Memorial Bridge (54 page)

"What?"

"I don't have more than a small piece of the picture, sir." Bowers glanced back at the door, then stepped closer to Dillon. "But what we see in I Corps does not square with the numbers you just got from Colonel Flynn."

"What do you mean, Captain?"

"The enemy battle-order estimates are way off, General. We're not killing half the VC that Flynn says we are, not in I Corps. And if you ask me, not anywhere."

"You heard what the colonel said. Those numbers are confirmed."

"Confirmed
bodies,
maybe. But not
soldiers.
We count civilians, General. That's why Colonel Flynn's summary didn't list civilians as a separate category. They have civilian casualty figures for
bombing,
but not for combat. Anybody killed in combat, even little girls, old ladies, villagers—they count them as VC.
That's
why the kill ratio has soared. I hear that ARVN has been faking body counts for years, and now we're helping them to do it. The numbers are what General MacAuliff wants, and it's what we give him."

"What troop-force indications do you get from prisoners?"

"That's what worries me. Captured VC and NVA regulars give us numbers that run the other way. Up, not down, in I Corps anyway. I've written seven explicit memos on this myself. MacAuliff's numbers do
not
include self-defense units either, the VC auxiliaries who lay the Claymores and booby traps. We keep those numbers—SDUs are going
up for sure—but they never make it onto charts or into briefings. We're not killing near as many as we say we are, and the Communists are sending in
more
than we say. We have North Vietnamese prisoners linked to nine separate NVA battalions, but MACV claims there are only four in I Corps."

"How can you be certain of that?"

"Believe me, General, by the time the poor buggers we have start to talk, they tell the truth."

Dillon thought of the letters home that Richard had heard some priest read, how he, Dillon, had dismissed them.

"And you've put all this in memos?"

"Yes, sir."

"To whom?"

"Colonel Flynn. And I've talked to my counterparts in III and IV Corps. It's the same everywhere, General. Not suppression, maybe, but being hooked on the most optimistic reports. When collators get contradictory feed, they just file the bad news under 'Dubious' or 'Unconfirmed.' Guys at my level know that the brass wants good news, so they just try to find it wherever they can."

"Every war has a version of that problem, Captain. No soldier wants to think his friends are dying for nothing."

"But they die when they shouldn't have to. That's my problem. I don't care if General MacAuliff needs happy-talk to send up the line to MACV and on to Washington. I don't give a damn what people think in Washington—no offense, sir. But the numbers Colonel Flynn gave you are what our guys take on patrol with them. In I Corps we've got grunts going into the jungle thinking Commie troop strength is half what it really is, and
that
is why our guys are getting blown away. We write ARVN soldiers off as cowards, but the reason they don't go charging into battle is because they know better than to believe what their intelligence officers tell them. Our guys are dumb enough to believe us."

Captain Bowers was leaning over Dillon with a wild look in his dark eyes. His fists were clenched in front of his chest. To Dillon, after all these months, he was like an apparition come with the message of his worst fear.

Before Dillon could respond, there was a single sharp rap on the door.

"Come!" Dillon said.

Colonel Freeman, the OSI chief, opened the door halfway and leaned
in. "General Cobb is on the line, sir, General Westmoreland's exec. He wants to talk to you right now."

Dillon felt the pulse of his own blood, but he clamped it and showed nothing.

Freeman glanced at Bowers, undecided, but only for a moment. "I told General Cobb that you might have left already."

"You were right, Pete. I did leave. I'm gone already. Tell General Cobb that you heard me say I hope to meet with General Westmoreland tomorrow morning."

Freeman nodded and left.

Dillon looked at Captain Bowers. "I want copies of your memos."

Bowers leaned in on Dillon again. "I'll get them for you tonight. Will you show them to Westmoreland? Will you say they're not getting—?"

"Captain, you have to trust me to handle what you give me. I don't want you talking about it, that's all. I don't control your assignment here, but I need it."

"But
you
have to tell Westmoreland. He'll listen to you."

