“Had to calm the nerves a bit,” he said with a grim smile. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to do something like that. Is your wrist okay?”
Maureen looked down at her wrist and shook it for a moment. There was no pain. Still too astonished to answer, she simply nodded.
“That’s a relief.” Father Patrick smiled. “I tried to be careful not to hurt you.”
He moved over to the brown leather chairs in the corner and set his drink on the small oak table between them. He sat himself down in one and gestured to her that she should do likewise.
Maureen didn’t move.
“Maureen,” he said a bit more sternly, “I think I’ve proven that I’m not going to hurt you. But I think you at least owe me a bit of an explanation as to what you’re doing bringing a gun into my home and threatening to shoot me. Now please, sit.”
“I don’t understand,” Maureen mumbled as she made her way over to the chair. “It has to be you.”
“What? It has to be me? Maureen, what are you talking about?”
“I’ve been inside the man’s head, Father. He’s religious. He thinks he’s cleansing the world. These children aren’t just victims, they’re sacrifices.” She sat down and stared at Father Patrick intently. “All you ever seem to talk about is the need to change the world for the better. Maybe somewhere in your crazy head, you think making these sacrifices to your God will bring about this ‘paradise on earth’ you’re looking for.”
“I see,” he nodded and took a small sip of his drink. “Well, you’ve trusted me with secrets of your past, so I guess it’s only fair to share mine.”
He set his half-finished drink on the table and leaned forward in his chair, staring straight ahead, like a man looking deep into his past to a memory that he’d rather forget. “You know that I was a soldier when I was young. What you don’t know—what nobody knows, actually—is what I did in Vietnam during my time there. I was a Marine. I rose incredibly quickly through the ranks. The senior DI in basic singled me out early on as having a certain something, and when I completed my eight weeks of camp, I was placed in a separate company from my classmates. I was to be part of a group of counterintelligence agents. The unit was made up mostly of veteran soldiers pulled from different branches. At the time, mixing the branches was an anomaly, but we were more so, because all our unit’s activities were to be completely confidential. Officially, we didn’t exist.
“We shipped over in the spring of 1969 after five months of jungle training and briefing. Our missions were going to all be behind enemy lines, all geared toward cutting supply lines, POW rescues if they were possible, that sort of thing. At least, that’s what they told us. It all started that way, but as the missions started to pile up, we found ourselves doing less and less subversion and more and more—what they called—extreme interrogation. Soon, all we were doing was kidnapping suspected Vietcong and torturing them for information. It didn’t even seem to matter how credible our intel was.
“We’d been in country for about a year, and around this time, word came to us about a pro-North terrorist cell across the border in Laos. This was one of those tips that didn’t actually come from our military intelligence, just some vague rumors among the locals, but our Sergeant decided to pursue it. A lot of us felt it was a little thin, and we debated the ethics of entering that country, but we had our orders. It was a long, two-day slog through the jungle, up around the peak of Rao Co, and over the border. Our Vietnamese guides left us at this point, and we continued toward the village for another half a day. We circled it just before nightfall. It was as small of a jungle settlement as you could imagine, a collection of less than a dozen thatched huts. A few small fires were still lit, but we saw no one moving around. No insurgents, nothing. It was decided that we’d proceed at dawn.
“The next morning, we rounded up everyone in the village. We were surprised at the lack of resistance. There wasn’t a single weapon fired by anyone in their defense. A search of the village and surrounding area didn’t yield anything to show the rumors that brought us there were true. No guns, no explosives. They must have been dealing in information, our officers thought, helping the Vietcong by spying, by playing the innocent villagers. A few members of our team were well versed in interrogation tactics and spoke Vietnamese. Of course, that was useless, as the villagers were Laotian, but that didn’t seem to matter to them. They screamed at the villagers—at a mother clutching her crying baby, at an old man cowering on the ground—trying to extract any information they could. Each villager had the same response: a wide-eyed look of horror, a ferocious shaking of the head, and tears. Hardly the behavior of hardened agents for the North.
“Finally, our sergeant called a stop and told the company to line up the villagers and execute them for aiding the enemy. And we did. Seventeen women, fourteen men, and nine children, all their lives snuffed out in a burst of machine gun fire. Afterwards, we followed orders to set fire to the village and left.
“A few days after we returned, I went to see the unit’s chaplain to talk about the morality of what we had just done. The chaplain assured me that we, and by extension America, were doing God’s work by defeating the evils of Communism and bringing light to a dark world. He assured me that the villagers did not know the light of
