Gods Go Begging (21 page)

The lieutenant wasn’t listening. He struggled to keep his jaw from quaking as it had on that long ride back on the chopper. His teeth had been chattering so badly that he’d bitten his tongue and lips in a dozen places. He closed his eyes, an act that somehow permitted another small note of grief to escape from his stomach and fill his gorge.

Because of his fear, a soldier had expired in that Huey without benefit of a chaplain, a chaplain who had been cowering less than a yard away. There had been no confession, no Extreme Unction. The colonel stopped speaking long enough to look up and see the lieutenant slumping to the floor. The young man’s face was slick with sweat and tears.

The colonel rose angrily to his feet, walked around his desk, and grabbed the lieutenant by his collar. Grunting angrily, he lifted the young chaplain up off his chair, slammed him down, then leaned forward until they were nose to nose.

“Maybe you noncommittal, so-called intellectual Unitarians don’t know this,” said the colonel in a transformed voice, “but Jehovah God is a heat seeker.” The smile on the colonel’s face had disappeared completely, leaving behind the angular, arid chin and thin lips of a professional soldier … a lifer.

“Time to stop beating around the burning bush,” growled the colonel. Courtesy and social grace had now given way completely to the dark power of the lifer: the power of inertia, the power to keep any boat from rocking, the ability to turn the smallest duty into a drudgery, and that drudgery into a litany of grumblings and reams of paper. Buried beneath this power, the smallest task became impossible. The course of least resistance ensured that nothing was ever done and no one was ever responsible for failing to do it. All lifers dutifully followed the rules of planetary motion.

“Open the Bible, son,” said the colonel, striking an elliptical posture, “and show me a chapter that’s filled with nice little parishes, tea socials, and contented congregations. Show me the fucking page where everyone’s happy and yellow cowards like you prosper and die surrounded by immediate family. The Holy Bible, chapter and verse, is one war after another. After all that begetting and begatting came the smiting and the slaying and the plagues, just like clockwork, just like Exodus follows Genesis.

“Do you think them damn Jews are the only ones who can carry God in an ark at the head of their column, smiting down their enemies and leveling their lands? Well, we’ve got God fighting for us, too, right here in Vietnam. After all, isn’t the Pentateuch a story about the bitterness of a divided nation, lieutenant, just like the Nam?”

The colonel released his hold on the chaplain’s jacket. He had used more energy on this useless conversation than he had expended on his entire first tour of duty. He sat down. A body at rest.

“For all your supposed faith, you don’t really want to meet your maker, do you? It got too hot for you out on that hilltop position, didn’t it?”

The lieutenant nodded slowly. A desolate groan left his throat.

“Do you remember the story of Elijah, chaplain?” the colonel said. He would expend one last erg of energy on this worthless Unitarian. Actually, it wouldn’t take even that much effort. He was about to deliver an old, well-worn sermon.

“Do you know the story about King Ahab and his pagan wife Jezebel? Now, there was a lovely and seductive woman, but the trouble was, she worshiped pagan deities and imported her own pagan priests. Now, this made the prophet Elijah real mad. So Elijah summoned King Ahab and his wife and all of her prophets to Mount Carmel for a contest, a final showdown between Yahweh and her god, Baal. The story goes that two bullocks were placed on two separate altars, and Elijah challenged the priests of Baal to implore their god to send down a heavenly fire to consume their bullock. You know what happened, don’t you?”

The young chaplain nodded. He knew the story. He had seen the fire on the hill. He had once lived on a hill.

“That’s right, son, nothing at all happened. The skies were stone silent. Then Elijah called upon his God, our God, and lo and behold, dark clouds gathered from horizon to horizon, then glorious flames filled the skies. In seconds, that bullock was charred to cinders.”

The colonel lit another cigarette then paused a moment to let the import of his sermon sink in.

“You are part of a great tradition, my boy. Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, and Elijah; there’s always a man of God at the head of the column with the warriors and the generals. In the best of all worlds it is the men of God who lead the crusaders. Remember Saint Bernard?”