"I said, you have to trust me. You may not care about Washington, but that's where I can make a difference. I need your numbers. I want you to get your own current I Corps estimates down on paper for me, and if possible sound out your counterparts in the other sectors. I want regular reports from you. I don't want Flynn to know. I don't want him dumping you, or MacAuliff either."

"But General, what about the battle order? I can't just slip the real numbers off to you in CONUS while guys here keep getting the bullshit.
Here
is where our guys are getting killed. You're asking me to just go along with that?"

Richard again. Dillon kept seeing Richard.

"You're not going along with it now, are you?"

"No, sir."

"You're doing something about it by telling me, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Captain, you're going to have to trust me on this. It's my job to make the best use of what you give me. Will you trust me?"

After a moment Bowers answered, "Yes, sir."

Dillon nodded. "Colonel Freeman will channel your paper to me. He's OSI, not DIA, but he has full clearance. You have complete discretion to say anything you think. But the harder your numbers are,
the better. What I need are data, anything you can get me about enemy numbers. I'm not
ordering
you to do this, because it involves irregularities that could cause us both problems. You just saw that in my response to Cobb. But I will promise you this: I will be out on the limb with you if anybody tries to cut it off."

Bowers laughed. "General, that's enough for me. I was hoping for this." His face darkened. "Desperately hoping."

"I sense that, Captain. Pull in on the desperation if you can. Cut back on the booze. I don't want you getting sent home on detox. I need you."

"Yes, sir," Bowers answered firmly. "All I needed was a reason to quit."

Dillon smiled, the kindly old confessor. "You don't have to quit, Captain. Just slow it down." He picked up a blank index card. "And what about your folks? Can I call them for you when I get home?"

"Yes, sir. Please."

"What's the name?"

"Dr. John Bowers, Fort Wayne—"

"Your father's a doctor?"

At first Dillon had no idea why that particular detail should have struck him with such force. But then he knew. Another man who'd trusted him, Riley, Richard Riley, the doc.

"I can't believe he's really dead." Cass was looking away from Sean, out her window. She didn't want him to see that she was near crying again. The red-tinged leaves of the September trees passed in a blur. They were in Sean's long blue car, riding in back with a stretch of the soft gray upholstery separating them. Sergeant Kingfield was at the wheel. Richard was in the front passenger seat. He had graduated from Georgetown two springs before, and was a second-year law student at the University of Virginia now. As if it would help to fend her emotions, Cass looked at the back of her son's head. The fringe of his hair brushed the collar of his dark suit. Usually he wore his hair longer. She knew he'd gotten it cut for her, for this, not that she cared, really. He was her rock. She was so grateful to him for getting here.

They were on Michigan Avenue, passing the wooded vale at the foot of the hill on which the Old Soldiers' Home sat. Up ahead the Shrine had just come into view, the huge blue beach ball of a dome, the needle spire of the K of C belfry, the largest Catholic church in North America. Ordinarily Cass felt a lift on first glimpsing the great basilica, but this morning her heart sank. They were coming here for the funeral of the man who'd built it, her oldest friend in Washington, Archbishop Barry.

Sean reached across to touch her. Unconsciously, she covered his hand with hers, holding it on the seat. She was still looking at her son. "I
was thinking last night of his baptizing you, Richard. He did it here. Do you remember that? At the Shrine."

Richard turned and looked at his mother. He smiled, but with a touch of self-mocking solemnity. "What I remember is that I was just a baby, Mom."

"Archbishop Barry was the rector. He was the first priest we knew here. He made our coming from Chicago seem all right. He gave me..." Cass took her hand back from Sean to open her purse for a fresh Kleenex.

Richard glanced at his father. They saw each other rarely these days. It had been so long since they had talked that Richard knew there was no point in trying, here, to indicate anything. Should he say, for example, that his mother's sadness was upsetting to him, but that he hardly shared it? He had come from Charlottesville for her, not for Monsignor Barry and not for his father.

The silence into which his mother's grief had taken them drummed unpleasantly in Richard's ears. "Actually, Mom," he said, "my favorite memory of Monsignor Barry will always be when he went to give you that medal from the Pope, but he didn't know where to pin it."

