Father O'Shea found him sitting on a campstool outside the quartermaster's tent, futilely trying to warm himself by a small portable kerosine stove. It was late in the afternoon and the crisp blue of the sky was softening. The 3rd Battalion, Maguire's unit, was holding a perimeter position of the makeshift encampment. The regiment, about a thousand men, was dispersed on the four peaks of a hill mass that dominated the main road south. Its mission was to cover the 24th Division's flank while it dug in at Osan. The four hills overlooked the rugged valley that had been cut over eons by the Han, and the regimental patrols were on the alert for signs of enemy activity. Word, though, was that the Chinese had stopped at the river.
What remained of Maguire's platoon had been split up. He, Brown and Pace were assigned to Second Platoon in B-Company, and it was scheduled to go on patrol at dusk. The other members were sleeping or playing cards in their tents. Maguire wanted the fresh air more than he wanted the rest or the warmth.
"Soldier, how are you doing?"
"Fine, Father." Maguire stood up and saluted, but it was clear from the priest's abbreviated return that he needn't have. Father O'Shea's bearing was lackadaisical. Not even his imposing uniform—the helmet with its white cross, the silver cross on his lapels, the major's gold leaves on his shoulders—overcame his air of informality. He pulled up another canvas stool and sat. He extended his gloved hand toward the stove.
Maguire stood awkwardly over him.
"Take your stool, soldier."
"Yes, sir." He sat.
"Cut the 'sir' crap with me, son. You're an Irish lad who ought to know better."
"Sorry, Father." Michael grinned. It came as a strange relief that this priest rejected martial despotism in favor of ecclesiastical.
"Where do you come from?"
"New York, New York, Father. Same as you."
"What parish?"
"Good Shepherd."
"Inwood? Is that right? Monsignor Riordan is an old friend of mine."
"Monsignor Riordan baptized me."
"No wonder you're good." The priest slugged Maguire's shoulder. "I hear you've been working on the railroad."
Maguire didn't react. At mess that noon some of the GIs sang the old folk song when he joined the tray-line, an indirect acknowledgment of what he'd done. It had made him uncomfortable.
When Maguire said nothing the priest was silent too for some moments. Then he said, "Lieutenant Barrett told me about it."
"How is he?"
"He needs to be evacuated. They're hoping for a chopper before we have to move."
"Is he...?"
"He'll pull through. He's one tough soldier."
"I know. We'd still be over there if it wasn't for him. They mobbed us."
"I heard."
Maguire looked up sharply. "Did you hear what he did?"
The chaplain nodded.
Maguire wanted suddenly for the priest to say that what the lieutenant had done, ramming that crowd with the jeep, was all right. But he veered away from that. "How's Jones?"
"He died this morning."
"Oh." Maguire exhaled slowly. It troubled him that he didn't feel more than a vague disappointment at that news. He'd liked Jones, though they'd never talked. He resolved to write his mother. "That's three," he said. "Plus the engineers; how many of them bought it?"
"Four. But Bean's okay. Just a flab-stab. Two other men have wounds that need more attention than they can get out here. Once the chopper comes..."
Maguire grunted and forced the mandatory irreverence of tone into his voice. "Tickets home."
"I guess those Chinese just showed up out of nowhere. Nobody thought they'd be in boats. You did damn well to get that bridge. Otherwise they'd be on us now. They could have eaten the whole division for lunch yesterday."
Maguire leaned forward to fiddle with the flame lever. He was grateful to have the chaplain's company, but he didn't feel like talking. That was why he'd left the tent.
Father O'Shea removed his gloves and offered him a cigarette. When they were both smoking he said, "I just wanted to be sure it wasn't bothering you."
Maguire stared at the cinder of his cigarette. "Shouldn't it?" "It's got to bother a man some, a thing like that, but not so it gets in his way. I wanted to tell you about the principle of double-effect, in case you're interested." He waited for a reaction from Maguire. Emotional numbness was a sign of shock. The lad just worked his cigarette. "Lieutenant Barrett said it was pretty rough."
