Howard Fast - The General Zapped an Angel - Stories

“Maybe we don’t explain it, sir. I mean, there it is. It happened. The damn thing’s dead, isn’t it? Let’s bury it. Isn’t that what a soldier does—buries his dead, tightens his belt a notch, and goes on from there?”

“So we bury it, huh, Mackenzie?”

“Yes, sir. We bury it.”

“You’re a horse’s ass, Mackenzie. How long since someone told you that? That’s the trouble with being a general in this goddamn army—no one ever gets to tell you what a horse’s ass you are. You got dignity.”

“No, sir. You’re not being fair, sir,” Mackenzie protested. “I’m trying to help. I’m trying to be creative in this trying situation.”

“You get a gold star for being creative, Mackenzie. Yes, sir, General—that’s what you get. Every marine at Quen-to knows you shot down an angel. Your helicopter pilot and crew know it, which means that by now everyone on this base knows it—because anything that happens here, I know it last—and those snotnose reporters on the base, they know it, not to mention the goddamn chaplains, and you want to bury it. Bless your heart.”

The three-star general’s name was Drummond, and when he got back to his office, his aide said to him excitedly:

“General Drummond, sir, there’s a committee of chaplains, sir, who insist on seeing you, and they’re very up tight about something, and I know how you feel about chaplains, but this seems to be something special, and I think you ought to see them.”

“I’ll see them.” General Drummond sighed.

There were four chaplains, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, an Episcopalian, and a Lutheran. The Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian chaplains had wanted to be a part of the delegation, but the priest, who was a Paulist, said that if they were to bring in five Protestants, he wanted a Jesuit as reenforcement, while the rabbi, who was Reform, agreed that against five Protestants an Orthodox rabbi ought to join the Jesuit. The result was a compromise, and they agreed to allow the priest, Father Peter O’Malley, to talk for the group. Father O’Malley came directly to the point:

“Our information is, General, that General Mackenzie has shot down one of God’s holy angels. Is that or is that not so?”

“I’m afraid it’s so,” Drummond admitted.

There was a long moment of silence while the collective clergy gathered its wits, its faith, its courage, and its astonishment, and then Father O’Malley asked slowly and ominously:

“And what have you done with the body of this holy creature, if indeed it has a body?”

“It has a body—a very substantial body. In fact, it’s as large as a young elephant, twenty feet tall. It’s lying in Hangar F, under guard.”

Father O’Malley shook his head in horror, looked at his Protestant colleagues, and then passed over them to the rabbi and said to him:

“What are your thoughts, Rabbi Bernstein?”

Since Rabbi Bernstein represented the oldest faith that was concerned with angels, the others deferred to him.

“I think we ought to look upon it immediately,” the rabbi said.

“I agree,” said Father O’Malley.

The other clergy joined in this agreement, and they repaired to Hangar F, a journey not without difficulty, for by now the press had come to focus on the story, and the general and the clergy ran a sort of gauntlet of pleading questions as they made their way on foot to Hangar F. The guards there barred the press, and the clergy entered with General Drummond and General Mackenzie and half a dozen other staff officers. The angel was uncovered, and the men made a circle around the great, beautiful thing, and then for almost five minutes there was silence.

Father O’Malley broke the silence. “God forgive us,” he said.

There was a circle of amens, and then more silence, and finally Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, said:

“It could conceivably be a natural phenomenon.”

Father O’Malley looked at him wordlessly, and Rabbi Bernstein softened the blow with the observation that even God and His holy angels could be considered as not apart from nature, whereupon Pastor Yager, the Lutheran, objected to a pantheistic viewpoint at a time like this, and Father O’Malley snapped:

“The devil with this theological nonsense! The plain fact of the matter is that we are standing in front of one of God’s holy angels, which we in our animal-like sinfulness have slain. What penance we must do is more to the point.”

“Penance is your field, gentlemen,” said General Drummond. “I have the problem of a war, the press, and this body.”

“This body, as you call it,” said Father O’Malley, “obviously should be sent to the Vatican—immediately, if you ask me.”

“Oh, ho!” snorted Whitcomb. “The Vatican! No discussion, no exchange of opinion—oh, no, just ship it off to the Vatican where it can be hidden in some secret dungeon with any other evidence of God’s divine favor—”

“Come now, come now,” said Rabbi Bernstein soothingly. “We are witness to something very great and holy, and we should not argue as to where this holy thing of God belongs. I think it is obvious that it belongs in Jerusalem.”

While this theological discussion raged, it occurred to General Clayborne Mackenzie that his own bridges needed mending, and he stepped outside to where the press—swollen by now to almost the entire press corps in Viet Nam—waited, and of course they grabbed him.

“Is it true, General?”

“Is what true?”

“Did you shoot down an angel?”

“Yes, I did,” the old warrior stated forthrightly.

“For heaven’s sake, why?” asked a woman photographer.

“It was a mistake,” said Old Hell and Hardtack modestly.

“You mean you didn’t see it?” asked another voice.

“No, sir. Peripheral, if you know what I mean. I was in the gunship zapping Charlie, and bang—there it was.”

The press was skeptical. A dozen questions came, all to the point of how he knew that it was an angel.

“You don’t ask why a river’s a river, or a donkey’s a donkey,” Mackenzie said bluntly. “Anyway, we have professional opinion inside.”

Inside, the professional opinion was divided and angry. All were agreed that the angel was a sign—but what kind of a sign was another matter entirely. Pastor Yager held that it was a sign for peace, calling for an immediate cease-fire. Whitcomb, the Episcopalian, held, however, that it was merely a condemnation of indiscriminate zapping, while the rabbi and the priest held that it was a sign—period. Drummond said that sooner or later the press must be allowed in and that the network men must be permitted to put the dead angel on television. Whitcomb and the rabbi agreed. O’Malley and Yager demurred. General Robert L. Robert of the Engineer Corps arrived with secret information that the whole thing was a put-on by the Russians and that the angel was a robot, but when they attempted to cut the flesh to see whether the angel bled or not, the skin proved to be impenetrable.

At that moment the angel stirred, just a trifle, yet enough to make the clergy and brass gathered around him leap back to give him room—for that gigantic twenty-foot form, weighing better than half a ton, was one thing dead and something else entirely alive. The angel’s biceps were as thick around as a man’s body, and his great, beautiful head was mounted on a neck almost a yard in diameter. Even the clerics were sufficiently hazy on angelology to be at all certain that even an angel might not resent being shot down. As he stirred a second time, the men around him moved even farther away, and some of the brass nervously loosened their sidearms.

“If this holy creature is alive,” Rabbi Bernstein said bravely, “then he will have neither hate nor anger toward us. His nature is of love and forgiveness. Don’t you agree with me, Father O’Malley?”