An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  A few weeks later, at Christmas, I went to Generals' Row again. I'd already had one turkey dinner at midday, but I got the special permission needed to leave the seminary afterward. Mom delayed the family meal for me. As the orderly began to serve us, my four brothers and parents and I laughed about my second supper, but a somber mood inevitably fell over the table. Our thin chat—the bowl games, the Redskins, Paul Hornung, Sam Huff—subtly underscored the thick subject of which no one knew how to speak. Joe was well along in a Ph.D. program in psychology. Still severely crippled from his polio, he was decidedly classified 4-F. As always, Joe made me feel uneasy, and I had not quite grown up enough to understand that my uneasiness was coming from me, not him. Brian was home from college. He'd found his niche as an athlete and all-around fun guy. His girlfriend, Vicki French, was a nursing student in Washington. She was the daughter of an Air Force colonel, a classmate from Wiesbaden. They'd fallen in love forever back then and made a match that would outlast the one their classmate Priscilla Beaulieu had made with Elvis. Priscilla and Elvis had recently announced their engagement, proving that the wildest rumors can be true.

  Dennis was a senior in high school. His hair was too long for my parents' taste, but he had quietly defied their orders to cut it. And today no one was going to make an issue of it. At this meal he was reserved and unforthcoming, the brother who had changed the most since I'd been gone. He was the one I felt I knew the least. But he was also the one who would ask me, after we left the table, if I had read Camus. We would discuss The Rebel briefly, and I would offer to send him a paper I had written. Kevin, the youngest, with his red-haired happiness, gave us all a point of unity. He was in early high school, but he could have been an infant for the uncomplicated affection in which we held him. Kevin alone, then and always, had no curves aimed at him, and none came from him either. When he was part of the gathering, we were a family.

  Presiding at one end of the table was Mom, and at the other, Dad. The two multipaned windows opposite the table opened out on the river valley. But the curtains were closed, and so it was my mind's eye that saw the blue runway lights of the airstrip and, in the far distance, the lights of National Airport. I pictured planes landing and taking off, landing and taking off. Magnificent machines. Cruciform objects of my love.

  At this dinner table, in the past, back when Berlin was its flashpoint self, we would sit arrayed like this, and occasionally the Red Telephone in our parents' bedroom would ring, with its shrill auxiliary bell sounding in the kitchen. The sergeant would push open the swinging door, an alert new blade of light in his eyes—no cook now, no servant, but an aide de camp, a general's man. Dad would touch his napkin to his mouth and get up without a word. The hot line to the Pentagon rang for only one of two reasons: to announce the start of war or to test the system. When the phone rang at dinner time, Dad would disappear and a stark silence would settle on the table. Even little Kevin seemed to know what was never more than an inch below the surface of this life.

  Me? Especially after that night in 1960, I always expected Dad to reappear for a moment, kiss us each quickly, then go away forever. What always happened instead was that Mom would break the silence with a simple order: "Eat your potatoes, Jimmy." "Elbow off the table, Kevin." Saying, in effect, Eat, live, be alive.

  That's what she was doing now, helping the orderly put the heaping platters on the table. When the sergeant had disappeared into the kitchen again, my father looked over and asked me to say grace. A first. Heat rushed to my face, but I bowed my head and recited the rote offering. Improvised prayers had come into vogue, but I knew better than to try that here. Nevertheless, the familiar words I spoke unleashed other words, and despite myself, especially despite my mother's clear though unspoken wish, I turned to my father as we all finished crossing ourselves—all but Dennis, who had not touched a hand to his forehead or heart. I blurted, "Dad, what did you think when that man died at the Pentagon?"

  His eyes filled with the sadness I'd seen before. They were hard on me. I felt the weight of his judging disappointment.

  Mom, serving plates, broke in sharply, "We're not discussing that."

  "We don't need to discuss it, Mary. But Jimmy has a right to an answer." Dad stared at me and spoke slowly. "What do we all want? The end of the war, right?"

  "Right." I was grateful that his voice sounded so calm and even, which seemed a concession. Already, without knowing it, I'd accepted the hateful stereotypes of the peaceniks. This was no warmonger, this was Dad.

