Christopher Goffard - You Will See Fire

Kaiser faithfully attended the Latin Mass Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. on the base and wrestled with the possibility he might have to take a human life in war. The fearsome presence of the water-cooled, tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun that, as a squad leader, he carried—the weapon spewed six hundred rounds a minute, punctuated by phosphorescent tracers, and grew so hot that it boiled the water in the tanks—made it impossible to ignore the question. The army was shaping him with ruthless efficiency into a Red-killing machine. “We discussed that very thing,” Meek said. “I had a lot of problems myself with it, if I could fire into human beings with that weapon or not.” Still, he recalled Kaiser as “very much a patriot,” a full-blooded soldier ready to follow orders. Ecclesiastes told him there was a time to kill, as did the Church doctrine of a just war. Deeply embedded in his ideological firmament was a sense of the malignancy of global communism and the “materialistic atheism” it represented; the struggle against the Soviet Union was nothing less than a fight against the principalities of darkness. It was one thing to pray for the conversion of Russia, as every good Catholic did, but only a fool forgot his gun.

NEAR THE END of Kaiser’s three-year army stint, he was demoted from sergeant to corporal in an incident whose details remain obscure. Having lost certain archives in a warehouse fire, the army has no record of what cost Kaiser his rank. “Some of the black soldiers under his supervision refused to work and he confronted them,” according to an FBI summary of his sister Carolita’s account Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. . “As a result of his intolerance of reverse discrimination and his actions at the time, he was demoted.” Later, she said her brother’s solidarity with the black soldiers got him in trouble—racist townsmen surrounding the Fort Bragg base were aghast at the presence of the black soldiers Kaiser had stationed to guard a barracks of white nurses. Refusing to remove the black soldiers, or to apologize to the townsmen, he accepted demotion rather than relent.

That account was echoed by Kaiser’s brother Francis Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. , who portrayed him as a victim of the army’s racial backwardness and cowardice: “The townfolks didn’t want ‘niggers’ guarding people. He said, ‘I don’t have niggers. I have soldiers.’”

It takes only a little imagination to reconcile the variations of the story. It’s easy to picture Kaiser as a hard-driving, brook-no-nonsense commander who demanded the strictest discipline; he obeyed orders unstintingly and likely expected the same from his troops, who might have bristled at his harshness. It’s possible that his black soldiers, sensing the danger, did not particularly relish the duty of guarding a barracks of white nurses in the Jim Crow South of 1957. It would have been consistent with Kaiser’s character to insist: Right is right; wrong is wrong.

By the time he was demoted, his sister recalled, he had already made the decision to leave the army. He had grown tired, he would later tell people, of teaching recruits how to kill.

His time in uniform coincided with a tense but quiet period for America’s fighting forces, and he left the service, unlike his brother, without having seen a battle zone. There is no record of a sudden mystical experience, an epiphany, a catalyzing moment that led to his enrollment, at age twenty-five, at the Mill Hill Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. Missionaries’ Jesuit school at St. Louis University, in Missouri. His decision to pursue the priesthood surprised no one, since he had spoken of its appeal for years. He told people that he considered it the world’s most important job.

“He was sidestepping God until he couldn’t do it anymore,” as his sister put it, though he did not relish the prospect of urban priesthood and “having to go to ladies’ circles, all the stuff you have to do.” Missionary work seemed the logical fit for a midwestern farm boy still seeking adventure and a measure of freedom.

Mill Hill, a London-based missionary society, had a reputation as a strict and exacting order. Kaiser got a single bed in a little wood-frame house, and he became fast friends with his roommate, a former air force pilot named Tony Barnicle. Their long nighttime chats flouted the rule of magnum silencium, or “the great silence,” which students were expected to observe through the night and morning rituals. The course load encompassed metaphysics, Latin, Plato, Aristotle, and massive doses of Thomas Aquinas.

In snatches of downtime, the seminarians watched films on a sixteen-millimeter projector and played fiercely competitive games of bridge and Monopoly in smoke-choked rooms. Everyone save Kaiser seemed to smoke. Even as they immersed themselves in doctrine, they wrestled with the prospect of giving up any semblance of a normal life. There was a sense of terror, of the massive weight they had agreed to shoulder, when strangers on campus noticed their cassocks and greeted them as “Father.”

“Both of us had a lot of doubts,” Barnicle said. “Every time I was ready to leave, John talked me out of it. Every time John was ready to leave, I talked him out of it. We had both had lives as adults in the military. We had no illusions about going into a life of celibacy.” The ache was sharpened by the site of pretty coeds wandering the campus. Barnicle had had girlfriends; Kaiser acknowledged to his roommate that he was a virgin. “I’m sure he’d fallen in love a couple of times. Daily, you’re faced with the sacrifice of a family,” Barnicle recalled. “We talked about our vocations, and we talked about girls, but we mostly talked about Thomistic philosophy.”