Fifth Gospel:The Odyssey of a Time Traveler in First-Century Palestine Read online

  Next, I climbed out of my uniform of a thousand wrinkles and hit the shower. That was followed by a cup of hot coffee. I felt human once more, so, after dressing in civilian clothes, I headed over to the Secret Service bunkhouse, a long, low, white washed cinderblock building only about sixty yards from the cottage. Clarence wasn’t around just then, but the other guys were friendly enough, if a bit reserved. Aside from my name and the fact that I was a VIP, they knew nothing about me and knew they weren’t supposed to ask. Nevertheless, we chatted amicably about sports, the weather, the surrounding countryside, and how they liked working for Ike. They had been told that I had been given the highest security clearance possible, so they were more than ready to talk about work. They proudly showed me the electronic monitoring room, a place that looked like something out of Buck Rogers, only more sophisticated. The farm was enmeshed in invisible waves of antipersonnel radar for a start. There were also pressure sensors just below the surface of the ground along the perimeter as well as at critical locations in approaches to the house. There were numerous photoelectric beams set up and infrared sensors set to pick up the body heat of would be intruders. The main house itself was hardwired with your good old fashioned contact and magnetic switch burglar alarms. The agents carried out roving patrols at random places and random time intervals, and they had two German Shepherds, either of which, the agents claimed, could track a man through Manhattan at lunch hour without losing the scent. I believed them.

  There were thirty-some agents assigned to the farm at any one time, with about eight sleeping, seven on patrol, one managing the sensor console, eight on ready reserve, and about eight off duty in town or back home. I was astounded at the weaponry they had. In addition to the .357 Magnum pistols they all carried, there were high power rifles with telescopic sights for counter-sniper work, BARs, Thompson submachine guns as well as the M3A1 grease guns so popular in Korea, riot guns, hand grenades, a bazooka, and even a flame thrower. They joked about the last item, saying that they used it only once each year—at the annual bull and oyster roast that the President threw for the Secret Service agents and their families at the farm. They claimed that it was the only way to roast a bull. I do believe that they were pulling my leg.

  When I saw all this exotic stuff, my first reaction was that they were nuts. And, being Aloysius Lightfoot O’Brien, I told them so. Hand grenades, machine guns, and bazookas in the tranquil, pastoral setting of rural Pennsylvania? This was Norman Rockwell country, I told them. What could they possibly be thinking of? Well, they didn’t throw me out, just kind of casually mentioned the storming of Blair House by Puerto Rican nationalists intent on killing President Truman. That had happened only eight years before, in November 1950. And, although the assassination attempt was unsuccessful, it had left one White House policeman dead and two wounded. Furthermore, it could have been worse if one of the terrorists’ guns had not jammed. Four years later, in 1954, three members of the Puerto Rican National Party entered the visitors’ gallery in the Capitol and began shooting. Shot were Representatives Kenneth Allison Roberts of Alabama, Benton Franklin Jensen of Iowa, George Hyde Fallon of Maryland, Alvin Morell Bentley of Michigan, and Clifford Davis of Tennessee. The world was getting to be a pretty tough place, the agents remarked. Properly chastened, I retreated to the cottage.

  I’d no sooner pulled a Louis L’Amour Western off the bookshelf and settled into a comfortable recliner, when there was a knock on the door and Clarence entered. He was in casual dress—old beat-up corduroy pants, a red-checkered flannel shirt, and a blue parka.

  “Hey, how do you feel today?”

  “Great, Clarence. What’s up?”

  “Well, since our meeting with the Old Man isn’t until 7:30 tonight, I figured that you might want to take in the sights. This being Gettysburg and you being a history buff. High Water Mark of the Confederacy and all that. Grab your coat and get your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, putting the novel down. “Let’s go.” I pulled on my denim sheepskin-lined coat, put on my beat-up Stetson, and we were off. Clarence had a white ’54 Buick with Maryland tags waiting outside.

  “Yours?”

  “All mine.”

  We drove down the tree-lined drive in silence, but it was not an uncomfortable silence. It was December 1, 1958. A light snow was falling, and Christmas carols were issuing forth from the radio in the dash. Clarence began to hum along, and I sat back in the plush (they really don’t make them like that anymore) seat and luxuriated in the blast of hot air coming from the car’s powerful heater. We were a long way from the desert. The radio announcer broke into the last chorus of “Good King Wenceslas” to remind everyone that there were only 21 shopping days left until Christmas. Clarence glanced at me.

  “I take it you don’t have any plans for Christmas.”

  “You tell me. Where am I going to be at Christmas?” Clarence laughed. “Well, what’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, just that you’re right. We haven’t been too informative, that’s true. Just hang on until 7:30. Trust me; it’s worth the wait.”

  “I had planned to take a nurse to the Christmas Party at the Officers Club at Nellis, but I hadn’t even gotten around to asking her. No big deal,” I shrugged. When we came to the main road, Jones turned right.

  “You’ve never been to Gettysburg, have you?”

  “No, I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the battle, though.”

  “A good place to start is the Electric Map.”

  “Electric Map?”

  “Yeah. Some buff spent years in research into the battle, in designing the circuits, in constructing the contour map of the area, and in wiring the console. Very impressive. It’s a huge topographic map of the entire surrounding countryside, inlaid with hundreds and hundreds of tiny multicolored light bulbs. A lecturer sits at a console and the lights are dimmed. As he narrates the three days of the battle, he uses the controls to illustrate. For example, the sequential lighting of a row of lights denotes the movement of a column. Flickering lights indicate skirmishes and battles … well, you’ve got to see it to appreciate it. It gives you a great overview of the whole battle. You cover the whole three days in forty minutes.”

