Not quite all. Also they perceive; perhaps they perceive, despite their numbness, with special clarity. Maguire saw the heads of Koreans cracked open like melons, gray matter spurting out like vegetable pulp and seeds, as if a pumpkin truck spilled right in front of him. He saw bodies flung through the air jerkily, limbs flailing like swingles, faces crushed against chests or against backs; bodies sprawling on top of each other, then being hideously bulldozed as the momentum of the jeep carried it fully through the line. A score of people were mauled, a dozen horribly killed, but the shock of violence—the wave it made—was felt, could be seen to be felt, all through the dense crowd. The grotesque sight of those split skulls was fixed in Maguire's mind and would always dominate his memory of that day. The memory would make him sick. But he would also always remember that it worked. Lieutenant Barrett had stormed the glacier and stopped it.
Tucci was standing in the jeep firing the submachine gun above the heads of the people. The staccato of his weapon gave perfect expression to the violent fury that always follows the release from danger. The Koreans, hunched over, protecting their heads, had lost their impetus. The GIs were in charge again. Maguire and the others formed ranks in front of and alongside the jeep. They stood with their weapons cocked, a more formidable blockade than ever.
"Cease fire, Tucci!" Lieutenant Barrett called.
When Tucci released the trigger a shocking silence fell. The groans of the wounded Koreans could be heard and also the distant booming of artillery, but still there was silence.
"Sergeant! Is everyone accounted for?"
"Yes, sir!"
"What about Bean?"
"Here, sir!"
"Tell these people anyone who moves will be shot!"
Sergeant Stone rattled off a few words in the strange language. The Koreans gave no sign they knew they were being addressed.
"That's you, Tucci," Lieutenant Barrett ordered. "Shoot them if they move. Don't wait for me to tell you."
"Yes, sir." Tucci, poised above the scene like the statue of a hero, was not as cool as he looked. He had never fired the submachine gun in action before.
Barrett shut the jeep engine off and hopped down. "Maguire! Brown! Let's help these people!"
They laid their rifles aside and knelt, trying to pull the tangled bodies out from under the front bumper of the jeep. Bodies were piled there three and four deep, like, Maguire thought, in a concentration camp. At first none seemed alive, but as they pulled, some victims began to move. The cries grew louder. The vehicle had come to rest right on the railroad tracks. One poor bastard's head was crushed against the rail.
Maguire retched, but he only turned his head aside. He, Brown and the lieutenant worked steadily to free the people, to drag the corpses away and to try to comfort the ones who were alive.
One little girl, a shattered but howling figurine, was strapped to her dead mother's back. Her mother's neck was broken, and her expressionless face was perversely askew on her shoulders. Maguire freed the girl, who was barely more than an infant. When he stood up with her he found himself facing Lieutenant Barrett. The officer seemed suddenly horrified. "Jesus Christ," he whispered while staring at the bawling child in Maguire's arms. "What have I done?"
Maguire buried the baby's face against his chest. It was how he'd held that rabbit. He wanted to say, "We all did it, Lieutenant," but he couldn't.
The crowd was still at bay and the bridge was clear when the train arrived. It pulled into view behind the scolding sound of its own engine and Maguire wanted to feel relief, but he had maintained his nerve up to then only by blanking out his ability to feel anything. He had spent the time trying to comfort the injured civilians, applying first aid, wrapping them in GI blankets, clearing stones from under them, wiping their faces. He realized that he'd begun to imitate their stoicism.
He had to remind himself that now he was going to leave. The train had come, in a way, for him.
"Move that jeep!"
Maguire looked around to see who Lieutenant Barrett was addressing, but he was nearer to the jeep than anyone. It was still blocking the track, and the engine was steaming steadily closer. He hopped aboard the jeep, pushed the ignition button, and fiddled with the gear stick until he found reverse. He had to gas the engine to get the wheels over the iron rail. As he backed away from the track he continued to gun it instead of stopping; suddenly he knew that he wanted only to get away. He saw what he had in common with those Koreans, not stoicism, but heart only for escape. He careened backward in that jeep toward the riverbank, as if escape was waiting for him there.
