An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  "You read the papers. You know what's going on. Berlin. The bomber they shot down last week. I may not come home one of these nights. I might have to go somewhere else. The whole Air Staff would go. If that happens, I'm going to depend on you to take my place with Mom and the boys."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Mom will know. But you should know too. I'll want you to get everybody in the car. I'll want you to drive south. Get on Route One. Head to Richmond. Go past it. Go as far as you can before you stop."

  He didn't say anything else. As I remember it, neither did I. We must have driven the rest of the way home in silence. I do remember very distinctly, though, the two halves of what I felt. The first was fear. Until that moment, even in Berlin itself the year before, tearing down Stalin Allee, red bandannas out the window, I had not felt afraid. Despite all the talk of war, I had believed that my father and the others like him—Curtis LeMay, Tommy White, Pearre Cabell, Butch Blanchard, our neighbors on Generals' Row—would protect us from it. Now I saw that Dad himself no longer thought they could. I felt my father's fear, which until then I'd thought impossible. I began to be afraid that night and I stayed afraid for many years, first of what our enemy would do, later of what we would.

  The second thing I felt was an unprecedented intimacy with him; the trust he placed in me had less to do with the prospect of that drive down Route One than with his readiness to let me see his fear. You are ready "to put away childish things," he might have said, with Saint Paul. Like what? I might have asked. Like your wish for self-realization, for carnality, for pleasure, for the world; the way you want a girl, companionship, relief from the loneliness that properly belongs to men like us.

  I felt a rare happiness in the car with him that night, the wish only to be what I already was, a father-pleasing son. I remained silent, but I could have said, Of course, Dad, that other stuff is for 'the boys/ for women, for those not chosen—I am chosen, and I admit it. The doom of my privilege, that's what I felt. A lifetime of exactly this servility. The loneliness I recognized in him was so familiar, and yet because he let me sense it, my version of the same feeling seemed not just tolerable, but like a badge, a sign of our belonging to each other. Loneliness? If I could have him, my dad forever, I would never be alone again. The silence was the seal of what bound us now.

  Another time, we did put some of this into words. It was that same summer. The international crisis had passed. In late August, Dad took me and Joe with him for a short vacation at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico, a SAC base on a remote bluff overlooking the azure Caribbean. Its golf course made the base a favorite R & R destination for the brass, and though Joe could not play because of his legs, golf was what took us there. On the course, I felt the old tug of guilt knowing Joe was back at the VIP bungalow, but also I prized the time alone with Dad. It felt like a reward for the inexorable, gradual surrender I was making, what later I would learn to call my abandonment to the will of God. By which I meant, in every way but consciously, my father's.

  The golf course lapped like a winding emerald lagoon at the edges of the huge concrete air strip. This was one of the bases from which a third of the nation's strategic bomber fleet was kept airborne at all times, to avoid being surprised on the ground. Ramey was a mammoth reservation, bordered by blue water on one side and rain forest on the other. The golf course was lush, dotted with palm trees, swept by a constant breeze, broiling in a tropical sun. On one particular hole, the green abutted the front edge of the longest runway, and Dad and I were about to putt when a fleet of silver motes appeared on the horizon. We watched them approach and heard the faint roar grow louder. It was a wing of H-bomb-laden B-52S returning from its global patrol. Once Dad had pointed out the B-52's wingspan, how it exceeded the distance of the Wright brothers' entire Kitty Hawk flight. At an air show at Andrews Air Force Base, I had sat in a B-52 cockpit. It was the first and only machine I ever fell in love with. And now this was the first and only time I saw it in naked flight from just below. The screaming eight-engine plane, first one, then a succession of them, swooped down to within dozens of yards above us. The earth shook with the noise. My father held his putter and waited five minutes, ten. Ten warplanes, twenty. When the last B-52 had landed, he exchanged a glance with me, addressed his ball, and stroked it into the cup.

