Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  To the right were the tennis courts, half a dozen of them, all clay, brilliant orange, and all in use. Other players sat at tables on the terraced lawn, watching. Everyone was dressed in white. To the left was a large swimming pool. Michael's eye went immediately to a pair of bikini-clad colonistes who sat on the near edge talking loudly in French. There were Vietnamese women, also in bikinis, less voluptuously endowed, but with long gleaming black hair that they displayed by tossing their heads. Beyond the pool was the awning-covered café leading into the maison. Men in white linen suits sat at tables with tall drinks in front of them, watching the jeunes filies en fleur.

  Howe led the way toward the courts. "We're up," he said, as a doubles match ended. Michael felt a rush of anxiety as he unbolted the racket brace. Tennis was one of the games seminarians mastered, but he'd never played anyone in white before. Suddenly he realized he had no standards. How good had the guys in the sem been? How good was he? Michael had an athlete's pride. He did not want to be humiliated. It was bad enough that when he passed the players who were leaving the court they cast disapproving glances at his shoes. When he looked down he saw that the tread of his soles, a pattern of circles and triangles, was clearly imprinted in the clay. Oh, Christ!

  During the warm-up hitting, when the spectators sized up newcomers, Michael's timing, naturally, was completely off. He missed shot after shot or sent them looping into adjoining courts. Howe had the smooth, steady stroke of someone who'd had his lessons early; by comparison Michael was a flailer. He knew he was already the perfect image of a fool. The perfect image, in this world, he thought, of a Catholic priest.

  It took him most of the first set, which went all too quickly, to realize what was wrong. He'd played his tennis on all-purpose seminary courts, asphalt, never clay. On asphalt the ball sizzled, skipping across the surface, and Michael had developed a style that depended on speed and power. But the ball positively died on clay, and slow, careful moves, accurate placement and finesse were what counted. Michael consciously adjusted, and began to play better. He lost the second set, but not as badly. And by the third he realized that the spectators who'd dismissed their match earlier were watching intently. Michael matched Howe point for point and in the eighth game broke his serve. He won 6–4. When they shook hands at the net, Michael realized that Howe was shocked. Howe was embarrassed.

  When they left the court, attendants had to come to repair the damage Michael's shoes had done.

  They crossed the terraced lawn, went by the pool and took a table in the café under the awning. They complimented each other on the game. Howe said they were well matched and should play regularly. Michael promised to get the right shoes and they both laughed. They ordered drinks. Howe asked the waiter to bring them towels.

  "So how has it been going, Father?"

  Michael shrugged. "Pretty good. I've been learning my way around. We have a new center in Bien Hoa. I've been trying to help with that."

  "Good." Howe smiled formally, then he wiped perspiration from his face and glanced around. Where were the damn towels?

  Michael said, "I'm sorry I haven't been able to arrange your meeting with the archbishop. He hasn't even deigned to see me yet. I wouldn't say he's overjoyed at my being here."

  Howe nodded. "He's no dummy. He knows you're one guy who could cause him trouble."

  The waiter delivered the towels before Michael answered. He wanted to say, I didn't come here to cause anybody trouble. He didn't like the way Howe took it for granted that he shared his disdain for the archbishop.

  They wiped their faces and their necks.

  Michael said, "I visited an orphanage in Can Lo where the nuns and priests sleep on stone floors so that the children can have the beds."

  Howe looked up at him sharply. "Why do you tell me that?" Michael shrugged. "I was moved by it. There are dedicated priests and nuns in this country."

  "I know that." Howe stared at Michael, making it obvious that he did not want his criticism of Thuc and Diem and Nhu reduced to primitive anti-Catholicism. "Hey, look," he said, "we can go around in circles, me saying the Catholics are bad, you saying they're good. So what? You know what my problem is. It's a Buddhist country."

  The waiter interrupted again, this time with their drinks. Howe thanked him easily. Unlike Michael, he took the man's servility for granted.