It was the colonel who closed his eyes now, remembering his own glorious days of combat in Korea. Once he had even been close enough to the fighting that he could see men dying, both Red Chinese and Americans. It was General Douglas MacArthur himself who had lent him his own personal binoculars. The colonel shook his head. The general had had such a messianic caritas, such immense power over men. He could have been a king, or even better, a medieval pope. One of the general’s favorite mottoes had been engraved onto the body of those binoculars:
Flavit Jehovah et disipati sunt.
God breathed on them and they were dispersed.

“There’s always been a prophet standing right there in the drop zone when the fire from heaven comes down to turn the bull to smoking ashes. Don’t you see? Old Elijah was a FAC, a forward air controller, calling in a fire mission to the Lord.”

The colonel, who had risen and taken three steps backward, now walked back to his desk and sat down. The smile had faded from his face.

“There’s a chopper leaving from pad alpha at fifteen-thirty hours. You be on it or I’ll have your ass court-martialed. Maybe Captain Gregory had more time to sit around and philosophize with you, but I don’t. You have a job to do. We all have a job to do. What you experienced up on your hill was just another small siege in a small anonymous place.”

“You know what happened back on the hill?” asked the padre, a surprised and animated look appearing on his face. “You know about the spiders and the secrets and the young boys being molested? ”

“There’s been some talk,” answered the colonel, who had a confused look on his face. “Command is aware of the situation.”

“I can’t lie to them anymore,” mumbled the lieutenant in a feeble but growing voice. “I can’t lie to them. They’re paying the highest price and they’re getting nothing for it, and I don’t have the will or the stomach to tell them any different. Do you know what the grunts say, colonel?” For the first time his eyes were glued to those of the colonel. “They say, ‘It don’t mean nothing.’ That’s their answer when things are beyond reason and beyond hope. ‘It don’t mean nothing.’ And they’re right! Those grunts aren’t stupid. None of this means nothing. None of this hellhole adds up to democracy, and none of this means God.”

The colonel was quiet for a moment, then broke into laughter. He reached for his pack of cigarettes and once again offered one to the lieutenant, who refused at first, then took one. It would be his first cigarette in years. As he lit both cigarettes, the colonel continued his uncontrolled, cynical laughter. High over their heads another flight of Phantom jets was leaving for points north. The sound of their engines was deafening. They were loaded with snake and nape, missiles and napalm, to burn the bullock.

“Your poor Okie fruit-picking parents up in Oregon or your minimum-wage colored parents down in Watts don’t want a reason for their dear son’s death, they want a rationale.” The colonel exhaled a thick, righteous cloud of filtered and mentholated death. “Now, there is a huge difference between a reason and a rationale, young lieutenant.”

He refilled his water glass. Then, splurging a bit, he dropped in another precious ice cube.

“A rationale is something that can be included in a prayer; it’s something you can put into a sermon. It’s a benediction!”

He upended his glass and drained it into his throat. The ice cube disappeared into his mouth. This time there was no pretense. This man needed his liquor.

“Think about it, what are you gonna say to those people? What are you going to say to some simpleminded Southern Baptist or a Jehovah’s Witness who doesn’t even have a week of training in the seminary? There’s millions of barrels of oil beneath the soil here? We need to keep Red China under control? Do we tell them we need to demonstrate all of these newfangled weapons for all of those buyers in the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Central America? Hell, there’s a billion pristine lungs sucking oxygen in China. Do we tell them that we’re fighting here so that our tobacco companies can open up these markets? Hell, no!

“You give them democracy and God! Now, that’s the stuff of prayers. That’s the stuff they can repeat on Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. You tell them their son died bravely and with a movie star’s sneer on his lips. You don’t tell them their dear boy became some kind of poet-warrior in his final days. And you, my young chaplain, are part of the rationale, not part of the reason. The reason for being here does not include you.”

“And the troops?” asked the lieutenant weakly.

“One of these days they’ll get a statue or something. The survivors will organize themselves into VFW chapters and tell stories to kids who’ll ignore them. Now, get back to that goddamn hill. Do your job! Take part in their facile foxhole philosophies.”

“It’s called ‘supposing,’ ” muttered the younger chaplain.

“Whatever,” sneered the colonel. “You were specially trained to conduct field services and symposiums. As it happens, I’ve taught some of those courses myself. My paper on the fallacies of Sartre is still being used at my seminary.”