  He was not so cool later that night. With an ample glass of bourbon in his hand, after Joe had gone to bed, and after another mute period spent listening to the bombers taking off one after another above our bungalow, he told me in so many words that World War III was inevitable. "The world is going to end in a ball of fire—of our own making," he said. I knew he was a little drunk, but in those days I thought that guaranteed that what he said was true. Within a few years as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, he would be the one to discover hard evidence of the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. "General Carroll Saw Something," said a missile-crisis headline on the front page of the Washington Star. I would keep that page in my boxes, and would have it copied and framed years later for each of my brothers. During the crisis, I would glimpse Dad on television behind President Kennedy, but that would be all my family saw of him. For those ten days he disappeared. I was gone by then, and no help to Mom. Later, when I asked why she'd never gotten into the car and driven south, she explained that she and the other generals' wives at Boiling took turns driving down to the remote corner of the flight line where evacuation helicopters waited that would ferry the brass to Thunder Mountain. As long as the choppers were still there, she knew the generals were still in Washington and war was not imminent. During those ten days the helicopters never left the ground, so my mother never bundled her remaining sons into the car.

  At Ramey that night, swirling his whiskey, Dad said, "Man has never created a weapon and not used it." An irrefutable fact; on this subject my father's authority was absolute. "The nuclear war is inevitable."

  "I know," I said, feeling the pull of his fatalism, a sickness that even now curdles the juices in my throat. "That is why," I continued, aware of my words as a declaration, "I want to be a priest. I want to be a priest, Dad."

  He looked at me, not speaking.

  Now that I was saying them at last, the words poured out of me: "Because what's important now are the spiritual things, the eternal things, the things that last. The political and social and philosophical things have all already failed, the worldly things." I could have added, "The flesh." I could have said, "The devil." I could have said, "Indubitably."

  He nodded, a quiet gesture of agreement and approval. The cold stone floor, the bamboo furniture, the stucco walls, the silence. I remember the unbroken silence, a stunning aftermath not only to my declaration but to the end-of-the-world shrieking of the B-52S. The silence was a warning that, having said those words, I would have to live them now. The silence was a warning also that the warplanes might never return.

  Is my memory of this moment only melodramatic? In what way exactly were such fears founded? In fact, my father's fatalism was appropriate to what he knew, and so was my readiness to take a large cue from it. As the secret files of the Cold War are declassified and made public, in Moscow and in Washington, we discover that the world teetered closer to the nuclear precipice than has been thought. The risks of the Cuban missile crisis are assumed to be well known, yet recent revelations, summarized for example in Robert McNamara's memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, tell us that had the United States invaded Cuba, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian leaders alike recommended, the Soviet commander in Cuba was under orders to unleash the 162 nuclear warheads, mostly tactical, already in place. McNamara concludes, "No one should believe that, had American troops been attacked with nuclear weapons, the United States would have refrained from a nuclear response. And where would it have ended? In utter disaster."

  This scenario, dreadful as it is, presumes that the United States would use its nuclear arsenal only in retaliation—and that has been taken as a tenet of our nuclea
r posture from the start of the Cold War. But in April and May of 1954, according to Mark Perry's Four Stars, a history of the Pentagon, Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, proposed using nuclear weapons to defeat Vietnamese Communist forces at Dien Bien Phu. President Eisenhower refused. In February 1955 the Chiefs, with only General Matthew B. Ridgway dissenting, proposed the use of nuclear weapons to preempt China's anticipated attack on Formosa. Again Eisenhower refused. And we know, as of 1993 declassifications, that in 1961 around the time my father was confiding his dread to me, the National Security Council, with President Kennedy's participation, was seriously debating whether to launch an unprovoked surprise attack against all targets in the Soviet Union while it was still possible to preempt their retaliation. "The Burris Memorandum," summarizing one such meeting and dated July 20, 1961, includes this sentence: "The President asked if there had ever been made an assessment of damage results to the USSR, which would be incurred by a preemptive attack." That same summer Kennedy confirmed McNamara's appointment of my father as founding director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and I am sure the shadows of such assessments fell on him.