Maguire would hear it said later that some men were made more acutely conscious by the bleak experiences of war, and it was true that his ability to see and smell and hear the minutiae of violence was heightened. But his ability to organize his perceptions into a coherent whole in which he was more than a detached observer abandoned him utterly. As far as he could recall he was barely aware throughout that episode of his own choices or even of his own reactions. It was a mad thing to do, for example, to send that jeep shooting off the edge of the cliff. It tumbled down the hundred feet of rocky incline and burst into flames just before it plunged through the ice. The gasoline fire was extinguished as quickly as it had ignited.
And Maguire, as if he'd practiced for a stunt show, had leapt free at the last instant, landed in a crouch facing the river, and watched until the jeep disappeared under a plume of steam. "Fucking thing," he said.
"Maguire! Maguire!"
The engine and tender were just crossing onto the bridge. The platoon was scrambling aboard. Sergeant Stone was waving Maguire's M-i and calling his name, alarmed that he was being left behind.
Maguire had to run. The train was moving at a clip and he would not have made it if Brown and Pace hadn't pulled him aboard. He collapsed on the iron platform and then at last, leaving that nightmare behind, felt the first hint of relief.
But it was premature.
"Oh fuck!" O'Hara cried. "Oh Jesus! Fuck!"
The others saw what he saw. The wall of refugees had broken and they were rushing onto the bridge behind the train. Their grim stoicism was gone. The crowd of old men, women, boys and girls which had not moved for most of an hour was now a charging infantry, bellowing insanely as it stormed after them. Fatalistic Orientals? Shock victims? A defeated populace? Resigned to wait for its new masters? None of these. They were like the notorious primitive armies of Sun Tsu, which depended less on weapons than on dreadful masks and frightening noises. But a mob is not an army. It is moved not by discipline but by emotion. The Koreans were one creature now, an incarnation of feeling that went beyond fear or rage into something wholly other, something infinite. Even from a distance Maguire could sense that now their energy was going to overwhelm any obstacle they met, and to their horror the GIs realized that the refugees were catching up with them.
"Fix bayonets!" Lieutenant Barrett ordered.
It was difficult to do it on the jolting train, but no one hesitated. In a moment all seven riflemen had the long blades fixed to the barrels of their guns, and Tucci had the safety off the Browning. No one, not Maguire certainly, allowed qualms to surface. The Koreans were no longer old men and women, no longer children. They were an enemy whom the odds favored.
A boy of about twelve was the first to catch the train. He was reaching for the rail when Pace poised to harpoon him, but at that moment the train picked up speed and a gap opened between the boy and Pace's bayonet.
The crowd kept coming even though the train was leaving them behind.
But just as it seemed safe again, the train slowed. Maguire had forgotten that it was going to stop in the middle of the bridge.
The iron wheels began to screech, and steam hissed out from the undercarriage.
And the refugees began to close the distance. The train jolted to a stop.
"Get ready!" Lieutenant Barrett ordered.
Maguire couldn't believe what they were about to do. Tucci raised his submachine
gun, and the other soldiers aimed their rifles. Maguire tried to find a middle-aged man to aim at, but all he saw were Pappa-sans and children. "Go back!" he screamed suddenly. "Go back!" Sergeant Stone started screaming at them in Korean, and the other GIs chorused, "Go back! Go back!"
Tucci fired into the crowd, and the front rank fell. Immediately there was a pileup as the onrush continued. The bodies of the Koreans, even the fallen ones, writhed as Tucci's bullets pumped into them.
Maguire couldn't tell whether the other soldiers were firing. He assumed later that he was himself firing, but he was never certain that he hadn't simply frozen while the merciless staccato went on around him. He wished desperately that the rabble-refugees had been a cavalry charging so that he could have aimed his gun at horses.
