Desmond Doss: WWII conscientious objector, Medal of Honor winner

DESMOND DOSS IS PRESENTED WITH THE MEDAL OF HONOR BY PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN

To end this week, when there has been so much talk about Muhammad Ali and his place in history, I thought it might be nice to spend a few minutes on Desmond Doss, a man who ought to be known far more than he is. Perhaps he is; I was not familiar with him before today, when I read that Mel Gibson was directing a movie about him, and I consider myself a fairly well-read man, but maybe most people have heard of him and I've had my head in a hole or something.

Pfc Desmond Doss served as a medic in World War II. He was a conscientious objector, due to his Seventh-Day Adventist beliefs, but he did not refuse induction, nor did he spend the war behind a desk. In 1945, he was involved in the battle for Okinawa, one of the most brutal actions in the Pacific Theater. By the time it was all over, Doss had earned two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts, as well as the Congressional Medal of Honor - the first time the Medal of Honor had ever been awarded to a conscientious objector. At this point, I think it's helpful to look at the citation that accompanied the award:

He was a company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades' wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers' return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.

Incredible, isn't it? Doss was discharged from the Army in 1946 and spent five years undergoing medical treatment for those injuries.

What this shows? Two things: first, Desmond Doss was a true hero, one who acted selflessly and with great courage. It's not reasonable to assume there are very many like him, or else everyone who served in the military would have the Medal of Honor. Second, You don't need to take up a weapon to be a hero. You don't need to kill your enemy to demonstrate your bravery. You don't have to shun military service altogether to be true to your beliefs.

So as you read the countless articles and listen to all the words spilled out in praise of Muhammad Ali, I thought it might be nice to remember men like Desmond Doss as well. Conscientious objector, Medal of Honor awardee, American hero.

Throwback Thursday: The power to move the world

Lately, I've been spending a good amount of time in the year 1968. Several of the TV Guides I've written about in the last few weeks have been from the 1967-68 period, and I've been studying some media coverage of the news events of that year, in particular the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

I've never been a fan of the Kennedys politically, but I have often admired their style if not their substance. John was in a class by himself, and Ted had a long life, which means that Robert has been caught somewhere in the middle. To be honest, I'd never given a great deal of thought to his impact on history, despite the fact I have clearer (if still limited) memories of his death than I do of John's.

Quite by accident, I happened to stumble onto a website that proved a treasure trove of radio coverage about RFK's assassination and funeral, which I wrote about over at the TV blog. In listening to the broadcasts, and investing some money in the accompanying television broadcasts, I came to a bit more of an appreciation of Bobby Kennedy's style, and some of the convulsive reaction to his death. There is much that is hyperbole about his life and death; for example, I don't think he would have won the Democratic nomination, much less been elected president; Hubert Humphrey was already quite close to the number of delegates needed to win, and RFK's victory over Gene McCarthy in the California primary (which Kennedy had been celebrating when he was shot) was in fact much narrower than it should have been. Many of Kennedy's most astute advisors (Lawrence O'Brien, for example) felt that he never really had a chance of winning. At most, he might have assumed the position that wound up residing with George McGovern, and in that light one can contemplate whether or not Kennedy would have given Richard Nixon a run for his money in 1972.

Kennedy speaking at the University of Cape Town, 1966

But I digress. One of the benefits of being plunged into the Kennedy phenomenon is that it's given me exposure to some quite remarkable things. Whereas Jack's gift was his charming demeanor, and Ted's was his debauchery, Bobby's appears to have been his eloquence in the written word. In 1964, introducing the JFK memorial film at the Democratic convention, he quoted Shakespeare, which was perhaps the last time anyone spoke that literately at any political convention. I excerpted one of his most famous speeches last week, one that he'd given in South Africa in 1966, and I'm going to present another, longer excerpt here in a moment. I've recordings of Kennedy giving this speech, and I'll admit it comes across with a bit more power on paper than in his delivery, which at the time was more halting, more self-conscious than it would be later on. This portion of his speech was read by Ted at Bobby's funeral, and for all the grief I've given Ted Kennedy over the years for his bloviating style, in this particular case he nailed it. The words themselves, and the phrases, carry such power that Ted's flat, emotionless delivery stays out of the way and allows one to ponder their true force. If you want to hear either Bobby or Ted delivering it, you can easily find clips on YouTube; I prefer to look at them on the page. Some comments will follow.

