Prince of Peace (9 page)

"No, Maguire! Let me go!"

"I can't do it without you, Lennie!"

"Fuck you, man. I'm gone. Get your hands off me or I'll tear your fucking eyes out!"

Maguire released Pace roughly. "You chickenshit!"

Pace whined abruptly. "Don't call me that." Suddenly he looked like the adolescent he was, at the mercy less of his fright now than of his buddy's contempt.

Maguire turned and started up the hill.

Pace called him and Maguire stopped.

"You think we can help?"

"We can get them five minutes maybe. It might be enough. But we have to make the Reds think there's a bunch of us at them. That's why I need you."

Pace caught up with Maguire. "Okay. Okay. But don't let the fuckers kill me, will you?"

Maguire smiled. "No, I won't." He said this soberly, as if he meant it, as if it was his to mean. "You got a grenade?"

"Yeh. A deuce."

"Me too. We have to get close enough to throw them. Then we pin them down with rifles, get it? You take the left flank through that crevice. I'll slip across here. Keep an eye on me. Don't do anything until I do."

"Not too close, okay?"

"Just watch the bushes, Lennie." Maguire slapped his friend's shoulder. "We can do it. Those wounded guys would do it for us." He felt responsible for the boy suddenly, Maguire's first experience of that sensation, and it seemed to him that his affection for Pace at that moment was strong enough to protect him.

As they set off Maguire had to stifle a whoop, as if they were boys at play. His flash of exhilaration did not cancel his anxiety but matched it. He was operating on instinct, like a natural driving for the basket. He didn't know from one instant to the next what the moves would be, but he was in such perfect control of himself that even Pace, sensing Maguire's innate competence, was able to come back from the edge of panic.

They were crouched low, descending the slope easily, each with his rifle and his pair of grenades slapping against his field jacket. The morning light was bright already, but the sun was not above the hills yet and a broad shadow stretched across the ravine that separated the two hilltops. Pace followed the contour line toward an outcropping of rock that would give him shelter, while Maguire plunged directly across the undulations of the rough terrain. When he reached a thatch of waist-high brush in the crease of the gully, he stopped and hid. He could count the Chinese, even in their crude camouflage—more than twenty—but he could no longer see the plateau where the wounded GIs lay. He couldn't see the helicopters either, but he could hear them approaching from beyond the hilltop. All at once he felt he'd made a terrible mistake. He'd surrendered his position on high ground and now was below the enemy. They had every advantage. But the high ground hadn't been in rifle range. He caught Pace's eye and waved him on. Pace's reluctance to leave his cover was obvious, but Maguire stared at him until he set out again. They angled up the hill behind the Chinese as the yapping sounds of the choppers grew louder. The Chinese heard the helicopters too, of course, and, obviously hoping to snare one or both of them, they began climbing toward the pinnacle with abandon, no longer creeping stealthily or taking care to crouch. Instead of slaughtering a few wounded, their glory could be the destruction of the dreaded American machines.

Maguire and Pace threw their grenades within seconds of each other. The explosions, coming out of nowhere and without the prelude of the artillery whine, stunned the rearmost Chinese, as if the earth itself had burst against them. The two Americans threw again, and by the time that second pair of grenades exploded, every Red on the hill had stopped. They never expected the enemy from behind.

The grenades killed or wounded a handful and the nearest Chinese took cover. Only those approaching the crest of the hill resumed running and, silhouetted against the sky, they were the ones Maguire and Pace chose as targets. The GIs were riflemen. This was what they'd trained to do, and they concentrated on lining up their sights and squeezing their triggers. They fired successive volleys, and the frontline Chinese began to fall.

A cloud of dust spilled over the ridge; the choppers were landing.

The Chinese patrol was under cover now, and some of its members had begun to fire back at Maguire and Pace, but against the shadow of the valley they presented obscure targets. Nevertheless Maguire fell prone behind a mound of dirt. He replaced the magazine of his carbine and pressed off several quick rounds. When he looked over at Pace it was like seeing a man about to walk off a cliff. Pace was still standing bolt upright and shooting his weapon efficiently, aiming carefully each time he pulled the trigger, as if he were on the firing range. Maguire wanted to yell "Get down!" but Pace wouldn't have heard him. Maguire resumed firing too; it was all he could do. Had Pace snapped? Or was it only his determination to show Maguire that he was not chickenshit? Maguire knew already that the big lunk was going to be hit, and that filled him with nausea and with guilt.