  At that time, American citizens were being urged by their government to build bomb shelters, always with the assumption that it would be Soviet fallout that threatened. But in the Burris Memorandum about a U.S. first strike, "The president posed the question as to the period of time necessary for citizens to remain in shelter following an attack." The answer was two weeks, but what citizens would be sheltered from was the earth-encircling fallout from our own weapons. At the end of his meeting, Kennedy remarked in an aside, "And we call ourselves the human race."

  History records that after such experiences with the Pentagon leadership, Kennedy went on to turn the tide against the nuclear mindset. His American University speech in 1963 and the Test Ban Treaty, which led to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, were signals of that effort. But the heart of it was Robert McNamara's struggle to reimpose civilian controls on the World War II generation of generals and admirals—a struggle in which, since his abrupt commissioning to the rank of general by Stuart Symington, my father had played a part, and would continue to under McNamara, ultimately with disastrous personal results.

  In his 1995 memoir, McNamara specifies occasions in 1964, 1966, and 1967 when the Joint Chiefs put forward Vietnam proposals that advocated "utilizing the nation's full military capability, including the possible use of nuclear weapons." This is a first public admission of what our government long denied—that the use of nukes in Vietnam was seriously considered. The common perception is that Curtis LeMay, who proposed bombing Hanoi "into the Stone Age," was a loose cannon, but his was far from the only Pentagon finger on the nuclear hair trigger. McNamara's record of conflict with the military leadership, well known as a key factor in the debacle of Vietnam, cannot be understood apart from the unacknowledged civilian-military struggle over use of nuclear weapons. And any assessment of McNamara's role that fails to credit him for finally thwarting the open-ended escalation toward nuclear use in Vietnam is inadequate.

  But in 1960 this conflict was just being joined. LeMay, our neighbor at Boiling, was riding high. He had more than 200 first-generation ICBMs in place, and he wanted 2,400 of the new Minuteman ICBM missiles; LeMay's successor as head of SAC, Thomas Powers, wanted 10,000. Eventually McNamara would impose a limit of 1,000, infuriating the Joint Chiefs, who had begun that year's public panic about a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. There was a gap, but it was heavily in our favor. The Soviets had, even into 1962 when the Cuban missile crisis occurred, only a few unreliable ICBMs. Their long-range bomber fleet consisted of 100 vulnerable Tupolev Bears and 35 May Bisons. By comparison, the United States had 1,500 B-47S and more than 600 B-52S.

  The subtitle of the film Dr. Strangelove was How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Perverse as it seems, I loved the B-52. A screaming wing of them had adorned the cover of my high school yearbook, called "Vapor Trails," a copy of which is still in my boxes. Within a year of this moment at Ramey Air Force Base, as a freshman at Georgetown, I would be presented with the stainless-steel model B-52 I spoke of earlier, my prize for being named ROTC Cadet of the Year. Even I knew, by the way, that that award was attributable more to the cadet commanders' awe at my father's rank than to any distinction of mine. I did, however, have the most magnificently spit-shined black shoes in the corps. At inspections, the officer would put his shoe next to the cadet's, aiming to outshine, but he never did in my case. Nor did my ROTC superiors ever learn that I was wearing my father's shoes, which had been brought to that mirror finish by the countless hours' work of Dad's orderlies.

  I would take my model bomber to the seminary with me. The "heavy hammer" of the nuclear triad would sit on my modest bureau—a perfect symbol of my unbreakable bond with my father, and of the motivating impulse that turned me, in fear and also despair, to God.

  Vietnam would change the meaning of the B-52, of course. By 1969, the year of my ordination, it would be flying 1,800 sorties a month from Thailand and Guam, a strategy of "carpet bombing" and napalm runs. By then I would have unceremoniously thrown my stainless-steel model into the ravine behind the seminary—that "annihilation of the gods." The B-52 would embody all that divided my father and me.

  But not now. The noise of the bombers had prompted his confession, which prompted mine. Now each of us was stuck. Within a year or two, the urge I felt could have taken me into the Peace Corps, or an inner-city tutoring program, or into a "helping profession" like counseling or social work. But in that pre-Kennedy summer, for a Catholic boy like me, what Robert Coles would dub "the call of service" could only mean the Church. And in my case, in addition to the call of service there was the call, though I did not know it yet, to fill a void. His. My mother's. Joe's. Anyone's but mine.