"There is," said an Italian philosopher, "nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation and the road is strewn with many dangers.

[M]any of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation.

[…] It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. […]

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change. […] I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

[There is] the temptation to follow the easy and familiar path of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind. And everyone here will ultimately be judged -- will ultimately judge himself -- on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

These are timeless words, more stunning because of how applicable they are to our times. For as we've experienced the collapse of confidence in government, the contempt (most of it justified) in which politics is seen, the decay of institutions formerly held in esteem, we realize that much that is important in life has been reduced to a bare essential.

There are many ways to, as Kennedy put it, "enter the conflict." It is not necessary for us to do everything, but imperative that we do something. For one man to stand up and fight the machine, whatever that machine happens to be, may seem a futile act; it is when others see and follow that man that change becomes a possibility. But, as Kennedy says, it takes the courage to stand up - despite threats, despite ridicule, despite the loneliness and isolation that often comes from being the first one to stand up.

And the change that will happen, the change that must happen, cannot come from institutions, but must come from people acting together. When I retired from competitive politics I remarked on the single most important lesson I'd learned: you can't change the world by passing a law; you can only change it by converting hearts and minds. And it isn't done in Washington, or in some state capital; it comes in your interactions with your family, your friends and loved ones, your neighbors, your co-workers, those in your wider community. It comes in the church you attend, the organizations to which you belong, the places you spend your spare time. And all the money, all the power, all the prestige in the world doesn't mean a damn otherwise.  You can't let the standards of the world determine your definition of success, of happiness, of making a difference.

There is much lamenting within the conservative movement that the culture war is lost, that Hollywood and the media have combined to freeze out the conservative voice. There are those on all sides who decry the corruption of Big Business, of the multimillionaires that often worship at no higher altar than the bottom line; and of Big Government, and those politicians who seek only to preserve their own power and line their own pockets. And here we must exhibit the courage of which Kennedy speaks, to turn away from the wealth and power which the modern world offers, in order to take the road less traveled, one which may contain hardship and heartache but ultimately emerges triumphant.

As I said, this is a remarkable speech, and whether or not RFK was responsible in toto for writing the words, he undoubtedly believed in what they meant. One of Kennedy's contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, was even more gifted at it - unparalleled, in my opinion.  Is there anyone today who uses such words to appeal to man's higher nature with an essentially optimistic message? And if not, why not? And what does that say about us?

Bowie

I quoted from this song once, when I was running for the state legislature so many years ago. There was something noble about it, the idea that it wasn't old-fashioned to dream of big things and grand deeds, to think that such things were possible for ordinary individuals.

It's perhaps the quintessential Bowie song, the one that so many have come back to in the days since his death, and I think it's because it strikes something in the hearts of people, the possibility of striving for something, even if it's just for one day, even if you wind up failing in the end. And there is something noble about that, particularly in the "why bother" world we seem to have lapsed into too often.

There's no sense in adding to the millions of words written, not when one has nothing new to offer. A couple of very good posts from people I follow in unlikely places, ones you might not ordinarily read: F1 journalist Joe Saward here, and Catholic blogger Steve Skojec here. Check them out when you get the chance.

And here's perhaps the quintessential performance of the quintessential song, at least given the context: Bowie singing Heroes at Live Aid in 1985.

We can be heroes

A few years ago - well, almost seven, to be exact - I wrote about one of the novels that made a seminal impact on the youthful Hadley - Walter F. Murphy's The Vicar of Christ. It's a book that holds up surprisingly well today, as does this review. Considering the novel's protagonist - a man who is elected pope and takes the name Francis I - I though it might also still be of interest.

I've linked a couple of times in past weeks to James Bowman's site, where he's been discussing a series of movies he's presented, entitled "The American Movie Hero." Bowman presents three architypes of movie heroes: the virtuous hero (Gary Cooper, John Wayne), the "cool" hero (Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen), and the cartoon hero (Harrison Ford, in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

It's difficult to craft a good story without a hero of some type, even if's only an anti-hero. Show me a flawed story, whether movie, show or book, and I'd suggest one of the major problems is the lack of a hero. Bowman doesn't presume to discuss all types of heroes, and therefore I'd suggest the existence of another: the doomed hero.