  He leaned toward me to make his statement. Not a discussion, not an argument. A statement. "The war will end," he said, "when the Communists see it's futile to resist us. That's why we've gone in so strong. A quick, strong attack. A bloody nose. Bang. Now—and here's the point—protests like Norman Morrison's, however sincerely motivated, or like the kooks who burn the flag—"

  "I don't believe in burning the flag, Dad."

  "—the kooks who burn the flag—they send exactly the wrong message to Hanoi. They give the Communists reason to keep fighting. Does that promote peace or postpone it?"

  "Postpone it, I guess."

  "So does that answer your question?"

  "Yes, sir," I said, convincing myself that it had.

  And that was it—Christmas dinner, 1965, on Generals' Row, also known, coincidentally, as Westmoreland Avenue. Except for this. In the silence after my father's efficient statement, Mom began to serve a plate for Dennis. He reached across and stopped her. "No turkey, Mom," he said.

  "What do you mean, no turkey?"

  "I'll have potatoes and the beans. I love your beans. I don't eat meat."

  "You what?"

  We all stared at him. I was amazed at how cool he was, sitting with his hair down nearly to his collar, not even blushing.

  "I'm a vegetarian," he said, so simply. A first-time declaration, devoid of anger. Yet it was a firm response, I saw at once, to that season of blood. So clear. So uncomplicated. So true. And so unlike me. How I envied him. Dennis would not eat meat again, ever. I would envy him often. Me? I was eating turkey for the second time that day.

  Once, at such a meal, we discussed Robert McNamara. I had met him a few times when I went to the Pentagon to pick up Dad. There was the time, one summer during college, I was stopped for speeding by an air policeman on the main road of the base. The AP was hardly older than I was. He blanched when he saw my ID, tagging me as a general's kid. Only then—dope—did he notice the stars on the bumper. There was no speed limit on base for this car. But the AP had started something, and I sensed his making up his mind to finish it. He wrote the ticket and gave it to me.

  "Now what?" I asked.

  "It goes to your CO," he replied. In that innocent time, CO meant commanding officer, not conscientious objector.

  "My old man?"

  "No, I mean, I guess it goes to his CO."

  "That's the secretary of defense."

  The AP stared, and I felt sick as I realized that he wasn't backing off. A few nights later, Dad came home steaming. He took me into the side room and told me how, at a meeting with the brass, McNamara had announced a grave crisis. After a weighty moment, he'd produced the traffic ticket. Laughter all around. But it was no joke to my father. He grounded me.

  At a family dinner, another time, somebody said, "McNamara's Irish, isn't he? Why isn't he Catholic?"

  We all looked at Dad, who had no answer.

  From her end of the table, Mom said, "He's a souper."

  "What?"

  "Someone in his family took the soup."

  Dad laughed. "Go away, Mary."

  "No, really." She seemed serious. She explained that during the Potato Famine the British offered soup to starving peasants, but only if they converted to Protestantism. Those Catholics who did so were called soupers. Mom finished the story by fixing me in her stare. "And a curse settled on the village of anyone who took the soup. From then on, no son of that village would ever receive the grace of a vocation to the priesthood."<
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  Jesus Christ, enough! Enough already! And what a blusher I was. The heat in my face, Jesus! But I remember that my father rescued me by cutting my mother short. "Never mind that, Mary," he said. "The point is that Mr. McNamara is a good man."

  Mister. It was the only way I ever heard my father refer to McNamara. The formality that this implied, and the subservience, did not disguise what I'd sensed early on in my father's feelings for his boss, what would only deepen as the years went by, and the wound opened—an admiration, a pride of association, an absolute loyalty that eventually would repulse me, which was how little I knew.

  In September of 1966, in a ceremony with my classmates, before the superior general of the order, I took my final promises as a Paulist, a lifelong solemn commitment to poverty, chastity, and obedience. I moved through the paces in the sanctuary—kneeling, standing, genuflecting—showing, I am certain, no sign of the inner anguish I felt. If I could take such vows at all, it was only because of the fervor with which I assented to the superior general's rubrical prayer for me: "What God has begun in you, may He bring to completion." Amen.

