Points Summer Book Club

FYI, I finished the book last night, and I've gotta say that I can't think of a single novel I've read in years that has affected me as profoundly as this one. I had to force myself to read to the end, actually; it was searing. I feel as if I've not been carrying a book around, but a chunk of bleeding flesh. I told my wife that had I read a novel about life in a concentration camp, I don't think it would have been so horrible as the descriptions of life under bombardment at the front.

The passages we're talking about today, in which the soldiers try to imagine life beyond the war, put me in mind of something my friend Jason told me a few years ago. Jason's now 39, and is the youngest of a large family. His father fought in the Second World War as a bombardier in Europe. After helping to save civilization, he came back to small-town Louisiana and took up a vocation as a house painter. Jason's dad was pretty old when he (Jason) was a boy, and used to spend summers going to reunions of his squadron. In fact, said Jason, the war preoccupied his father's life to a degree Jason found hard to relate to.

Then Jason saw "Saving Private Ryan," and it all became much clearer to him. His father had lived through something that is simply unparalleled in human experience. Every single day promised death. The drama of daily life was unendurable -- yet these men endured it. And after that, normal life became impossible -- normal life in the sense of routine existence. Nothing could quite match the terrible intensity of the war. Jason's dad was closer to the men who came through that fire with him than to just about anybody else. The emotional intensity of the war bonded those men in ways that seem almost superhuman.

Consider the conclusion of Chapter Five, in which Paul and Kat are together roasting a goose. Excerpt:

We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common -- now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.

Fr. Vincent Capodanno was a military chaplain who served in Vietnam. He was killed heroically in action (read the Wikipedia entry on him). Father Capodanno was a Maryknoll priest who had come back to the US after serving a tour in Vietnam. His religious order was strongly anti-war, and Fr. Capodanno found he could not relate to them at all. It wasn't so much that they opposed the Vietnam War as it was that their anti-war convictions led them, in his view, to refuse to sympathize or have compassion at all for the American soldiers fighting it. Fr. Capodanno was so lost back home that he requested to be sent back to the front, to be with his men, whom he died serving.

Think about that. He loved the soldiers so much that he wanted to share their suffering, even unto death, rather than live safely at home with comrades who had no feeling for what GIs were enduring. According to his posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor citation, this is how Father Vincent Capodanno of New York City died:

In response to reports that the 2d Platoon of M Company was in danger of being overrun by a massed enemy assaulting force, Lt. Capodanno left the relative safety of the company command post and ran through an open area raked with fire, directly to the beleaguered platoon. Disregarding the intense enemy small-arms, automatic-weapons, and mortar fire, he moved about the battlefield administering last rites to the dying and giving medical aid to the wounded. When an exploding mortar round inflicted painful multiple wounds to his arms and legs, and severed a portion of his right hand, he steadfastly refused all medical aid. Instead, he directed the corpsmen to help their wounded comrades and, with calm vigor, continued to move about the battlefield as he provided encouragement by voice and example to the valiant Marines. Upon encountering a wounded corpsman in the direct line of fire of an enemy machine gunner positioned approximately 15 yards away, Lt. Capodanno rushed a daring attempt to aid and assist the mortally wounded corpsman. At that instant, only inches from his goal, he was struck down by a burst of machine gun fire.

Greater love hath no man than that he would lay down his life for his friends.