The doomed hero encompasses elements of all three types listed above. He probably comes closest to the virtuous hero, the one who fights for an ideal; who, as Bowman says, sees "the work that needs to be done," and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of the doomed hero. However, the doomed hero can also share elements of the cool hero in the sense of fatalism and world-weariness that accompanies his mission, which can include a moral ambiguity about his work. It's more difficult to see the similarities with the comic, or larger than life, hero, although the doomed hero often appears in works of an epic, larger than life, scale.

Most of all, when watching or reading about the doomed hero, there is the sense on the part of the witness that "this isn't going to turn out well." Think of Maximus, the character portrayed by Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Not only is there a sense of foreboding about Maximus throughout the film, that although he's certain to triumph he's also going to pay a heavy price, there's also the feeling that this is as it should be, that there really isn't any other way it could happen. The doomed hero meets this with a sense of resignation - the resignation that you see in Steve McQueen's face in The Towering Inferno, as his character, Fire Chief O'Hallorhan, heads back into the burning building in a last effort to save the lives of those trapped inside. The expression on McQueen's face (through which McQueen usually did his best acting) tells you that he doesn't expect to come out of this building alive, and it's perhaps more a testimonial to McQueen's star power than anything else that he somewhat surprisingly survives his mission, rescuing those inside to boot.

This has been perhaps a somewhat roundabout introduction to Declan Walsh, the doomed hero of Walter Murphy's 1978 novel The Vicar of Christ, a book that probably should be better known than it is. We know he's doomed before the story even starts, really: in a brief introduction, the unnamed narrator explains that he's on a mission to write the biography of the martyred Walsh, who died as Pope Francesco I. So, having been told in the opening pages that our hero dies, we are immediately plunged backward into the remarkable story of Walsh's life: a Korean War hero and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Chief Justice of the United States and, finally, Vicar of Christ.

If all this sounds a little like just a too much for one lifetime (not to mention straining the credulity of the reader; even a favorable reviewer called it "preposterous"), there's good reason. I'd read the book myself one summer during my college years, afterward discussing it with a professor who enjoyed discussing that type of thing, and making this very point. Of course, he shrugged in response - after all, the story wasn't really about realism. It was about the epic, mythological hero. Were the adventures of Ulysses, Beowulf and Arthur any more realistic? It was big book for the reader to get lost in (over 600 pages), a bigger-than-life story that reminded one that life itself, in fact, is bigger than life.

The Vicar of Christ tells this epic story through the eyes of four people who knew Walsh well – a fellow soldier in Korea, a Supreme Court associate justice, the Cardinal who spearheads Walsh’s election as Pope (the book’s longest section), and, as a type of coda, the journalist who provides the inside story of (the now) Francesco’s final days. In doing so, Murphy tells us as much about the narrators, who appear and reappear through Walsh’s life, as he does about Walsh. Their distinctive voices, their (at times) compelling stories, their frequently contradictory opinions of characters they each come in contact with, and their insights into the enigmatic Walsh/Francesco all serve to weave the disparate threads of the story together. We know Walsh as they did, but in the end it’s unlikely that we know him any better then they did, for Murphy as author only lets us see Walsh through their eyes, giving us as much knowledge as he does them.

Murphy, given the chance to provide us with easy answers about Walsh, declines the opportunity and leaves the task to us. Occasionally one of the narrators will provide us with insight that another narrator lacks, but ultimately we’re left to guess about Walsh as much as they do. And while it’s clear that we’re meant to admire Walsh, it’s not at all clear that we’re supposed to understand him.

Murphy is never blind to Walsh’s faults. In an effective use of the narrative form, Walsh’s actions – good and bad – are always given to us as seen through the eyes of others, denying Walsh the opportunity (common to so many fictional characters) to provide a self-serving explanation. (When we do hear those explanations, they’re filtered through the translations of the narrators, further separating Walsh from the reader.)

As to those faults, they are a mixture of the objective (adultery, arrogance, crudity) and the subjective (a liberal Catholicism that will not rest easily with many more orthodox Catholics, though ultimately it does not get in the way of the story). But if great men have great faults, they frequently also have great virtues as well. A towering intellect, a driving ambition, an inner confidence that helps to hide an uncertainty self-knowledge, and an uncertain growth that (depending on your own reading of Walsh) either leads him far away from his old self, or brings him to the fulfillment of his destiny – these are the traits that Murphy uses to confirm his verdict of Declan Walsh/Pope Francesco I as a great, if flawed, man.