  My mother and father attended the evening ceremony on their way to a reception at the White House. Dad was resplendent in dress whites, three silver stars gleaming on his shoulders. The seminary chapel gleamed too: floor stripped and freshly waxed, statues dusted, every pew polished that afternoon. What zeal we had! When the service was completed, having handed over to my religious superior, if not to God, what I was sure was the rest of my life, I sought out my parents, who didn't have time to stay for our collation, since they had to get to Lyndon Johnson's. But my father, at least, would remember what his son had done that day, because his magnificent white uniform, in which he'd sat on our magnificent oak benches, was stained from the shoulders to the seat of his trousers with cherry-hued furniture polish. After a terrible moment, my mother defused the situation by saying, "Thank God the president is a Democrat." My father, who I would before long associate only with stony rage, reacted with a crack about his long-standing bad luck with uniforms. To my knowledge, President Johnson never mentioned the stains.

  Increasingly, though, I found it impossible not to mention that other stain. On some holiday or other I sat at the dining room table and dropped the words "Bach Mai" on the sheen of our chatter. The New York Times correspondent Harrison Salisbury sent dispatches back from Hanoi in 1966, the first solid reports that the American government's denials of widespread civilian casualties were false. Bach Mai was the name of a hospital that had been bombed.

  "What about it, Dad?"

  "You think our flyers deliberately targeted a hospital?" I see his fork suspended in midair.

  I push against him. "But you said—"

  "No." He cuts me off. "If one of our pilots deliberately bombed a hospital and I found out about it, what would happen?"

  I do not know anymore, so I say nothing.

  "What would happen?" He is really angry now. He clutches the fork in a fist.

  I lower my eyes, as if the shame is mine. "You'd have him court-martialed."

  "You're damn right I would. You're goddamned right I would. Bach Mai was a tragedy. Don't use those poor people as a ploy. And while you're at it, tell your friends that the North Vietnamese put an airfield near that hospital, right next to it. The airfield was the target! The hospital was hit because the NVA put the target there. Tell your kook friends that!"

  "I don't have any kook friends, Dad."

  "I don't want to hear 'Bach Mai' from you again. Is that clear?"

  It was, and he wouldn't. By the time Bach Mai hospital was bombed again, during Nixon's Christmas bombing of 1972, when far more than any mere airfield was targeted, Dad was out of the war, and we weren't talking anyway.

  Years later, as the twentieth anniversary of the war's end approached, I happened to meet a pair of pediatricians from Hanoi who were visiting Boston. I asked them about Bach Mai. A man and a woman, they exchanged a wary glance. "That was our hospital," the man said.

  "You were there?"

  The 1972 raid came at twilight, they said. Neither was at the hospital at the time, but on hearing of the attack, they rushed to help. One American historian reports that doctors at Bach Mai had to amputate the limbs of some of the wounded in order to free them from debris.

  The Christmas bombing, beginning December 18, went on for eleven days and nights. A hundred thousand bombs were dropped in three thousand sorties, mainly of my once beloved B-52S. The raids were the highest concentration of firepower in the war, a penultimate savagery whose motive—our surrender agreement was already worked out and would be signed within weeks—was simply to punish the Vietnamese for defeating us.

  The "Vietnamese." In the presence of those doctors, who did not really want to speak of this, the ancient abstraction of that word became the particular children who had been their patients. I thought of Maya Lin's piercing black memorial in Washington, how it had helped soothe America's pain. But that wailing wall is carved with not one single name of the three million Vietnamese who died.

  On an impulse I asked the doctors to walk with me the few blocks to Boston Common. When I explained that I wanted to show them something precious, they agreed. A few minutes later we were standing on the side of one of the Common's graceful hills, below a young but stalwart oak tree. It was a mild spring afternoon. Passersby moved swiftly along a footpath, unaware of us. The tree's twigs and branches were tipped with greenish gold, the early buds of its rebirth. I had often stopped at that tree since witnessing its planting twenty years before, with fifty veterans of the antiwar movement.