  When the waiter left, Michael leaned toward Howe. "Look, Catholics may be the minority here but they're in power not because of some conspiracy but because they're educated, they have Western values, and they appreciate what Communism can do to a country. I don't think it matters a damn how many province chiefs are Catholics. The question is, are they doing their job? The way I read recent history, I think they are."

  Howe pushed the sugar bowl aside. "Can I give you a slightly different version of that history?"

  Michael stared at him, sipped his lemonade, waited. He wanted Howe to quit beating around the bush with him. He knew they would never be friends until they could speak with each other frankly. And Michael admitted, he wanted to be friends with this man.

  Howe nodded. "First, about this crap that Diem rescued the Catholics in the North from the Red Devil murders. Pure bull, Father."

  "Wait a minute, Howe. What about that day in August, we saw those people with missing ears? You were the one who told me what their crime was, hearing Mass."

  Howe waved his hand dismissively. "I was telling you what the people said, what they believed had happened. But it probably wasn't true."

  "How do you know that?"

  Howe worked at breaking up the sugar cubes in his tea. The ice was melted and he snapped his fingers at the Vietnamese waiter and barked several Vietnamese phrases at him. He waited for the boy to return with the ice. The interruption had the effect of defusing the challenge that had been implicit in Michael's question. While dropping a few cubes in Michael's drink as well, he said, "Because I know a guy who brags that he made that story up himself. An American. An Agency man who ran a string of 'black propaganda' agents whose job was to spread rumors like that among the Catholic population, to feed their panic. The Viet Minh were perfectly capable of mutilating people, but their targets were collaborators, not Catholics. There was no poetry to it—an ear because of the Mass you'd heard. That came from the CIA. I've heard that some of those agents carried out atrocities themselves, to frighten the people into running."

  "But why? Who cared if the Catholics stayed or moved?"

  "Think about it. Who was better known in the rectories of New York than in the villages of South Vietnam? Diem, the George Washington of Southeast Asia. But who the hell in this country ever heard of George Washington? When his people needed him most, fighting the French, he was living the high life in Spellman's seminary, giving tennis lessons to you guys." Howe grinned, but only for a moment. "Diem's power base was in Washington, not Saigon. And only one group could change that for him. The Catholics in the North. They could become his base. So he had to attract them south, or drive them there, like cattle. Hence the U.S. Navy. Hence Doctor Dooley. Hence Cardinal Spellman, all portraying the Ngos as the rescuers of the refugees, when the case was just the opposite. That migration of a million people was the great CIA success, of the decade, better even than the coups in Iran and Guatemala."

  Michael sipped his drink. "I'm a little slow, John, aren't I? You're with the Agency, of course."

  Howe shook his head. "Not on your life, Father. Their manipulation of your Church and your Churchmen is not only cynical but stupid, doomed to fail. Catholicism will never be anything here but a vestige of colonialism, and colonialism is dead. I don't think the CIA knows that yet."

  Michael smiled awkwardly. The sweeping, and compelling, indictment of his Church embarrassed him, but he was not prepared to acknowledge this. "So remind me. Why was it you wanted yet another Catholic priest over here?"

  Howe did not answer him.

  Michael pressed. "You said, if I recall, that you wanted communication, but you haven't a
sked me anything about the local church. You said you wanted a meeting with Thuc, but obviously you regard him as one of the Borgias. What the hell do you want, John? Why am I here?"

  Howe only stared back. Suddenly the man's inaccessibility infuriated Michael. Then he saw it. "Good God, you think I'll come around, don't you? I'll see it like you do, and I'll make my report to Spellman, whom you hold in contempt in every way but one. He's still the key to controlling Diem."

  Howe laughed. "'Controlling Diem!' Everybody is controlling Diem—Spellman, Kennedy, Nhu, Madame Nhu." He stopped abruptly and pointed to the far tennis court. "See that guy over there, playing doubles? That's our esteemed ambassador. His partner is the CIA chief of mission. They're playing against two guys out from Washington who are supposed 'to appraise the current situation.' Everything depends on what those men say. Oh, sure, Nhu makes them nervous, but he's paid to. He makes Diem look good by comparison. They never talk to anyone—forgive me, Father, for the theme!—but Catholics. And you know what else? They never leave Saigon. So Diem controls them. He controls Kennedy. He controls us."

