September Song

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “April Rosemary,” Chuck had said to her, “you’re going off to college next year. We will have to trust in your taste and your judgment and in the values we taught you. There’s no point at this stage in trying to control your life. We trust you now!”

  She hugged us both and thanked us and promised that we would never regret our trust. As it was she hung around with a crowd of kids, like Carlotta, who believed in getting a good night’s sleep so they could play tennis, golf, and softball—and water-ski every day the Lake was moderately calm.

  She was now able to give me a strong match on the tennis court and beat her father most of the time, though I think he let her win.

  I also noted, I remember, with some desire to be able to deny it, the passage of the years. Next year my husband would be forty and I would be thirty-seven. Half our lives already gone.

  Life is so short.

  1968

  10

  In late October of 1967 Chuck began to talk about going to Vietnam. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. I always thought he would. My stomach churned. Still, I said the right thing.

  “I can understand that you feel you should.”

  I had truly become the sensitive sympathetic wife, one who almost but didn’t quite say, “You damn fool, you’re out of your mind, you should get a therapist too.”

  Antiwar protests were increasing at that time, though they were still smaller and less dramatic than they would become in the near future. April Rosemary, who not so long ago had felt that we were embarrassing her by marching at Selma, was now burning the American flag, and chanting, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!”

  “What’s the matter with Sis, Mom?” Kevin asked me, a puzzled frown on his Fenian face.

  “She’s worried about all the Vietnamese who are being killed by our bombs.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “I guess that’s worth worrying about … Will her protest marches end the war?”

  “I don’t think so. She figures that she has to do something.”

  He nodded again.

  “Like you and Dad did when we went to Germany?”

  “Something like that.”

  And something very different. We were carrying out government policy in the hope of making the world a better place. Our daughter was opposing government policy in the hope of keeping the world from becoming a worse place.

  Both generations wasting their time?

  We went to a meeting of “concerned Catholics” at Rosary College. It was a strange group, a dozen or so people, older Catholic liberals of The Commonweal variety, a couple of union types, a few CFM people, and some very angry nuns in lay garb. Well, the kind of garb nuns would wear and no laywoman would be seen dead in: ill-fitting pantsuits and “sensible” shoes which enabled them to feel that they were radical while enjoying the moral advantages nuns still enjoyed over most Catholic laypeople.

  The nun in charge, a lean angular woman with thin lips and hard eyes, took an immediate dislike to me, too well dressed, too good looking. Spoiled Oak Park matron.

  “We have the luxury of sitting here in a safe room in an affluent suburb,” she began, “while black people are dying on the streets of Chicago.”

  Instantly I became Rosemarie the Obnoxious from my days at Trinity High School. Nuns do that to me. Well, to be fair, some nuns.

  “I thought this meeting was supposed to be about the war.”

  My damn husband began to grin. He knew what was about to happen and settled back to enjoy it.

  “Only someone who does not read the newspapers can deceive herself into thinking that the genocide in Vietnam and the genocide in Chicago are not the same thing.”

  “A rather complex sentence, Sister. You mean the war and the racial injustice in the city are the same thing?”

  “What have you ever done to fight racial injustice?” she demanded.

  “I don’t think we solve anything by conflating issues which we ought to keep distinct,” I replied.

  Chucky Ducky, the bastard, sniggered at the word “conflating.”

  “You didn’t answer my question!”

  The group was getting restless. Instead of getting on with the business of figuring out how we were to end the war, we were letting two foolish women fight.

  “Suppose you tell me what you’ve been doing, Sister.”

  They’re always suckers for that question.

  “I’ve been teaching racial justice in class, I march in protests, I sat down in the federal building, I’ve attended racial justice meetings, I’m advocating more black students in the college …”

  “I’m impressed, Sister, I really am.”

  God forgive me for setting her up. God forgive my husband for the leprechaun gleam in his gorgeous blue eyes.

  “And what have you done?”

  “Not much since I crossed the bridge at Selma with Dr. King.”

  Dead silence.

  Then the damnable blue-eyed husband joined the fray. “It wasn’t really all that dangerous, except when the snipers shot at us on the road back to Selma from Montgomery.”

  The subject promptly changed to the war.

  I don’t know why I have this terrible aversion to priests and nuns. Perhaps it is their easy assumption that they are moral people and have the proper moral answers to all questions and that therefore it is their right and obligation to impose morality on the rest of us. I don’t include John Raven or my brother-in-law in this condemnation or lots of other priests and nuns. I just seem to attract the losers. Ed O‘Malley was undoubtedly at a similar peace meeting that night but with a good deal of doubt because the O’Malleys turn into pragmatists eventually. At that thought I said a prayer for my April Rosemary that she would eventually discover pragmatism.

  The group at Rosary that night decided that the only way to end it was to dump LBJ in the election which was two years away.

  “I quite agree,” my husband continued to muddy the waters, behavior to which he was addicted in these circumstances. “Dick Nixon is the man to bring us peace.”