Like an apparition in a cloud the first chopper appeared above the lip of the ridge, lifting off unsteadily in a great roar, but instead of gaining altitude it jerked down along the curve of the hill toward Maguire. The second helicopter swooped up and immediately away.

Now the Chinese all over the hill began firing at the chopper instead of at Maguire and Pace, but the wash from the rotors kicked up a screen of dirt, and the peasant-riflemen were too agitated to fire accurately.

At first Maguire thought the helicopter, erratically dropping toward him from the hilltop, had been hit and was about to crash. But then he realized that its jerkiness was evasion, and that it was coming down to snatch Pace and him up.

Pace was still lost in another time. He had not been hit, though he continued to stand exposed, like a statue. But he was pressing off shot after shot. Maguire took his cue from him. All over the hill the Chinese too were upright, in the open, firing madly in the air, trying to bring down that helicopter. Pace and Maguire picked off one after the other of them. By now more than twenty Reds had been shot and still the brown hill was dotted with them. Maguire's estimate had been off by dozens.

The helicopter swerved and bounced in midair, as if it were being swung on a cable. A soldier was in the open door braced against the hatch frame, clinging with one hand to the lurching machine and, with the other, firing an automatic pistol down at the Chinese.

The chopper dropped dangerously and then hovered right above Pace. Pace reacted to it with shock, as if he'd just awakened. The noise and dust were infernal. Only an act of mind made it possible to see the thing as a rescuer, not monster. The skid-railing was just above his head and he could have grabbed it, but at that moment his back snapped in a sharp arc as he took a bullet. His body jerked again as it took another.

Maguire ran to him.

Unbelievably, gallantly, the helicopter waited.

Pace collapsed in Maguire's arms. That was it.

Maguire looked helplessly up at the man straddling the doorway. Wind tore at him. He was bareheaded and half-bald, naked without his helmet. Perhaps that was why Maguire had not recognized him. He was frantically gesturing with his pistol for Maguire to grab the skid. Only yards separated them.

Maguire's mind slowed down. Why didn't the man in the chopper jump down and help him save Pace? But that was impossible. Still he stared pleadingly up at him. Don't leave us here! He focused on the soldier's breast insignia off which light glanced. The silver cross. The man who'd been firing from the doorway was Father O'Shea.

The irony that his violation—his violence—should have so embodied his dedication stunned Michael. This priest would kill for me!

Michael shook his head and waved them off.

O'Shea was screaming at him, having dropped the gun and cupped his hands around his mouth, as the helicopter began to ascend. In the noise it was impossible to hear what he was saying, but then O'Shea, priest again, blessed him. Absolution. For an instant Maguire's eyes and the priest's met.

Michael told me years later that he felt in Father O'Shea's look an absolute affirmation, what he'd come to call, with Rogers, an unconditional positive regard. Michael might have called it by its other name—love—but his history with Father O'Shea was complicated by then. At that moment, though, he experienced the priest's gaze as if it were his dead father's or God's. The transcendence of that sensation, more than the violence around him, made him certain that he was about to die.

 

The helicopter swooped away, leaving behind in the relative silence only the popping of the Chinese guns.

Even that fell off to nothing as the last echo of the chopper engine faded.

Maguire listened and listened, but to Pace, not the enemy as it closed on him. He pressed the Italian kid against his own breast, the way he had that baby at the bridge, that rabbit in basic. He listened and listened.

He could have sworn he heard Pace speak: "You said you wouldn't let them kill me and I believed you."

But Pace was silence itself.

When his captors jerked Pace's body out of Maguire's arms, he saw a red mark on Pace's face, the impress of Maguire's own dog tag. He had crushed his buddy's face against it, stamping on the poor bastard's forehead for all eternity the negative of the ID number, rank, name, blood type and religious preference of the man who had led him to his death.

When the interrogators asked him their questions over the next thirty-three months, he answered as if he were reading from above the left eye of Lennie Pace: "Private First Class Michael Maguire, U.S. Army 73822.094, O-positive, Catholic."

T
HE
Korean war could have saved us.