  "I leave Saigon, John," Michael said with bravado, "and no one controls me."

  "Good for you." Howe stood up. Had he said that snidely? Michael thought so until he added somberly, "It is important that you see what's happening. That's all I wanted. That's why I hoped you'd come."

  Howe gathered his rackets and turned to lead the way out.

  At that moment a good-looking American woman approached him. She was wearing whites and carrying a racket of her own. "Jack," she called.

  He opened his arms as she came to him, and without a thought they embraced and kissed blatantly. She might have been his lover, but, if so, Michael sensed, not his only one. Nor was he hers. She said, "Play with me. My partner didn't show."

  Howe said, "Who was your partner?"

  "Annie."

  Howe winked at Michael. "Well, in that case..." As long as it wasn't a rival. He turned to Michael. "This is Sally Doubleday, Father. Sally writes for Newsweek. This is Father Maguire, Sally. He's with Church Relief."

  Michael and the woman shook hands. She eyed him boldly, but he expected that. Now he was glad he wasn't wearing whites. He wasn't just another dashing correspondent or Foreign Service dandy. He never liked being different except when he saw how it piqued a pretty woman's interest. What really piqued that, of course, was her realization that he wasn't on the make.

  She looked back at him once as Howe went off with her. Michael watched them both, but it was the change in Howe he was aware of. He was so much more relaxed suddenly, jovial, even, and high-spirited. Obviously Michael had an inhibiting effect on the man, and he regretted it. They would remain strangers. When Michael realized that Howe hadn't followed through on his suggestion that they play tennis again, he felt put down. Should he have let the bastard win? Was this a country club? Was Michael Maguire a ball boy?

  He left the Cercle Sportif, knowing he wouldn't return, and angry because of it. But then he chastised himself. He wasn't in Vietnam to improve his social standing.

  The month that Carolyn and I got married, September of 1961, the Communists took over a provincial capital just outside Saigon. They held it long enough to flaunt their impunity and underscored it by decapitating the Catholic province chief. Though we heard nothing about it in America, the raid was the beginning of a new level of terror. It frightened the people of Saigon, and the method of mutilation terrorized even the sophisticates and the Catholics. As Vietnamese they still believed that a decapitated person is condemned to an eternity of headless exile, the worst of all possible fates.

  The Communists proceeded with their hit-and-run terror among the rural population and with their brutal assassinations of local officials. And it worked. The illusion of Diem's control collapsed. By the time Michael had arrived in Vietnam that winter it was obvious at once that the CRS estimates of the numbers of refugees, displaced persons and orphaned children were already outdated. The relief program he'd come to help administer, once seen as mammoth, would barely touch the surface of the problem. Michael assumed at first that that was the result of the new Communist-sponsored violence. Indirectly, it was. But the immediate cause of the people's misery was a tactic that had been adopted by the Diem government, the elaborate fortification of central villages, "agrovilles" or "strategic hamlets." It was a tactic that had worked against Communists in Malaya; in Vietnam the French had tried to hold every village and had failed. So now most villages were evacuated; it was a second mass-movement of Vietnamese under Diem. But these people were not Catholics and they were not willing, so their resettlement had to be forced. The Americans called it "Operation Sunrise," and Maxwell Taylor referred to the program as "a great national movement." But in practice it was violent and brutal, and the supposedly idyllic "agrovilles" were in fact concentration camps. By the end of 1962 ten million peasants had been confined to these heavily guarded centers, working their fields and paddies in the daytime and returning to the "hamlets" at night. Thousands of peasants who resisted this resettlement were thereby branded Communist and killed. Hundreds of thousands of others, terrified by the awful, alien crossfire they found themselves in, crowded into the cities, burdening them impossibly. Almost overnight Diem, as if ignorant of the sacrosanct character of the tie between the Vietnamese and his home village, the village of his ancestors, had created a grave crisis of personal and spiritual identity for his own people. He had made them into exiles in their own country. In the beginning his problem had been that they didn't know him. Now it was that they hated him. And exactly as he expected the American government to provide his army with weapons to enforce his policies, he expected the Church to provide his displaced and demoralized population with food, clothing and medical care.