  The patent absurdity of such an assertion escaped no one. Then another nun observed, “I don’t see any difference between him and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.”

  We would hear similar idiocy—and not just from priests and nuns—in the new year.

  “That’s right,” Chucky agreed, “they’re all running-dog capitalists.”

  We stopped at Petersen’s on the way home. Chucky Ducky never put on weight. I was still under Maggie Ward’s mandate to keep my poundage at the level she deemed appropriate.

  We didn’t sing that night.

  “Silly people,” I said.

  “They mean well. They want to do something about the war. I don’t question their frustration. We have to face the fact that we live in a Greek tragedy and are powerless.”

  “Too bad Bundy and McNamara did not leave with a noisy protest.”

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  His hand caressed my thigh under my light autumn dress. It was not the first time he had engaged in such a maneuver in Petersen’s. I sighed contentedly. It was good to have a husband who was fixated on your body, even if it were still a few pounds underweight.

  “Who’s left?”

  “Townsend Hoopes, John McNaughton among the good guys. Rusk, Rostow, the military people among the bad guys. Lyndon never did follow my advice to bring in a bunch of West Texas sheriffs.”

  Dean Rusk and Walt Whitman Rostow were ardent cold warriors.

  “How will it end, Chuck?”

  “I said ten years, Rosemarie,” his creeping fingers paused. “Nineteen seventy-five. Seven more years to go. People will finally turn against it. Well-meaning protesters like our daughter might prolong it a little.”

  “Our boys … They’ll all be draft age …”

  “I know. I keep asking myself what I can do … I hate panty hose by the way.”

  “So do all men. They’ll just have to get used to them. I never like garter
s scratching … Chucky! That’s a little too far!”

  He did not desist, however. Nor was I of a mind to stop him. Sex defies death, as I tried to say in one of my secret stories. We faced death in our family. So we would have to make love to defy it—even if the threat seemed distant.

  “Do you think I ought to go over there for a week or two and take some pictures? Or do people see it every night on television?”

  Dear God in heaven!

  “They would see it differently in your work, Chuck. More striking than any TV clip.”

  Later on, I wondered if I had actually spoken the truth under such circumstances. I had of course. All the more need to make love, passionate, violent love, the kind of love which thumbed its nose at death.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

  “If you continue what you’re doing, I won’t be able to think about anything.”

  “That’s the general idea—finish your malt!”

  “No seconds tonight? Oh … I guess not!”

  We hurried home on the leaf-strewn sidewalk, slipped quietly up the stairs, and continued our passionate amusements in the safety of our bedroom.

  We defied death all right. Spectacularly.

  For the time being.

  There were a lot more such exhausting nights, especially after December 1, when we announced the plan to the family. He would fly over after Christmas and be back at the latest by January 15. He wouldn’t go anywhere near combat areas like Khe Sanh, where the Vietcong had surrounded the Marines just as they had the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where the French were finally defeated in Vietnam.

  Chuck probably meant the promise when he made it.

  At first the family was quiet, accepting my acceptance of the harebrained scheme. Then April Rosemary began the discussion.

  “Why do you have to go, Daddy?”

  “Why do you have to go on protest marches?”

  “Yes, but you already protested when you quit the administration and told the truth in that article in the New York Times.”

  So, the little brat remembered all that.

  “I think my pictures will have more impact than the clips on television. The public is inured to them now.”

  “I’m sure they will,” Kevin agreed. “But haven’t you done enough?”

  “Sometimes you have to do more than enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re Catholics.”

  That seemed to settle that.

  “We’ll go to Mass and Communion every day,” Jimmy promised, “until you come back, won’t we, Mommy?”

  “You bet.”

  “It’s a stupid war,” Seano insisted, “isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Very stupid.”

  “Promise you’ll be careful.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  I wished he hadn’t said that.

  We resolved that the trip would not ruin our Christmas. At the family party, Moire produced and directed a play for the whole sprawling O’Malley clan. It wasn’t clear what it was about, but it was very funny.

  At the end, she said, “We all know Daddy will come home safe and sound.”

  She had mentioned the unmentionable, doubtless quoting either me or the good April. We quickly changed the subject.

  I wished I was as sure as she was.

  It was silly, of course. Reporters, diplomats, movie and music stars had been through Saigon and Danang and Hue and none of them were casualties.

  Charles Cronin O’Malley, however, had a certain genius for getting into trouble.

  His trip, on a TWA commercial flight was delayed several times. Chuck finally arrived in Saigon on January 30, 1968, the day before the Vietcong violated their pledge of a cease fire for the Chinese New Year and threw almost a hundred thousand troops into a fierce attack on the cities of Vietnam. Later it would turn out that they expected that this offensive would end the war. They believed that the local populations of the city would rise to welcome them.

  General Westmorland, the commander of the American forces, had told NBC that the Vietcong would launch an offensive at Tet. American intelligence knew it was coming. However, our officers were totally unprepared for a direct attack on Saigon and on the American Embassy, where my husband was spending his first night “in country.”