Forgive me that fustian pronouncement. The Korean war could have saved us? Saved us from precisely what, pray tell? What a wad of fibrous padding for cracks in the mind that statement is! Indeed. And I apologize. Unfortunately the statement is also true. If we'd learned from it, Korea could have saved us from the moral and political suicide we committed in Vietnam. Will future generations remotely understand what led America to squander her glory, wealth, moral position and the cream of her youth on distant conflicts of no true international significance, and to do so not once but twice? It is stunning to realize that a mere decade separated the ignominious end of the conflict in Korea and the launching of the doomed American effort in Vietnam. Were we asleep all that time?

In a way, yes. My friends and I, like the entire budding intelligentsia, were spellbound by the hocus-pocus of Cold War bombast. We believed that the transcendent political event of the era was the discovery that our leaders had "lost" China. Imagine. Congressmen, senators, diplomats, generals and presidents were regarded as having lost a nation of five hundred million people. As if it were a parking stub. Which of them, after that, would willingly be perceived as participating in the "losing" of anything else? Even Indochina, wherever that was? The nations of the world were like a hoard of marbles. For twenty-five years every president, military man and senior civilian to grace a table in Georgetown had his aggies to protect, his steelies, his walleyes, and his balls.

Now balls we understand about. We males are required, whether by nature or culture, to establish for ourselves and others that we have them. Rites of passage, journeys through the dark forest, Sacraments of Confirmation, Bar Mitzvahs, Eagle Scout ceremonies, fraternity hazing, panty raids, beerblasts—showcases all for two things. Balls. But it isn't enough to demonstrate potency, virility, once, at the beginning of one's manhood. Most of us have to do it again and again. Having established that we have balls, we have to regularly prove that we haven't "lost" them. Like we lost our parking stub or China or the war in Korea.

Unfortunately, by definition, the circumstances in which we must establish such a thing are rarely subject to our control. A bully shoves us in the corridor. A stranger asks our girl to dance. An army crosses a parallel of latitude. The process that ensues—ballbusting—is irrational and often degrading of others, humiliating for oneself and implicitly—here is the irony—emasculating. Like Korea was. Like Vietnam was. Like the behavior of boys on the prowl almost always is. But I am ahead of myself.

What I knew about balls in the autumn of 1953 was that Michael Maguire had them. Jesus, did he have them! He was a goddamn war hero, a repatriated POW, still tall, more erect than ever, as if he'd survived by holding himself rigidly at attention. His picture was in the papers and he was one of a group interviewed on television by Edward R. Murrow. Murrow had approved the Korean war and introduced his guests that night as "young men who had drawn a line not across a peninsula, but across the world."

Michael was thinner than he'd ever been, but not malnourished. He was gaunt, but like an ascetic poet. He had the lean visage everyone wanted in Greenwich Village. My friends there regarded the experience of the veterans as cavalierly as they'regarded their own. I knew better. In the Village all experience was artifice, at the service of impressions to be made, whether on oneself—the Beats—or on others—the College Joes, of whom I was one. But men who'd been at war, men who'd seen violence and awful death at first hand, men who'd killed other men, nobly—these were creatures set apart, young gods to me. And none more so than Michael.

Having distinguished himself in combat he had then withstood pressures of what a phrase of the day tagged the "Red Hell." Unlike others he had not compromised himself before his captors. Only on his return did he learn that he had been, while imprisoned, promoted to sergeant and awarded for actions taken at the Han River bridge the Silver Star, and for actions taken in the hills outside Suwon the Distinguished Service Cross. For conduct while in prison he was awarded the Legion of Merit and two Presidential Unit Citations. He received this news as one chastened. I remember that on the Murrow show, in contrast to his comrades, he displayed a lively graciousness toward the Chinese and generosity toward the Americans whom imprisonment broke. When Murrow asked how he survived the brainwashing he replied that though he was interrogated regularly he was never tortured, and that his impression was that attempts to brainwash footsoldiers like himself were rare. He said that airmen and officers who resisted were the ones who deserved respect because they were the ones the Chinese singled out. When Murrow pressed him, he allowed that he did depend for solace on his Catholic faith and, yes, he supposed that POWs with strongly held beliefs might have had some advantage. Far from torturing him, he said, his captors had permitted him to keep the one possession that mattered to him, a small copy of the New Testament. Murrow asked him to hold it up for the TV audince, but Michael politely refused.