Prince of Peace (5 page)

The river at that point was half a mile wide, but it seemed narrower because ice, white shoulders of it stretching from each bank, had begun to close on the center channel where the current ran most swiftly. It was so cold that Lieutenant Barrett gave permission to keep the jeep running so that the GIs could take turns sitting on its radiator to keep warm. The bridge was a rigid, solid multispan suspension structure, a quilt of pig-iron girders on top of concrete pilings, that the Japanese had built during their wartime occupation. Ice floes had begun to jam up at the pilings. The retreating ROK Army had demolished the center span of the bridge the previous July when the North Koreans overran the south. American engineers had rebuilt it in October after the U.N. breakout and the recapture of Seoul. And now Seoul was about to fall once more, this time to the Chinese, and its population was once more fleeing south. Maguire and his buddies knew that the bridge would have to be dropped again, but if it wasn't done soon, the river was going to be frozen clear across anyway, and no one would need a bridge. "If the Chinks don't catch us," they complained to each other, slapping their sides, "the fucking cold will."

Later Maguire would grasp the chronology of the seesaw victories and defeats that characterized the first phase of the war, but that day he did not understand what was happening. MacArthur's autumn assurance that his army would be home by Christmas was repeated now as a bitter joke. In the previous summer the North Koreans had conquered most of the peninsula, but that was before the Americans came. After the great assault at Inchon, the GIs took the peninsula back almost easily. When Maguire got his orders for Korea as one of the tens of thousands of quickly drafted relief troops the war—the "police action" as the president called it—was supposed to be over. Draftees like him expected ninety-day turnarounds. Now he and his regiment and, as far as he knew, the whole U.S. Army were running for their lives, just like the expressionless, sullen refugees passing stoically by him.

To tell the truth Michael Maguire understood very little of what had happened to him in the six months since he'd graduated from Good Shepherd High School in Inwood. He was one of only three boys in our class to be drafted. The rest of us pretended to envy them and, though we worshipped our older brothers for having fought in World War Two, I can recall no one of our group who went downtown and enlisted. It was as if, instinctively, we knew that Korea was not the war we wanted. As to why Michael should have been drafted, no one knew. His fame as a schoolboy athlete had carried around the city, leading some to think the Selective Service only picked those most likely to make good soldiers. But Tubby McGaw was drafted too. More confusing still was the fact that Michael's long-deceased father had been a New York City cop. None of us remembered him but it was neighborhood legend how he'd been killed in the line of duty, thwarting a holdup in Pop Mahoney's Variety Store. It was as if the draftboard, instead of exempting the only sons of widows, went out of the way to call them. Maguire's father a dead hero? Then the army would give him the chance to be one too. By rules we were all familiar with, it was a chance Michael was compelled to take, for it was unthinkable that he should apply for a hardship exemption. He'd have been a shoe-in for it, but he felt bound by an honor code of which his father was the mythic exemplar. We were far from cynical about such things, but that honor code of Michael's seemed anachronistic to some of us even then. His willingness to be conscripted by events would set Michael apart, for good and for ill, for the rest of his life.

The war in Korea was not the war against Hitler, and aspects of it troubled right from the start, but it was morally compelling nonetheless. However difficult it is to imagine now, America seemed as invincible as upright then, and we were sure that our mission in Asia was thrust upon us by a pleading world. When Michael left Inwood, even those of us who thought he was a sap to go were proud of him. I was also grief-stricken. Already the bond between us was stronger than blood. He was my best friend and I was his. For a long time I felt his absence as a bodily pain, and I came to hate the war that took him from me, even if I believed in it.