Maguire nodded.
"In many actions there's the intended good effect and the unintended bad effect. If the intended good effect—say, the blowing up of a strategic bridge—is justifiable, then the unintended bad effect—say, the deaths of civilians—can be considered moral."
Maguire looked directly at the chaplain for the first time. "That's it in a nutshell, eh?"
"You don't seem convinced."
"To tell you the truth, Father, I didn't think about it. Any of it. And I wasn't thinking about it now."
"Just a fighting machine, eh? A burp-gun with legs?"
"Isn't that the point?"
"Hell no! We're Americans, soldier." Father O'Shea instinctively adopted a brisk authority as he spoke now. Nothing irked him more than the kill-and-masturbate mentality of drill instructors, as if that was all soldiering was. He was "one of the guys" until a moment like this, but now he was an oracle. His authority was what rescued men from their confusion. "Americans, you hear me? We think about what we do. We know right from wrong and we stake our lives on the difference. Goddamnit, we bury men in the difference. That's what this war is all about. You want to be a burp-gun with legs, you join the other side. You want to be responsible for your actions, make humane decisions even in the heat of battle, always looking out for your buddies, then stay right where you are."
"I see what you're saying, Father. But I don't think it matters much to the people who got blown up."
"We pray for the dead, son. But we watch out for the living. It sure matters to Lieutenant Barrett. He's damn grateful to you for not leaving him out there."
"I didn't think about that either."
"No blame, no credit, eh?" The chaplain surprised Maguire by grinning at him and putting his hand on his shoulder. "What's your name?"
"Maguire."
"I mean your first name, son."
"Michael."
"The Archangel. The leader of God's army against Lucifer." Maguire laughed.
"Monsignor Riordan christened you with that name? He'll be damn proud when I tell him what you did. And when he tells your folks, imagine how they'll feel."
Michael didn't say that his father was dead. The thought of that unknown ghost filled him, for a change, with calm. He'd scored every basket and lined every outside pitch and caught every buttonhook of his life with one eye on the man who wasn't there, and in our own small world where the legend of his hero father loomed we all knew it. "Go, Michael! Go!" we would cry from the stands as he led our teams to victory, but everyone knew that Michael drove so hard not because of our support but because of his father's absence. How could he earn that long-gone love? That was the void into which O'Shea stepped with his simple affirmation. For the first time in his life, Michael felt his father's presence.
When the priest stood up Maguire asked, "Hey, did you just give me absolution or something?"
"Maybe I did, Michael." The priest muttered a quick blessing and waved his hand over him. And then he reached inside his field jacket and pulled out what Maguire assumed was a pack of cigarettes. Weren't chaplains always giving out cigarettes to people? But it was a book with blue covers, small enough to close inside one hand. The chaplain handed it to him. "Here," he said. "This was my brother's. He was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. I'd like you to have it."
Instinctively Michael removed his gloves. It was the New Testament. He looked up at the priest. Years later, in describing this moment he would take refuge from its emotion in a Woody Allen line: I always carry a bullet i
n my shirt pocket in case someone throws a Bible at me. But at the time he was too moved to speak. The relief he felt came as a shock because he'd had no explicit idea how distressed he'd been. The priest had soothed the orphan-pain in him that was far older than a day. What had happened on the bridge had only uncovered it, and now, with this gift evoking so much—the New Testament, a dead brother, the Battle of the Bulge—he experienced a sense of embrace he'd never felt before. And at last he understood—how he needed this!—why we call them "Father."
That midnight an artillery bombardment began that veterans said was as bad as anything the Germans had ever thrown at the Allies in France. The Americans were pinned by the fire and even the patrols had to stay in their ditches. The frozen earth had resisted their efforts to dig out proper foxholes, but now the men wished they'd stayed with it. The ground on which they flattened themselves reverberated continually as it registered every shell that exploded on those hills. Some soldiers made fists of themselves in their shallow holes. Chunks of dirt and stone-chippings bounced off them endlessly. The noise of the heavy-caliber explosions coming after the piercing approach-whistles was so loud that their ears hurt, and they took to blocking them with the heels of their hands while their fingers pressed the cold metal rims of their helmets. Periodically, even through their gloves, they had to warm their hands, though, by stuffing them into their armpits. But quickly the noise of the bombardment was a worse pain again than frozen fingers. Now and then even that din was surpassed by the shrieking of a man who was hit. It was dangerous to look, for the popping of debris and shrapnel was constant.