Cass smiled wanly. "Archbishop," she said softly, correcting the title Richard had used. She went back to looking out her window.

Sean reached up to touch the back of Richard's seat. Richard was sure his father was going to find fault with him. For recalling a moment of the archbishop's awkwardness? For calling him Monsignor? For hair that was too long? But Sean said, "I'm glad you could get here." Richard turned around in his seat, unable to keep the surprise from his face. But then he remembered, it was not true that his father could read his mind. Perhaps his father did not know how alien he felt. He almost said something to explain himself, but instead he glanced at the driver, who was new to him. The driver's presence, like that of how many other drivers and orderlies before him, guaranteed that they would not speak of anything that mattered. With Mack he might have, but Mack was retired, and now Richard knew enough to measure what they had been to each other, despite the fondness, by the fact that he had never known Mack's first name. He had never known any of their first names.

Richard thought of those nights when he had been the one to drive his father home. He had not done so in more than a year now. He could see it: the two of them staring out into the moving lights of the darkened city, stone silent, as if they had each begun to believe that Richard too was the
general's servant. It was their silence when they were alone that Richard had come to find unbearable.

At Fourth Street the driver steered the car into the Shrine's broad entrance circle. Policemen lined the curving drive like posts. The shadowless Romanesque church loomed above a row of arriving automobiles, many of them limousines. Senators, congressmen, lobbyists, Establishment lawyers and stars of the administration were leaving their cars and heading up the long flight of bright stairs.

Richard saw a four-star army general getting out of an olive-green staff car, and from a car behind, a pair of admirals. Archbishop Barry, with Cardinal Spellman of New York, had taken recently to staunchly defending the war in Vietnam. The more strident the war's critics had become, especially among the liberal clergy, the more pointed had become Barry's expression of support. No wonder the military brass were here. Richard wished for a way to set his father apart from them. My father knew this priest before he was a bishop, before my father was a general! Richard glanced back at the stars on his father's shoulders. When had it ever occurred to Richard that those stars would cause him to feel ashamed?

The mourners, moving in a steady stream up the stairs, all carried themselves like VIPs, except for the nuns and priests, who were alike in hiking their robes to go up. As Sergeant Kingfield slowed their car, Richard looked away from the church entrance. Beside the Shrine was an oblong green, a tranquil stretch of tidy lawn, and beyond that were the pseudo-Gothic buildings of Catholic University. He recognized in the distance the oblivious bustle of students going to and from classrooms. Richard envied them their rightful indifference to this event, but Catholic students were known for their indifference to civil rights and peace marches too. Did he envy them that? To Richard's surprise, though, he saw on a nearby sidewalk, opposite the K of C bell tower, a moving circle of twenty or thirty protesters who were carrying hand-lettered signs he could not read. Not students, he realized, but mature people, Quakers or
Catholic Worker
types probably. They were separated from the throng of funeral goers by a thin row of policemen, but unlike the ceremonial guard lining the driveway those cops had their nightsticks ready. To Richard's relief, neither of his parents seemed to notice the demonstrators, and to his further relief, once he'd left his father's car, none of the demonstrators seemed to notice him.

The familiar aroma of wax hit Richard's nostrils as he entered the church. Thousands of votive candles flickered eerily in the pale morning light at side altars up both sides of the length of the nave. More than any other detail, that smell evoked what was left to him of Catholic feeling. Adorning the concave wall at the far end of the church, dwarfing everything but the stone structure itself, was the sparkling mosaic of a Byzantine Christ. The figure's huge oriental eyes burned into everyone else's face, perhaps, but not Richard's. He remembered that the gaze of that Christ was famous for following the guilty no matter where they went in the vast space. But now the eyes seemed flat and unthreatening, like the religion itself.

Richard looked at his mother, knowing how wounded she would be to know her son was an apostate. He wished she could take it as a sign of his deep love, that he was not here for God either. He was here only for her. He squeezed his mother's elbow, sending her a pulse of affection and concern.