Forgive me if I homilize about it for a moment, but Korea serves as the first bracket not only for this story—for Michael's life— but for the story of the tragic decline of America, which is of course our larger subject. It is only the failure of Communism to realize its own rhetoric that makes that first reflexive effort to oppose it seem naive. And it is only the recent collapse of belief in our own rhetoric about ourselves as free people defending freedom that makes our intervention in behalf of an invaded people seem militaristic. Contrary to present opinion, it is not that people were stupid in those days or prisoners of univocal thinking that draws all conflicts in black and white. They were neither morally nor politically shallower than we are. On the contrary they had a perception of one of the century's great facts, a perception since lost in the fog of our social, personal and political narcissism—that Communism is an inhuman system comparable to Nazism in every way but one: it works as a system of repression and conquest, but it cannot feed its people, and so eventually must fail whether opposed from without or not. The generation that fought Communism and contained it in Greece and Korea did not know that yet. I was an aware young man launched on a Greenwich Village phase of Camusian
engagement,
yet I did not know it. Communism, we believed, was capable of taking over the world. It is superficial therefore merely to fault Americans of that period for their paranoia, despite its dreadful domestic and international consequences. They moved— I should say "we" moved—in Eliot's phrase, "in the time between sleep and waking."

The point is that there were reasons, regarded as good ones then, and still so regarded by some of us, to perceive the Communists as monstrous. Every GI in Korea could have given them to you. Graphic stories of Red atrocities were a feature of basic training. What pimply-faced draftee could benignly contemplate the prospect of dying in a ditch with his balls in his mouth?

Later in life Michael Maguire would express the opinion that basic training was itself a kind of atrocity—a systematic numbing of individual conscience and will. His preoccupation by then would be not with how we were right about the Communists, but how we were wrong about ourselves. It would become his position that even a graced, generous society like America can be corrupted—will be corrupted—when its major effort is turned to the prolonged conduct of war. Basic training, his own experience of it, would therefore become a basic point of reference and a basic metaphor for the inhumanity into which America slipped. But that came later.

At the time, though, he knew something was dreadfully wrong with a system that celebrated and sought to nurture the sadistic in men. In a letter he wrote to me just before shipping out to Korea, he described with suppressed rage how his company's drill instructor had presented them on their arrival at Fort Dix with the gift of a pet rabbit, and how he had encouraged them to feed it and care for it and grow fond of it. Through the rigors of the training that rabbit—its childishly derived name was Thumper—sustained in Maguire and others the capacity for gentleness and warmth, feelings for which there were simply no other outlets. Maguire described how attached they became to Thumper. They fed the animal on scraps smuggled out of the mess hall. He described how on the day that basic finally ended and they were shipping out to various regiments bound for Korea, the DI gathered the company for his farewell talk. He took Thumper and, after fondling him and nuzzling him, he suddenly snapped the rabbit's neck with his bare hands and then threw it on the table and in quick order produced a gleaming bayonet with which he skinned and disemboweled it. Then he splashed on his men its blood, Thumper's blood, an unconscious mockery of the
Asperges Me.
And he swore that that was what the Commie bastards would do to any GI they caught alive, and so GIs just fucking well better do it to the Commie bastards first. Michael said in his letter that he was horrified by that drill instructor, but also by his own reaction to him, for in fact he accepted despite himself the slaughter of that rabbit as an image of Communists' skinning their prisoners alive, and it terrified him.

And now the ultimate Commie Bastards—Chicoms—had swept down on Seoul, whose citizens needed no Thumper lessons to be afraid.

Maguire watched as the Koreans funneled onto the bridge. They hauled ladened carts or carried their possessions on their backs, boxes and even pieces of furniture strapped to the large Korean A-frames made of tree branches. Some women carried loads on their heads, like Africans, and they alone managed a stately pace in the otherwise jerking crowd. Progress was too sporadic and the press of bodies too close to ride bicycles, so those who owned bicycles pushed them. Babies rode in bicycle baskets or on smaller versions of the A-frame on their mothers' backs, wrapped like papooses. The faces of the men and women were so lacking in animation of any sort that it was possible, by virtue of that lack, to imagine the oppression under which they'd lived. If one had only their faces to go by, they'd have seemed sullen, not afraid. Their fear was communicated through the ferocious concentration of their energy on movement.

The faces of the children, though, seemed alive, despite their being wrapped against the cold so that only their eyes, noses and mouths were visible. They reminded Maguire of the Hummel figurines his mother collected, with little dashes of color for features and an air of porcelain fragility, as if just looking at them would make them break.