It didn't take an Omar Bradley to deduce that the Chinese were advancing across the river valley during the barrage. Every man in the regiment knew that. But the bombardment went on so long—nonstop, all night—that they began to understand its purpose was not merely to cover that advance or even to neutralize their ability through shock, fear and disorientation to resist it when it reached them. The purpose of the aimed fire was to kill them.
The 27th Regiment was under orders to hold its ground, but only long enough to delay the onslaught. The American stand wasn't going to be made in the hills around Suwon, but at Osan. The regiment therefore was to withdraw before actually engaging the Chinese, and it was to link up with the main body of forces twenty miles to the south. But an orderly withdrawal was out of the question until the artillery fire stopped. Even panicked flight would have been impossible. And the artillery fire wasn't going to stop until the Chinese were ready to attack. By then what would anyone be able to do but run?
The terror of that night unhinged more than one man. Lennie Pace was crouched next to Maguire in the same ditch, and when a round landed close enough to singe their clothing, he tried to get out. Maguire and another GI grabbed him just as he was scrambling over the lip of the hole. "Let me go, you fuckers! Let me go!" Because of his size and toughness Pace threw the second soldier aside effortlessly. Maguire slugged him, but the punch seemed only to quicken his belligerence. Pace began to pummel Maguire, but Maguire clung to him. Pace tried to get away and he dragged Maguire with him. "You fucker!" he screamed. "I'll kill you!" Maguire held on until Pace fell into the fresh crater of a 175. It was still warm, but it was deeper and more secure than the ditches the men had dug, which were like shallow graves.
Even in the crater the hysterical soldier continued to slug away. Maguire covered his face and let Pace hit him. Most of the blows were lost in his heavy clothing or against his helmet. Eventually the Italian kid collapsed on top of Maguire. He was weeping. Maguire made no effort to get out from under him, but only closed his arms around Pace and held him. At first he envied him the catharsis, but then he realized that he'd shared it. They both felt purged. The terror of that night, Maguire saw, would be a bond forever.
In the release, the evaporation of tension that followed Pace's outburst, both men settled into a kind of sleep. One hears it said that such a drifting off is not uncommon during prolonged sieges. The psyche has its ways of escape even when the body doesn't. Some Londoners never slept well again after the Blitz ended, but during it, even in the rank discomfort of sewer tunnels, they slept like children. Neither the noise nor the cold, extreme as both were, penetrated the consciousness of either soldier for several hours.
Maguire woke first and he was amazed to realize he had slept. He actually felt a kind of refreshment. The artillery fire was still on, merciless as ever, but he wasn't cold. Pace was still on him, like a blanket. He was snoring lightly.
Maguire didn't move. Beyond Pace's collar, like a dream, he saw the morning star, Venus, hanging in the east above the notch in the hills where the sun would rise soon. Automatically Maguire's hand went to his breast pocket, to touch Father O'Shea's New Testament, as if it was going to save him or already had.
On the roof of his apartment house on Cooper Street, Michael and I had slept out through countless summer nights, though not in each other's arms. Imagine the cries resounding through Inwood of "Fairies! You fucking fairies!" It would have been disgrace enough to have it known that we called the roof our "lone prairie" and pretended that the straining barrel-staved water tank was our Conestoga wagon. When Venus appeared—it was the last star to fade because of course it wasn't really a star but a planet which reflected the coming sun's light instead of getting washed out by it—he always woke up and nudged me. We New York City boys did not take our heavenly bodies for granted. In our pale night sky only the luminaries shone because the dispersed light of the city screened all the ordinary stars and planets out. New York was that way with people too, although we didn't know it yet. Shining in that firmament meant, fortunately, as we would learn much later and separately, either burning to extinction or reflecting the light of some other star.