  11

  Saigon

  February 3, 1968

  Rosemarie my darling,

  I figured it would be easier for both of us if I recorded my letters on a tape cassette and sent them off to you, so you can tell that I’m in good shape, save today for the usual jet lag.

  You know from my phone call earlier that I’m fine and utterly unfazed by arriving in the midst of a Vietcong offensive. It’s a disturbance on the tape medium that makes it sound like I’m still scared.

  I promised to stay away from danger. Danger, however, came to me. I’m now the first O’Malley in several generations of uniform-wearing to find myself in combat. As you have doubtless known for a long time, I’m a coward.

  I endured a tedious conversation with the Ambassador when I arrived here, a man who is not very bright and perhaps a drunk. He called me Ambassador O’Malley all evening. I think he suspects that I may take his place. He informed me that there “was light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “We are winning the war,” he said. “We’ve killed two hundred thousand of them in the last year with negligible losses of our own.”

  “How many young men come of age in North Vietnam every year?”

  “About two hundred thousand … However, no nation can afford to lose a cohort every year.”

  “If they’re Communists, they can.”

  “The enemy is too weak now to mount a major offensive. It’s just a matter of time.”

  I finally went to bed and sank immediately into a deep sleep.

  I woke up in the morning to hear gunfire outside my window. Nightmare I thought. I opened the drapes and peeked out the window. In the bright sunshine people were shooting at one another on the Embassy grounds just one floor below me. I closed the drapes quickly.

  How nice of good old Uncle Ho to arrange a welcome party for Staff Sergeant Charles C. O’Malley

  I guarantee you, Rosemarie, that I was in a daze. I firmly believed that it was a nightmare caused by jet lag. I didn’t know what I was doing. So I threw on some clothes, grabbed Trudi’s camera, and ran out into the corridor. There were a lot of people, military and civilians, running around like the proverbial headless chickens.

  A women screamed that the Vietcong were everywhere. A man in Marine fatigues with a star on his shoulder shouted that the compound had been penetrated. A couple of grim-faced soldiers rushed down the corridor with automatic weapons in their hands.

  I had held one of those in my own hands a couple of decades ago, but had never actually fired one.

  It was, I thought, a dazzling nightmare. I figured that I should walk around and find a safe place, preferably in the company of a platoon of the United States Marines. Having served in the Army, I didn’t trust the Army one bit.

  I walked down a couple of flights of stairs, into a kind of subbasement where I discovered a lot of communications equipment which had been abandoned. I knew then that it was a nightmare. We didn’t abandon our precious technology, did we? Besides, how could an army that had lost two hundred thousand men break into the Embassy of the United States of America?

  So I opened the door of the communications room and wandered down an equally empty corridor. I opened the door and found myself facing, maybe ten yards away, a wide-eyed Vietnamese lad, maybe Seano’s age, with an AK-47 in his arm. Since we don’t issue AK-47s, I figured he was one of theirs.

  I remembered one of my basic rules of military life: when someone points a gun at you, fall on your face. I took the kid’s picture as I went down. A burst of bees flew over my head. Then an M-1 rifle chattered in one of the offices which lined the corridor and the kid’s head exploded.

&nb
sp; Eternal rest, I said, and then I could not remember what came next.

  A couple of more Vietnamese kids with AK-47s rushed through the door at the other end of the corridor maybe twenty yards away. Their eyes were wide-open and staring crazily. Drugged, I thought as I fired away with my Leica.

  I was lying flat on my face in the darkness of the corridor I had entered from. The Vietcong were charging in from the bright sunlight outside. They couldn’t possibly see me. One of them lifted a satchel charge as if to throw it. Before he could throw it, however, he was blown back out into the compound by a volley of M-1 fire.

  The explosive detonated outside in the yard of the Embassy compound. I caught the blast with the last shot of Tri-X in the Leica. I hardly noticed the sound of the blast. My ears stopped ringing only a couple of hours ago.

  No one stirred in the corridor. Then a Marine carefully peaked around the corner of one of the office doors.

  “Sappers,” he said.

  Carefully, his back against the wall of the corridor, which had been warped by the force of the blast, he eased toward the door, covered by several men with their M-1s at the ready.

  Quickly he glanced out and then pulled his head back in.

  “Sergeant, phone those idiots upstairs and tell them that we have repelled a wave of sappers who attempted to attack our communications facility. The charge they may have heard exploded harmlessly in the yard of the compound. They may want to send down a few more Marines.”

  “Yes, SIR,” said a voice in one of the offices.

  “Tell them no Marine casualties.”

  “YES, sir!”

  I reloaded the Lecia, said a prayer of gratitude to every saint who might have been involved, and also a prayer for you and Trudi and pondered my next move.

  A hasty redeployment, I decided.

  I had now decided that it was most improbable that I was in a nightmare. Well, it was a nightmare all right, only it had not come from my unconscious.

  I noticed the bits of the poor kid’s brains and quietly vomited behind the door. Then I heard men thundering into the communications room. More Marines.