By the time Lieutenant Barrett gave the order to fall back, the engineers had already abandoned the train. Stringing detonating wire behind them, they were rapidly crossing toward the shore, and it was with infinite relief that the platoon took out after them.
It was impossible to run efficiently on the railroad ties, and the men stumbled constantly.
When Sully fell ahead of him, Maguire assumed he'd only tripped. He stopped to help him. Sully looked up with blood gushing out of a hole below his ear, then he collapsed, obviously dead.
Bullets pinged off the ironwork of the bridge.
Maguire was the first to see the flotilla of small boats in the river below. The channel between the iced margins was clotted with vessels. Scores of soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms were shooting at the Americans from the decks and superstructures of dozens of fishing boats and junks. "Chinese!" he screamed. "Chinese!" Some of the boats were already alongside the pilings of the bridge. The Chinese were grappling their way up.
The GIs ran even faster. The railroad ties were suddenly no obstacle.
Bean was shot. Lieutenant Barrett stopped for him, but then he fell too, clutching his chest.
Eddie Brown and Maguire scooped the officer up and, each taking an arm, carried him along. O'Hara and Pace started to pick up Bean, but he waved them off and they left him.
Tucci fired his submachine gun in a frenzy, and only then did Maguire realize that a pair of Chinese soldiers had just climbed over the railing right in front of them. The Chinese fell dead.
Tucci, Pace and O'Hara ran swiftly ahead. Fifty yards from the riverbank Maguire and Brown with the lieutenant between them came upon the corpses of the two engineers who had been stringing the detonation wire. One of them had his arms around the black plunger-box. The other members of the platoon mustn't have realized what it was because they'd run right by.
"Get it!" Lieutenant Barrett ordered. "Leave me and get that plunger!"
"No, sir," Maguire said. "We're getting you out of here."
"Fuck you, Maguire!" The lieutenant wrenched himself out of their arms and fell violently to the track. His blood had soaked even through the heavy winter jacket, turning the olive-green to black. He looked desperately at Maguire. "You've got to get off the bridge and blow it!"
Maguire looked behind him expecting to see the Chinese soldiers, but the wave of Korean refugees, having swarmed over and around the halted train, was rushing at them again. The fucking refugees! They'd overrun the Chinese too!
Eddie Brown picked up the wire-wheel and began to string it out, moving backward toward the shore. Maguire picked up the plunger-box with one hand and with the other hoisted Barrett over his shoulder. He ran as well as he could. He and Brown reached the far end of the bridge at the same time. Tucci was there and once his buddies were clear he began firing back into the onrushing refugees again.
It took several moments for Brown to cut and attach the electrical wire to the terminal in the detonator. When it was ready he looked up at Maguire. "Okay!"
Maguire reached over and grabbed Tucci. "Stop firing! Stop firing!"
There was no need now. Let the poor bastards make it, a few of them anyway.
Tucci obeyed Maguire. He stared at him dumbly. Tears stained his face. He'd been weeping all the while. He'd also wet himself.
Maguire felt a shocking sense of control. It had all somehow come down to him. When the first set of refugees rushed past him off the bridge, a token quota of survivors, he pushed the plunger without hesitating.
For an instant, long enough to turn toward the bridge but not to see the faces, thank God, of the Koreans who hadn't quite made it, there was no explosion. Then it came as a simple loud clap, followed by a muffled dull roar. The earth of the riverbank registered the shock. It moved.
The iron girders of the bridge's three central spans were tossed into the air, along with mammoth fragments of the locomotive and millions of splinters of metal and wood. The dust of tons of enginecinder and the smoke from the huge combustion billowed. Yet through that chaos of debris and noise Maguire swore that he saw severed limbs arching through the air and heard the cries of babies.
"Hey, hey, LBJ!..." At his side in demonstrations years later I was always aware of Michael's refusal to utter such taunts. "...how many kids did you kill today?"