  It was an impossible job and Michael Maguire was one of the people who had it. The longer he was in Vietnam the more his focus narrowed. No longer did rhetoric about a new polity, a via media between right and left, appeal to him. His days were taken up with endless rounds of meetings with the various volunteer agencies and Church officials who were responsible for getting the supplies out to the countryside. In fact, Michael, whose duties had been only vaguely defined when he'd arrived, became a kind of troubleshooting dispatcher. He was the guy who ran from one logjam to the next, kicking them loose, from bureaucracy to ministry, from dockside to truck depot, from the American embassy to the offices of the archdiocese.

  And most of the time, like all Americans, he was in Saigon. And from Saigon, as refugees poured in by the thousands with their horrible stories, it was impossible not to believe that the Communists had gone from their ruthless assassinations to a policy of mass murder. Ironically, when reasons began to appear for hedging his support of Diem, Michael, like the leaders in Washington, stiffened it. The more of the victims' suffering he saw, the more he accepted the arguments of the anti-Communists. And he accepted the government's position that until order was restored, even if that meant extreme defensive measures, like the "agrovilles," nothing else could happen. Given the urgency of the situation, concerns about Catholic predominance seemed irrelevant. It was just as well he wasn't seeing Howe. If the AID officer came at him about the Ngos' religious intolerance, Michael would have reacted as O'Shea had, spouting the old chestnut that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of liberal Episcopalians.

  But then one day Howe showed up. He burst into Michael's office without knocking. Michael was on the phone with a French warehouse owner who'd been looking the other way while his workers pilfered rice to sell on the black market. Obviously they'd done so at his behest.

  Howe said, "Can you come with us, Father? I think you should."

  Michael held his finger up and repeated his threat to the Frenchman, and promised a visit, then hung up. He looked at Howe. "What?"

  Howe calmed himself by wiping the perspiration from his hands on his khaki trousers. He wore an open-necked short-sleeve white shirt and no coat. On his head was a baseball c
ap with a B on it, Boston. "Come with us. Right now," Howe said. He let his agitation show, an amplification of his abrupt demand.

  "All right." Michael stood and buttoned the black soutane he wore most of the time, as the Vietnamese clerics did. He picked up the stiff linen collar from his desk and fitted it around his neck as he followed Howe out into the brutal midday heat.

  Howe had an embassy car, a Ford or something, and Michael sat beside him in front. In the back was the striking figure of a saffron-robed Buddhist monk, an elderly man. His bronze skin was tight on his shaved skull and his eyes were fixed on a point beyond. Michael glanced back at him but the monk did not speak and Howe did not offer to introduce them. Throughout the time it took them to clear the city and drive well into the countryside, the three maintained their silence, and by then it had come to seem natural.

  My Tho was a river settlement in the delta region south of Saigon, formerly a fishing center but now one of those towns that had been swamped by refugees. It took two hours of fast driving through unsafe country to reach its outskirts where they were impossibly slowed by the thick traffic of carts and staggering families. One never saw Americans in the smaller towns in those days; the American command was only about twelve thousand strong.

  Michael said, "It reminds me of Korea," though for the first time he noticed that the Vietnamese had no equivalent of the Korean A-frames for carrying their loads. The people carried their bundles or their children in their arms, and seemed doubly burdened.

  "I hate to do this, but..." Howe leaned on the horn and gunned the engine threateningly. The refugees made way.

  Howe addressed the monk in Vietnamese. The monk responded and made a pointing gesture. The monk, Michael understood, was the one giving directions. After winding through several blocks' worth of crowded streets, they pulled into a broad, open square, and the scene they came upon disturbed Michael because of the suffering it implied, but it also filled him with pride.