It’s always been a wonder to me that The Vicar of Christ, which was published in the heyday of the television miniseries, was not made into one. Its truly epic scale that covers all of the American passions – politics, religion, war, justice, lust – made the story a natural, and I’d thought that at one time I’d read of the story being optioned; alas, however, nothing apparently ever came of it.

So what, ultimately, do we make of Walter Murphy’s The Vicar of Christ? Doubtless it represents many things to many different readers – a hoary relic, the last gasp of a fading liberal Catholicism; a reminder, through the mists of time, of the legendary hero-warrior; a story, uniquely American, of ambition and accomplishment; or perhaps a universal story, that of triumph and tragedy, loss and redemption. At the very least it presents us with a doomed hero that would have done Wagner proud, a man sacrificed on the pyre of his own beliefs. Was he martyred for the faith, or stopped from destroying it? Or could it perhaps be both? That is one of the many mysteries the reader encounters, mysteries likely to be mulled over in the mind for some time to come. Not everyone will like it, or agree with it. Some may be bored with it. Fewer, in all likelihood, will quickly forget it.

One thing is for certain, however. As the college professor told me those many years ago, it is a modern demonstration of the power of myth, the need for heroes, the drama of life. And life itself requires some suspension of ordinary, mortal belief, doesn’t it? For even the most ordinary of lives is so full of miracles that, were we to write about it in simple truth, nobody would believe it.
◙

What in the World Now?

By Bobby

The Demise of Good Music on Media. If there's one thing I've learned here, we have a love of classical music. Obviously, with Spoleto and related events starting off Interstate 26 in Charleston, learning the information on the most popular station in the area is always a good thing. The recession has taken a toll, however, on the quantity of material available. Also, there's a big hockey series in the minors to worry (Stingrays vs Aces).

A recent technical bulletin posted by the cable company noted that MusicChoice has decided make channel changes to their channels. Among the channels staying are the natural list of big pop hits, including a new hip-hop channel ("MC Mix Tape", older hip-hop), music for toddlers, "True Country," but opera and musicals have been removed from the list. I had to wonder what that shows when people would rather listen to hip-hop rather than opera, and when churches are now preferring hip-hop over sacred masterpieces, what it means.

Do They Know What's In That Song? The sexual deviants have taken control in the White House, and now they have grabbed courts and the New England Area in attempting to rewrite "marriage" to appease their own lobby. But while working out recently, a popular tune by Stefani Germanotta was blaring through the class that I thought the lyrics needed Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten to decipher initially. While at a dinner last week, I saw numerous children dancing to that song and I could not believe the lyrics of the song when I went inside the letters. It was using gambling metaphors from roulette, poker, and blackjack being used for X-rated discussion, including explicit use of language that these children should never be hearing. Out of the mouths and ears of these children are these questionable songs, and the worst part is the sexual deviancy being discussed on the songs and other sexually charged explicit lyrics that would send Mark L. Walberg dropping people two metres down to their deaths. Sexually explicit language was in the song where if a common-sense person heard such talk, that would be worth a $25,000 fine, and 25 points.

When the dance teacher wanted to teach the routine to a coeducational group, she warned the men that it was too "girlie". It was not known until I learned about the sexual deviancy of the song the exact reason for that. Sadly, when it was taught to younger people, the males wanted to dance like women in those parts.

It was a downright raunchy song by Miss Germanotta about another type of sexual deviancy. The sad issue is we have too many who do not understand the messages of these songs. Yet, they are huge fans of it because of the beat. Even Miss Germanotta wants a "girlie man" and that's not what I want. I'd rather be a strong serious man who is dancing with a former Duke cheerleader who is a good friend of mine (and we were partners in an adult dance class) than be courted by someone who wants a girlie man. Don't be any type of girlie man!

Proof is in the Pudding. In an article that came to my attention this week regarding the church music controversy I have learned in the past few years since I began taking voice lessons, one source noted at one of the popular "life enhancement centres" that masquerade as a church was taking rock music at a level of 98-108 decibels, and that the people wanted only to feel the music. If this is the type of "music" in churches a generation has been trained in hearing with no theological content, what happens to them when they grow older? It seems many of them have lost the faith, as they walk into a college campus and are not firmly entrenched in the faith, and when they walk into church, they hear only "dead music" that is serious in its content, with live organs and does not have the 98-108 decibel music of feelings such as the latest megahit from the secular publishers.

This Just In. Chris Roseborough of the Extreme Theology site has a great article that would fit with our This Just In segment. Sadly, with the numbers killed each year in baby slaughter that is legalised, it could be true.