  My father's quiet approval was, in fact, satisfaction that mitigated the despair he'd let me glimpse. Peace Corps? Tutoring? Social work? My inchoate sense of having filled a transcendent need of his would make such other ways of filling my own the moral equivalent of picking up an English-speaking prostitute on Ninth Street. Me? My call to service, my own personal strategy of deterrence—Myself Assured Destruction—was to stave off the war with an act of sacrifice. Given those terms, I did so willingly.

  Thirty-five years later, the B-52 is still flying—seventy-four of them remain in service as I write. A third of the bomb tonnage in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 was dropped by B-52S. But in an odd turn of fate, the survival of the old workhorse has made it possible to reject successor bombers—the B-70, the B-1, and the B-2, which would have been even more destructive and would have forced yet another arms race escalation. The Air Force intends to keep the B-52 flying for another decade, as the mission of the heavy bomber melts away in the thaw of the Cold War. So ironically, the B-52, by its very longevity, may last long enough to be our final cover while bomber production shuts down once and for all. The B-52 as a kind of ploughshare: I could not have imagined it at Ramey in 1960. Or wanted it.

  After 1993, when Russia and the United States stopped targeting each other's cities, and only then, I would stop being afraid of the nuclear war with Moscow. The American first-strike warmongers of the early 1960s had been held off, and their equivalents in the Soviet Union had been disarmed. In that contest, I know now, my father was on the right side, and I will return to the story of what it cost him. Suffice to say that he ended his career as an opponent of a Nixon-sponsored effort to escalate the nuclear arms race. I would feel a belated gratitude to him, and I would remember how the peculiar knot of love, in our case, was tied up with fear. Fear, no doubt, of the unconscious terrors of sex and success, true freedom and change; but fear, first and foremost, and quite consciously experienced—that Doomsday Clock—of an imminent nuclear war. It was a fear that did not come true, in some small part, I believe, because of him.

  What matters now is not the fact of what he did but of what he let me see, what I infer fro
m it, and how it shapes my soul. The evidence of his role in secret Pentagon debates will always be ambiguous, and while they were going on, I was ignorant of them. But now I believe that even as I was giving up a world I loved for peace, so was he. He could not forgive himself, and so he could not forgive me. That inability was tied up in that other knot that bound us—of our priesthood. As a young man, I did not do what my father asked but never required—heading down to Richmond with Mom and the boys. But I did what he required without ever asking.

  Introibo ad altare Dei. I went to the altar of God, and it was true. He did give joy to my youth. An odd joy. An unexpected one. A relief. A release. An escape. A discovery. A renouncing of the self, but a reinventing of it too. Joy, defined in words I still remember: "To live in the midst of the world with no desire for its pleasure..." This nosegay was on holy cards and graven plaques everywhere in the seminary, above the name of its author, to us an otherwise unknown Frenchman named Lacordaire. For a long time, such a card, bordered with a chain of thorns and roses, was displayed on my bureau along with my B-52. "... to be a member of every family, yet belonging to none; to share all suffering; to penetrate all secrets; to heal all wounds; to teach and instruct; to pardon and console; to bless and be blessed forever. O God! What a life! And it is yours, O priest of Jesus Christ!"

  6. A RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

  ST. PAUL'S COLLEGE, the Paulist Fathers' seminary, was a crenelated faux-Gothic castle dominating the hill around which the colleges, seminaries, monasteries, and convents of Little Rome had sprouted like tiger lilies in the rich humus of midcentury Catholicism. Nearby were the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, completed now as a towering Byzantine beach ball, and the kitschy Franciscan Monastery with its cement-over-mesh grottoes and catacombs—both of which had been such consolations to my mother and me during the early rounds of Joe's bouts with polio. St. Paul's would be my home from 1963 to the beginning of 1969, an island of relative calm in that typhoon of decades, but also, so unexpectedly, an incubator of my own personal and unwanted revolution.