As they moved by, Michael waited for someone to look at him, but their eyes were fixed on the heels of those immediately ahead. Even when they were shoved into each other, as happened increasingly, no one protested. Maguire felt sorry for them. Only the eyes of the papoose children snagged on him. Well over six feet tall, thin, cigarette dangling from his lips, M-I slung on his shoulder, he was the embodiment of the fantasy Asians had of good-looking, friendly but also somehow frightening Americans. When he waved or otherwise acknowledged that he saw them, the children looked away. Alone of everything he'd seen in weeks, their shy glances made Maguire feel that there was something in that frigging country to protect. What would Chicoms do to enemy children? Maguire didn't believe it, but the Koreans said they ate them.

"Maguire!" Sergeant Stone's harsh voice cut through the cold. "On the double!"

The ten men of the platoon circled the jeep, drawing as close as they could to its radiator. Their breath rose in white puffs, a winter flower that bloomed and faded above them magically. Lieutenant Barrett was standing with one foot on the jeep bumper. When the men were assembled he said, nodding at the radio on Tucci's back, "Okay, boys, we got the word. We get one more train through, then we move out."

"Across the river?" O'Hara asked.

"Hell, yes. You think they'd leave without us?"

"Fucking-A!" O'Hara slapped Bean's helmet with relief. Bean just looked at him.

Lieutenant Barrett went on. "It's time to be on our toes." Something in the lieutenant's voice frightened the men. Maguire had been afraid since arriving in Korea, not acutely and certainly not in any acknowledged way, but in a dull, constant mortification of all his senses, as depressing as it was secret. Now he felt his fear quicken. He shifted his glance to the others. They were all staring at Lieutenant Barrett, riveted, waiting. Despite the cold a thin line of perspiration could be seen on the young officer's lip.

"The next train only has one car, get it? It'll be a big tender, only instead of coal it has a load of dynamite in it."

"Oh fuck," Lennie Pace said. He was the big Italian kid who admitted that he was only sixteen years old, but he was so brawny he passed for eighteen easily. Everyone mispronounced his name—it was "pa-chay," not "pace"—but he'd grown accustomed to that in basic. He'd only been in Korea a week. His fright was palpable.

Sergeant Stone gave him a look. Its thinly veiled contempt seemed lost on Pace, but it unsettled Maguire. He remembered that the sergeant was a veteran of World War Two.

So was Lieutenant Barrett, who made no secret of his resentment at having been called up from the reserves. He seemed young but had been in combat in the Philippines, though not as an officer. That he was new to command accounted perhaps for his stifled uneasiness. "When the train passes, we hop aboard, get it?"

"Even though it's moving?" Sully asked.

Maguire saw that the other men were at least as afraid as he was.

"Falling off the train is the least of your worries, believe me." Lieutenant Barrett looked nervously across at the mobbed bridge and he wiped his lip. "So we're on the train, okay? The engineer's going to stop it right in the middle. Then we get off, okay? We cover the crew. They get a jump on us."

"You mean everybody gets off the train?"

"The train is stopped, Sully. After the crew, we hightail the rest of the way off the bridge on foot. On the other side we hook up with Captain Ray. Get it?"

"So what about the dynamite?" Pace asked.

"Pace, you're a stupid Wop, you know that?" Sergeant Stone belted the kid's helmet.

"No, it's a good question," the officer said. "Usually, they'd string the charges out all along the bridge. They'd put them on the pilings. But there's no time. They're going to just blow it right there in the middle. Right there in the train."

"What about the jeep?"

"Fuck the jeep," Sergeant Stone barked. "Shut up."

Maguire thought the sergeant was right. The men were only asking questions out of nervousness. Obviously Lieutenant Barrett knew barely more than they did.

"Our job," he said, "is to clear the bridge." He looked at his watch. "We have half an hour. The train just left the depot. The lucky people who are already on the bridge will have just enough time to get to the other side. Nobody else gets on, so let's stop these folks. We'll only use what force is necessary, but we'll use it. Any more questions?"