  Now I said almost nothing in explanation, but the woman pressed my arm firmly. She told me she would bring the tree's image home and keep it always. The man drew close to me on my other side. He insisted on being photographed with a branch of the tree by his solemn face.

  At the base of the tree is a plain stone marker that reads, "For Hai and Sacha, Age 9. For All Vietnamese Children Who Died in the War. And for Ourselves. 1975."

  I knew so little. To me, my father was a general, pure and simple. But to his fellow generals, he was anything but. Ever since 1947 when he'd been forced on them by Stuart Symington and Harry Truman, generals had looked askance at my father, a general who had not served in World War II! An Air Force general who could not fly a plane! A general who had not been tempered by the hazing of rising through the ranks! Those who associated with Dad as colleagues in security or intelligence work had always come to revere him, but more broadly in the Pentagon he had remained a kind of pariah general. His standing as such had only intensified with the arrival of Kennedy and McNamara.

  Among the new administration's first problems was one of its own making. Candidate Kennedy had been taken in by dire Air Force warnings of a "missile gap," a U.S. inferiority to Soviet ICBMs. Moscow, after all, had beaten us in the race to put a man in space. Kennedy had made the most of the gap in his campaign, but on taking office he learned that if a missile gap existed in 1960, it was in America's favor.

  Air Force intelligence estimates that had been leaked to Kennedy had never reflected that. The "missile gap," like the "bomber gap" before it, had been cooked to square with Air Force budget ambitions. McNamara wanted to eliminate such service bias from Pentagon intelligence estimates, and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wanted a second intelligence source as a check on the CIA. Thus, in 1961 McNamara ordered the establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to consolidate and objectify all military intelligence activities.

  Doubtless aware of my father's background as a Pentagon maverick, McNamara appointed him the first director of DIA. (According to a 1995 article about my father in the American Intelligence Journal, "McNamara believed that Carroll's integrity and civilian background, which had kept him out of the internecine battles of the Pentagon, would enable him to influence the production of reliable and objective NIEs [National Intelligence Estimates].") Once again my father's role was to challenge the assumpti
ons and power of the brass, only this time his opponents in turf battles would be Navy admirals and generals of the Army and the Marines as well as of the Air Force. From now on, and for the first time, there would be Pentagon intelligence estimates from an agency that owed first loyalty neither to a service branch nor even to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but directly to the secretary of defense and the president. As for the CIA, it had to reckon with its neophyte counterpart when in September 1962 the DIA, not the CIA itself, provided the first hard proof that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba.

  The American war in Vietnam was characterized from start to finish by misunderstanding, ignorance, confusion, illusion (Vietnam a Catholic country!), deception, and contradiction. My father's direct experience of the war, running from its effective beginning until his retirement in September 1969, was and remains unknown to me.

  But I have read declassified military histories that describe, for example, the furious interagency argument over how to define, and therefore count, the enemy. DIA argued that the Communist order of battle should not include the Vietcong's so-called self-defense (SD) and secret self-defense (SSD) forces because, in fact, those terms were VC designations for old people and children who were not brought into regular forces. They were often, literally, in the last ditch.

  The CIA wanted SD and SSD numbers included in estimates—but wouldn't that in effect have obliterated the distinction between combatant and civilian, a distinction that the DIA position implicitly wanted to maintain? Of course, the actual "counting" was mainly of dead bodies. Defining success in the war by body count was itself disastrous, because it meant that everyone in the chain of command, from NCOs to HQMACV, had a motive for exaggerating the count. Odd numbers were always rounded upward, and dead civilians were almost always tagged as soldiers. The end result of all this was that GIs went on missions with only the haziest notions of the opposition they might face. What the grunts had learned in shadows, the whole world saw in clear light during the Tet Offensive, in January 1968. That explosion of Communist forces, which U.S. military historians still insist on describing as a victory for our side, laid bare the harsh fact that every American intelligence estimate, DIA and CIA and all, had grievously undercounted the enemy. Tet was vivid proof that U.S. intelligence in Vietnam, across the board, had failed.