Page 263 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 251

“Hey, you, Ski,” Lock said. “Stop spitting out your food!”
“My uncle was a chaplain,” I said. “He was in the Battle of the
Bulge. He had his picture in Life magazine saying Mass in front of
a Jeep in Belgium.”
Ski scowled. “Kennedy stopped the Russians, didn’t he?”
Keith Fahnhorst said, “If he hadn’t, and if there’d been a war,
the government would have made us stay here inside Misery all year
round to keep our clergy exemption. Like in the last war.”
“If Kennedy and Khruschev had gone to war,” Ski said, “there
wouldn’t be any Misery. There’d be fallout all over the place. My
pastor says so.”
“Phooey.”
Everyone had a two-bit opinion. We argued on till Gunn rang
the bell for silence and we stacked the dishes. I loved Irish Jack Ken-
nedy. His call to arms was stronger than the call to the priesthood. I
was committed to Jack Kennedy. If he had taken us to war, I would
have knocked on the redheaded Jesuit’s door and said, “O’Malley,
I cannot sit still at Misery while the world blows up.” I would have
joined my brother Thommy in the Marines. Kennedy had drawn a
line with the blockade of Cuba. Washington peaked at war intensity.
Any Soviet arms-running ship refusing inspection and immediate
return to Russia, he ordered sunk.
Gunn and Karg and all the old priests who had served in World
War II grew more excited than I’d ever seen them. They brought
radios into the refectory, and we ate quietly listening to Kennedy’s
Roman-orator’s voice crackling direct to us between reports from
on-the-spot announcers. In a day, the first letters from home, stuffed
by boys’ parents with newspaper clippings, showed us how fright-
ened the world had been with civilization and mothers and fathers
and children teetering on the brink, the real brink, of real nuclear
annihilation.
Himself I blessed: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He committed him-
self. He took a stand. He dared face the bravado of the Communist
dialectic. He remained calm. He resisted dropping nuclear bombs.
Finally, after four tense days, when I did not know if I would live to
be a priest or die fighting in a nuclear war, the blockade lifted and U
Thant went from the United Nations to Cuba. We were wary: when

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