FOUR
WHILE Michael went to Korea, I went to college. I hastily set about putting away, in Saint Paul's phrase, the things of a child, including, I'd have said with worldly relish, the phrases of Saint Paul. The idea—and it is the perennial idea of freshmen, one of the few they can be counted on to grasp—was to reinvent one's personality. For a punk from Inwood newly arrived at NYU in Greenwich Village, the quickest way to do that was to claim the fiercely romantic identity of the fallen-away Catholic. That meant having to learn at once to disdain above all others the figure of the Roman Catholic priest, that embodiment of smug sterility and intellectual vacuity.
And then, of course, almost immediately, I fell under the spell of Gerard Manley Hopkins. My attraction to him would be permanent and his aesthetic would even be the subject years later of my dissertation—"Instress and Inscape; the Diction of G. M. Hopkins." In those days it embarrassed me, as I was sure it did his Balliol friends, that he'd become a Catholic and a priest. I agreed with critics who asserted that his religious vocation had come at the expense of his literary one. What a waste! we said as if we were horny schoolgirls discussing the handsome curate. If Hopkins hadn't been a priest, we agreed in every seminar, he'd have been a lesser great poet instead of—how these distinctions mattered!—a great lesser one. When he called himself "Time's eunuch" we knew he was bewailing the mistake he'd made, the trick God played on him.
Now I understand that of course his priesthood was precisely what drew me to him. For my kind the priest is the linchpin of belief. In all my religious phases—whether I was fallen away, newly found or only, in current argot, user-friendly—priests have been at the center of my consciousness, and that's part of what's made me Catholic.
And priests, as you know already, will be at the center of this narrative.
None more so, beginning in Korea, than Tim O'Shea.
Father Timothy O'Shea—he answered neither to "Padre" nor to "Major"—was born in Tipperary. His parents emigrated when he was a child and he grew up to become a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He was trained in philosophy to be a seminary professor. Though overage he had entered the army with Cardinal Spellman's blessing when his brother Ned was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. It was an impulse born of grief and patriotism and also of guilt at his exemption, but he never served with a combat unit during World War Two. Perhaps that's why he felt obliged to stay in even when the war ended. After two tours at stateside VA hospitals he'd hated to admit it but he welcomed this new war, and he'd had Spellman pull strings for his assignment to the 27th Infantry in Korea.
Father O'Shea wanted to be with lads in their extremity, the way he hoped someone had been with Ned in his. He wasn't prepared to find that at the front most GIs ignored him and what the commanders expected of him was help with the USO tours. Still, he had not adopted that ingratiating and implicitly apologetic manner typical of military cle
rgymen, as if they were by virtue of their calling not quite manly enough to keep company with soldiers. Father O'Shea knew what contribution he had to make, even if the men didn't. An army's effectiveness depends most on the ability of its members to believe in the justice of its cause. Since Augustine and Thomas, the Church had considered every implication of each question concerned with that very element of warfare. Once the morality of going to war (jus ad bellum) had been established, then participation in war (jus in bello) could be encouraged. Once the criteria of the Just War Principle had been met, in other words, it was important that the warriors knew it. Father O'Shea would hold your hand if you wanted, but mostly he wanted to help you think about what you were doing on a bleak spit of land between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. He wanted to help you do your grim work there as well as possible, and he wanted you to be proud of yourself for doing it. He resented the commanders who required him to arrange the USO events, but in fact he epitomized what they wanted from their chaplains. He was the best goddamn morale officer in Korea.
"God," he said, quoting Emerson's line as a motto, "will not have His work made manifest by cowards."
Most vocations to the priesthood are inspired ultimately by the example of another priest. The priests of Good Shepherd parish in Inwood had a reputation, as a group, for kindness, and the junior curate was widely considered to be terrific with kids, but the parish clergy had made no more overt impression on Michael than they had on me. Priests had certainly been a fixed part of his world—his mother was a volunteer at the rectory—but they were far less central to it than, for example, coaches had been. He was very young when his father was killed, or it might have been different. Until Korea he'd never needed a priest for more than encouragement from the bench at basketball games.
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