Is This Church? Mr. Roseborough also sent this link to a comic about a stupid church. It's supposed to be fiction, but sadly, these things are happening in too many churches. We've gone from suits to business casual, to now anything goes in church dress codes.

Now How's This Bet? GOP 2012 On the Line? Mark Sanford (shrimp and grits from a Charleston restaurant) and Sarah Palin (wild salmon) have a bet on the line in the ECHL Kelly Cup Finals between the Stingrays and Aces. Let's Go Stingrays!

Transnationalism. We are starting to hear of "transnationalism" among the President's judicial nominees to the Department of Justice and the courts. It is the simple idea of using foreign law to overturn local, state, and federal laws (sodomy, abortion, criminals) that led to my comment that our nation's capital was being moved to Brussels. Now they're talking about our Constitution being illegal, replaced by foreign laws. Now how much worse can it be? I said our nation's capital was being moved to the "capital" of the European Union in Belgium because of the attitudes of these justices. I did not vote for any of these pro-transnationalists to any position, yet like a crush car, I am being smashed by the monster truck of the liberal supermajority.

The Real Goal. I warned that the President's plans for automakers was to push for the microcars months ago. That's why he was wanted total control over automakers. This is turning nearly into Hitler. Just imagine the newspapers showing the number of dead caused by a Big One on the way to school. He wants to control two by force because they focused on trucks and not cars, and the other one he already has through concessions to switch to a three-tiered (micro, mini, small) line, and a willing Governess who praises them for switching to small. I don't want to drive a car that uses an engine smaller than a World Superbike motorcycle, and lighter than a P1 car in the 24 Heures du Mans. Yet that's what the President thinks . . . it fits transnationalism too since Europe, not us, dictates our autos the way they dictate our laws.

Our Troops. One of my college friends is in Afghanistan with the Army. I also have other friends in the services. Let us remember those who have been killed in action over these wonderful years. Sadly, what they teach in our schools today is to hate the heroes of battle, and to promote anti-war freaks such as Jeanette Rankin and Barbara Lee. Heroes such as Patton and Eisenhower are now relegated to the scrapheap under revisionists' attitudes against heroes and in favour of goats. We need to remember our battles.

The doomed hero

I've linked a couple of times in past weeks to James Bowman's site, where he's been discussing a series of movies he's presented, entitled "The American Movie Hero." Bowman presents three architypes of movie heroes: the virtuous hero (Gary Cooper, John Wayne), the "cool" hero (Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen), and the cartoon hero (Harrison Ford, in Raiders of the Lost Ark).

It's difficult to craft a good story without a hero of some type, even if's only an anti-hero. Show me a flawed story, whether movie, show or book, and I'd suggest one of the major problems is the lack of a hero. Bowman doesn't presume to discuss all types of heroes, and therefore I'd suggest the existence of another: the doomed hero.

The doomed hero encompasses elements of all three types listed above. He probably comes closest to the virtuous hero, the one who fights for an ideal; who, as Bowman says, sees "the work that needs to be done," and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of the doomed hero. However, the doomed hero can also share elements of the cool hero in the sense of fatalism and world-weariness that accompanies his mission, which can include a moral ambiguity about his work. It's more difficult to see the similarities with the comic, or larger than life, hero, although the doomed hero often appears in works of an epic, larger than life, scale.

Most of all, when watching or reading about the doomed hero, there is the sense on the part of the witness that "this isn't going to turn out well." Think of Maximus, the character portrayed by Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Not only is there a sense of foreboding about Maximus throughout the film, that although he's certain to triumph he's also going to pay a heavy price, there's also the feeling that this is as it should be, that there really isn't any other way it could happen. The doomed hero meets this with a sense of resignation - the resignation that you see in Steve McQueen's face in The Towering Inferno, as his character, Fire Chief O'Hallorhan, heads back into the burning building in a last effort to save the lives of those trapped inside. The expression on McQueen's face (through which McQueen usually did his best acting) tells you that he doesn't expect to come out of this building alive, and it's perhaps more a testimonial to McQueen's star power than anything else that he somewhat surprisingly survives his mission, rescuing those inside to boot.