Venus seemed closer than ever that morning in Korea, and even though the barrage was still on, it seemed to Michael he had already survived it. His lucky star. The night was almost over. And what better omen for the day than the worn little book in his pocket.
The good book. The Bible. The glad tidings of Jesus Christ. Michael was no more religious than any of us, but like us he'd gone to religion class, however automatically, every day of his school life for twelve years. He'd heard the Scriptures read every Sunday and most first Fridays for eighteen. Surely he could remember some proverb, some parable, some saying of Jesus that would help him now.
He squinted at the morning star and a line popped open in his mind like the "Bang" on the flag out of a fake pistol. "He was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower." He had read those words a million times while the priest recited them in Latin; they were from the Last Gospel with which every Mass ended. "A man came, sent by God."
Michael told me over Scotch whiskey many years later that at that moment, half frozen, paralyzed under the weight of a shellshocked soldier in a bomb crater on a desolate hilltop in Korea, he discovered for the first time that he did believe in God. He believed in the Resurrection. "What can I say? I saw His glory." He shrugged and drained his Scotch. "With Him on my side, who can be against me?" In other words, while fifteen thousand Chinese were steadily creeping toward him and his one thousand terrified frozen comrades, Michael Maguire accepted in advance whatever was going to happen to him, not only, as pious assholes were always doing, during the remainder of his life, but—much more difficult—during that very day. It was as if he knew how decisive it would be. I would wish many years later that he'd been killed.
The withdrawal began at dawn. Because artillery shells were still falling, though intermittently now, it was a retreat through a nightmare landscape, but the men of the 27th Infantry Regiment were so relieved to have their dreamless terror over that they pushed out energetically. Who wanted to wait for the Chinese charge?
It was impossible to assemble a proper convoy. The regiment's vehicles, marshaled along the main road, had been sitting ducks all night and the artillery had knocked most of them out. That meant forced ma
rch, which posed a heart-wrenching problem for the colonel in command: the wounded would have to be left behind. As of dawn, counting the casualties of the night shelling and those from the incident at the bridge two days before, there were fourteen of them. Two Medevac choppers had been promised the day before, but they couldn't come in during the heaviest bombardment. Though now it had eased, there was still no sign of them. It made no sense to leave behind a unit of healthy soldiers to defend the wounded until the helicopters arrived, because each aircraft could carry out only seven men. The fourteen, plus the medic, was stretching it already, and when the chaplain volunteered to stay behind, the colonel could not refuse. He said, "Take off your insignia, Father, and make sure Lieutenant Barrett isn't wearing his bars either."
Father O'Shea wasn't stupid. He wasn't going to fall into Chinese hands with gold leafs on his lapels. But he kept his crosses, on his helmet and his breast.
Word passed through the regiment quickly both that the wounded were being left behind and that the chaplain was staying with them. When Maguire heard it, he was just tying the flaps of the radio case that he and Pace had been assigned to carry. He looked up at the GI who'd told him, but he was gone already, scurrying down the side of the hill. He looked at Pace. "We can't just leave them here!"
"What the fuck, Maguire! What can we do?"
Maguire snatched up his M-i and climbed quickly to the top of the hill. The wounded men were huddled on a level spot near the top of the next hill. Even without binoculars he could see Father O'Shea holding a man in his arms. They knew what was happening. Maguire searched the sky above the windswept hills, looking for the choppers. No sign of them. In the distance of the valley below, the figures of men jammed the roads, but these were not refugees. It was the massing army of the Chinese peasant-riflemen. He scanned the spiny terrain of the nearby slopes, but there was no sign of the enemy there yet.
A round landed in the gully between the hill on which he stood and the one where the wounded lay. Maguire didn't flinch. After the night, the occasional shell now seemed benign. He squinted, trying to make out Lieutenant Barrett.
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