The colonel’s face flushed with pride.

“An intellectual like yourself should have no trouble answering their naive questions about sex before marriage and the meaning of life. Don’t let it get any more complicated than that. If you get too complicated, folks in the chaplains’ corps will begin to think you’re one of them effete papists who’s lapsed into linguistics … or maybe they’ll think you’re a Jew.”

“Can you answer questions about Mexicans in space?” asked the padre defiantly. “Can you? Do you know anything about spider holes? ”

The lieutenant rose to his feet and was standing with his thighs against the colonel’s desk. There was a growing disdain in the lieutenant’s voice that the colonel did not appreciate.

“Can you speak a single goddamn word of Gaelo-Aztecan? Can you? Do you have any idea what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s heart? Did you know that I was never a Catholic? I am an insect. That is my denomination! Does someone like you know the first thing about Moroccan jazz? Can you write a poem in Ladino? I didn’t think you could. I was never a Catholic, sir. I was never a Mennonite. I was a spider. It’s a blue ballet out there, colonel, and it’s men like you who are the perverts.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about? Are you crazy?”

The chaplain did not answer. There was a haughty look on his raving face. He had just made several key points that had not been refuted.

“Just help them write their letters,” said the colonel, ignoring the look of smug satisfaction that had appeared on his underling’s face. “Ease their way into the next world. Help our boys kill the Hun.”

“A lot of North Vietnamese soldiers are Catholics,” said the lieutenant. “They have rosary beads wrapped around their rifles. I’ve heard them saying the Lord’s Prayer in Vietnamese.”

“Like I said”—the colonel smiled—“you gotta help our boys kill the Hun. Policies change, lieutenant. No more secure duties for us soldiers of God. No more hanging around the hospitals and loitering in canvas chapels. We’re out in the field now, where we belong.”

The colonel put down his newest cold drink and pointed a quivering finger toward the lieutenant.

“You be on that chopper at fifteen-thirty hours or I’ll start organizing a firing squad for your yellow Unitarian, intellectual ass. You flake out again and I’ll snatch your bars so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

The lieutenant saluted weakly then turned and walked to the door. As he opened the door the white light and oppressive heat of Da Nang rushed into the air-conditioned room. There had been a forty-degree difference in temperature between the colonel’s office and the air of Vietnam. Riding piggyback on the thick waves of heat were the sickening scent of jet fuel and the numbing cacophony of the largest airport in the world.

“Close that goddamn door, lieutenant!” roared the colonel, “it’ll take an hour to get this room back down to seventy degrees. Do you remember what happened to the prophets of Baal, lieutenant?”

The chaplain stepped through the door without answering his superior officer. The prophets had been taken from the top of the hill into a nearby valley where they had been slaughtered, one by one. It had not really been a contest. It had been a trap.

“And may God be with you,” the colonel had called out as the door slammed shut.

When the young chaplain last saw the colonel he had been sitting behind his desk polishing the brass crucifix on his clean, dustless helmet and sneaking a quick peek at a pair of brigadier general’s stars that he kept hidden in his desk, just in case the rumors from Command were true.

The chopper was blessedly clean. The ground crew had washed and sterilized it. It was a “slick,” a lightly armed troop carrier and the very same helicopter that had brought the chaplain to Da Nang just hours earlier. The lieutenant peeked cautiously into the doorway, then sighed. The ground crew had used a high pressure water hose to remove the blood and body parts. A wave of nausea washed over the chaplain’s face as he remembered last night’s flight, and the young soldier who had flown back with him. The grunt had been cradling his own helmet in his shaking arms as the chopper lifted from the hill. In the webbing of the helmet was the young man’s own right kneecap.

“They can sew it back on, can’t they?”

The young soldier had repeated that question over and over. They couldn’t. The leg it had come from was out there, somewhere below the dark canopy of tree limbs. But beyond the sadness that the chaplain had felt for the young man, there was something else, something deviated and twisted. He had experienced the strange, almost overpowering desire to touch the kneecap. It had been so perverse. It was certainly something he would never have wanted to do while it was still attached to a living leg.