarded milk bottles on the lakefront beaches, competing with derelicts. He'd climbed to the roofs of buildings near Comiskey Park to retrieve the "Spaldeens" and softballs and White Sox hardballs that had been lost up there. Once a section of roof collapsed under his weight, which brought him crashing down into the owner's bedroom. His shirt was stuffed with balls: what to do but grin impishly and ask the man if he wanted to buy one?

  The yards district was the home of Edward J. Kelly, the mayor and head of the Democratic Party machine, as years later it would be home to Mayor Richard J. Daley, and then, years later again, to Mayor Richard M. Daley. After the Capone syndicate was broken by the feds, Kelly's machine picked up the pieces. The mob's lucrative vice industry continued, only now run out of police stations, ward offices, and city hall. Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Kelly machine raked in $20 million a year from illegal gambling alone. At the same time Kelly, by delivering Chicago to Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, made himself essential to the president, who repaid him with massive patronage through the WPA.

  The newsstands and cigar stores where my father bought his Tribs and Camels were fronts for betting parlors, which had no need to hide the betting slips and numbers stubs the losers dropped on the floor. Nor was there shame in the machine's vote-getting technique, which Joe saw even closer up. His father's job as a janitor in a South Side ward house was contingent on the family's delivering ten certified votes in every election. When he came of age, my father was one of those votes, as, later, would be my mother. Once married, they would not be able to move out of the ward without having arranged for reliable replacements on my grandfather's voting list. Kelly's ruthless enforcement of machine discipline; his open collection of money from gamblers, pimps, and protection racketeers as well as from the coffers of the New Deal, which in a few short years funded Kelly's new airport, the State Street subway, and major expansions of Lincoln Park and Lake Shore Drive—it all left my father with what would be an abiding contempt for the hypocrisies of politics.

  "Roosevelt is my religion," Kelly used to chant in a favorite speech, but so was Irish Catholicism. Whatever he did during the week, on weekends he was a good Bridgeport family man whose Saturday confession and Sunday Communion reinforced an Irish sense of God's mercy on a fallen world, which helped make him a complacent partner to criminals. My father was a different kind of Irish Catholic, the other kind. A fallen world? Its only hope was a firm attachment to the law, the letter of it. Despite his apparent good humor, my father, from an early age, had a ruthless conscience, and by the time he was a man—what else took him to school all those nights?—the idea of the law itself had replaced not only Roosevelt but, in some way, religion too. Didn't Edward J. Kelly represent the corruption of both? That was why my father hated Kelly and, taking Kelly as their archetype, all other politicians. The world is fallen, yes. But that is reason not for a winking laxity, but for rigidity.

  Years later my father, with his partygoing days long behind, would describe himself to me as an Irish Jansenist. Cornelius Jansen was a seventeenth-century Dutchman who held that human nature is incapable of good. His sway was greatest just when Irish seminaries were being shut by the occupying English, and Irish clergy had to go to the Continent to learn Catholic theology. Condemned by Rome as heresy, Jansen's ideas had nevertheless found a niche in the besieged Irish Church. Eventually they spread like a virus to Irish-American seminaries, in one of which my father was infected. The trouble was that the harsh Jansenist judgment he applied to others he had first to apply to himself. Incapable of good? My father had reason to think as much of Kelly, the neighborhood boss, city tyrant, exploiter of his own father. But by the standard of immigrant Catholicism, at the deepest level of his existence, my father had reason to think as much of himself.

  In 1934, Kelly's Bridgeport-based machine was reported by the Chicago Daily News to be taking in $1 million a month from illegal vice activities. That same year, my father returned to Bridgeport, a twenty-four-year-old disgrace to his parents, his five sisters, and to the parish that had sponsored him. After a dozen years in the archdiocesan seminary, preparing to be a priest since the age of twelve, he'd committed the sacrilege of quitting. He did so on the eve of his ordination to the diaconate, shortly befor
e taking the lifelong vow of celibacy. The years of disciplined study in philosophy and theology—he'd been at the top of those classes too—had grounded him in a rigid moralism. There was a flinty ledge below the surface of an affability that was enough to make colleagues love him, but only to a point. And in his family he would always be at the mercy of an old self-rejection we would note but never understand. It would inflict itself on me, but not more than on himself. Domine non sum dignus! My earliest memory of my father, from when I knelt next to him in a pew I could not see out of, is the forceful thumping of his fist against his chest. When later I learned the words and gesture meant "I am not worthy!" I was not surprised.

  As the son of a sporadically employed, heavy-drinking sad sack whose one season as a bullpen catcher for the Chicago White Sox—"Dike" Carroll, they'd called him—was a sole and, perhaps, ultimately inhibiting distinction, Joe Carroll would never have been educated except for his time on the track to the priesthood. But once well along that track—here was the catch, and I would feel the pinch of it myself years later—it was a virtual mortal sin to get off.

  Young Joe had had a last meeting with the seminary rector, a bishop who told him that if he changed his mind, he could go to the North American College in Rome for his doctorate in theology, a slipstream Church career. But still he said no. No to the bishop. No to Holy Mother the Church. No to his own Irish mother, who'd already claimed parish primacy as the mother of a priest. And no to God.