This has been perhaps a somewhat roundabout introduction to Declan Walsh, the doomed hero of Walter Murphy's 1978 novel The Vicar of Christ, a book that probably should be better known than it is. We know he's doomed before the story even starts, really: in a brief introduction, the unnamed narrator explains that he's on a mission to write the biography of the martyred Walsh, who died as Pope Francesco I. So, having been told in the opening pages that our hero dies, we are immediately plunged backward into the remarkable story of Walsh's life: a Korean War hero and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Chief Justice of the United States and, finally, Vicar of Christ.

If all this sounds a little like just a too much for one lifetime (not to mention straining the credulity of the reader; even a favorable reviewer called it "preposterous"), there's good reason. I'd read the book myself one summer during my college years, afterward discussing it with a professor who enjoyed discussing that type of thing, and making this very point. Of course, he shrugged in response - after all, the story wasn't really about realism. It was about the epic, mythological hero. Were the adventures of Ulysses, Beowulf and Arthur any more realistic? It was big book for the reader to get lost in (over 600 pages), a bigger-than-life story that reminded one that life itself, in fact, is bigger than life.

The Vicar of Christ tells this epic story through the eyes of four people who knew Walsh well – a fellow soldier in Korea, a Supreme Court associate justice, the Cardinal who spearheads Walsh’s election as Pope (the book’s longest section), and, as a type of coda, the journalist who provides the inside story of (the now) Francesco’s final days. In doing so, Murphy tells us as much about the narrators, who appear and reappear through Walsh’s life, as he does about Walsh. Their distinctive voices, their (at times) compelling stories, their frequently contradictory opinions of characters they each come in contact with, and their insights into the enigmatic Walsh/Francesco all serve to weave the disparate threads of the story together. We know Walsh as they did, but in the end it’s unlikely that we know him any better then they did, for Murphy as author only lets us see Walsh through their eyes, giving us as much knowledge as he does them.

Murphy, given the chance to provide us with easy answers about Walsh, declines the opportunity and leaves the task to us. Occasionally one of the narrators will provide us with insight that another narrator lacks, but ultimately we’re left to guess about Walsh as much as they do. And while it’s clear that we’re meant to admire Walsh, it’s not at all clear that we’re supposed to understand him.

Murphy is never blind to Walsh’s faults. In an effective use of the narrative form, Walsh’s actions – good and bad – are always given to us as seen through the eyes of others, denying Walsh the opportunity (common to so many fictional characters) to provide a self-serving explanation. (When we do hear those explanations, they’re filtered through the translations of the narrators, further separating Walsh from the reader.)

As to those faults, they are a mixture of the objective (adultery, arrogance, crudity) and the subjective (a liberal Catholicism that will not rest easily with many more orthodox Catholics, though ultimately it does not get in the way of the story). But if great men have great faults, they frequently also have great virtues as well. A towering intellect, a driving ambition, an inner confidence that helps to hide an uncertainty self-knowledge, and an uncertain growth that (depending on your own reading of Walsh) either leads him far away from his old self, or brings him to the fulfillment of his destiny – these are the traits that Murphy uses to confirm his verdict of Declan Walsh/Pope Francesco I as a great, if flawed, man.

It’s always been a wonder to me that The Vicar of Christ, which was published in the heyday of the television miniseries, was not made into one. Its truly epic scale that covers all of the American passions – politics, religion, war, justice, lust – made the story a natural, and I’d thought that at one time I’d read of the story being optioned; alas, however, nothing apparently ever came of it.

So what, ultimately, do we make of Walter Murphy’s The Vicar of Christ? Doubtless it represents many things to many different readers – a hoary relic, the last gasp of a fading liberal Catholicism; a reminder, through the mists of time, of the legendary hero-warrior; a story, uniquely American, of ambition and accomplishment; or perhaps a universal story, that of triumph and tragedy, loss and redemption. At the very least it presents us with a doomed hero that would have done Wagner proud, a man sacrificed on the pyre of his own beliefs. Was he martyred for the faith, or stopped from destroying it? Or could it perhaps be both? That is one of the many mysteries the reader encounters, mysteries likely to be mulled over in the mind for some time to come. Not everyone will like it, or agree with it. Some may be bored with it. Fewer, in all likelihood, will quickly forget it.

One thing is for certain, however. As the college professor told me those many years ago, it is a modern demonstration of the power of myth, the need for heroes, the drama of life. And life itself requires some suspension of ordinary, mortal belief, doesn’t it? For even the most ordinary of lives is so full of miracles that, were we to write about it in simple truth, nobody would believe it.
◙