  It was a short drive, and we were inside the Visitors Center in just fifteen minutes but had to wait another half hour for the next show to start. We spent the time wandering about the halls, looking at the exhibit cases. Most of the display items were weapons, but there were also uniforms, battle flags, eating and cooking utensils, faded tintypes and daguerreotypes, pages from diaries, even a Civil War surgical kit.

  “Hey, Clarence,” I said, indicating the last, “you can see why one of the nicknames for doctors used to be ‘sawbones.’” The kit consisted, for the most part, of a variety of saws.

  “Yeah,” Clarence answered, “that was pretty much SOP. You got a bad wound in the arm or leg, and because they didn’t know the meaning of sterile procedures, you invariably developed sepsis, which in turn meant that the arm or leg had to be sawed off.” He shivered. “How’d you like being treated by a doctor whose idea of sterilization was washing off his instruments in a bucket of creek water? Or being in a field hospital where no one has ever heard of penicillin? The docs in the field hospitals in World War II and in Korea thought they were doing meatball surgery, but compared to these guys, they were operating under Mayo Clinic conditions.”

  The electric map presentation was fascinating. Since it was December, I wasn’t too surprised to see that there were only eight people besides us in the auditorium. It made the room seem colder, but it also made for no distractions. I folded my arms on the iron railing in the first row, laid my chin on my forearms, and was transported back 95 years in time. I almost felt like some sort of supernatural being, floating ethereally above a battle raging hundreds of feet below on the physical plane. I watched in a most detached fashion while tens of thousands of men strutted and fretted their allotted times on the stage
and then were heard no more. I saw, on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 1863, the battle lines ebb and flow as men made desperate charges and flanking movements. I heard the crash of musketry, the yells, the screams, the clanging of metal against metal. The flashes below were not tiny lights flickering on and off, but muzzle flashes; the dull red glows did not emanate from bulbs, but from campfires. I was rapt.

  We rode around a bit after that, taking in the sights as we followed the battle in chronological order. From the Marsh Creek bridge to McPherson’s Ridge to Little Round Top to Devils Den to the Wheatfield, we were taking it all in, oblivious of time. It was turning into a pleasant day. The snow had tapered off to flurries, and the temperature had risen to a tolerable 38 degrees.

  “Lightfoot, why don’t you join me and my family for Christmas? We’d like to have you,” Clarence said as we were getting back into the car after looking at Spangler’s Spring.

  “Thanks, but no, Clarence. Christmas is a day for family. Anyway, over the years I’ve kind of gotten used to spending it … without family.” A thought suddenly struck me. I don’t know why I’d been too blind to see it before. “Clarence, the fact that I don’t have any family … or anybody else … would that have anything to do with why I was selected for this job?” He didn’t answer me immediately. First, he started up the car and fiddled with the rear view mirror for a moment.

  “Matter of fact, it does. That was one of the factors, among many others, that was taken into consideration.”

  “It’s that dangerous?”

  “It’s that dangerous, but there’s more to it than that. Just hang on until 7:30 tonight, Lightfoot. All of your questions will be answered.”

  “O.K., I’ll lay off. You’re a mighty mysterious man, Clarence Jones. You and your ‘special and very sensitive project.’ How did you come to be involved in cloak and dagger stuff? I thought you Secret Service types were primarily bodyguards. I thought the CIA or the FBI ran around doing the stuff you’re doing.”

  Clarence continued to drive sedately through the winter countryside. “I guess I’ve been involved in what you’re calling ‘cloak and dagger stuff’ ever since I’ve been with the Old Man. As I told you back in Nevada, until June of 1942, I was a harmless associate professor of history at Notre Dame. I marched straight from grading my students’ final exams to the recruiting office. A quotation kept running through my mind, something Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, ‘It is required of a man that he share the passion and action of his time—at peril of being judged not to have lived.’ An incurable romantic, perhaps that’s what I am. I had visions of being a latter day Stephen Crane or Joyce Kilmer. I don’t know.

  “Anyway, to make a very long story short, somebody decided that SHAEF needed a historian because history was being made. I wound up on Ike’s staff before I knew what hit me. I became somewhat of a curiosity there because of my photographic memory. People were flabbergasted when they saw a historian who took no notes, just leafed through reports, maps, charts, and orders of battle. The day when Ike found out that he had a man on his staff who could flip through a three-foot stack of intelligence reports, tables of organization and equipment, and so forth, then read them back in his mind’s eye verbatim, was the day Ike made me a major and made sure that I went everywhere with him. We grew especially close to each other during all the planning for D-Day. There were a million things that had to be taken into account—meteorology, times of high and low tides along the coastal areas of Europe, topography, organizational charts, tables of personnel and distribution of equipment, radio codes, intelligence estimates on the strength and locations of all enemy units in Europe, technical specifications and capabilities of all the weapons that would be used on each side, times of sunrise and sunset, strengths and locations of the Resistance units … Well, Ike just had me look at every scrap of paper that came into his office; then he carted me around with him instead of a briefcase. In all modesty, it would have taken more than a briefcase anyway to carry around all the stuff I carried in my head. Around fall of 1944, the Old Man thought of yet another use for my freakish talent—as the ultimate courier, a courier who needed to carry no papers or microfilms or anything. I had my share of adventures, and, as I told you in Nevada, my errands brought me into direct contact with a lot of high-level people—Stalin, Churchill, Montgomery, De Gaulle, Bradley—the lot. I collected a veritable treasure trove of anecdotes that I’ll never be able to tell, used my mind to ‘photograph’ more documents in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and code than I care to remember, and logged so many miles I swore that after the war I was going to never wander any more than ten blocks from my house for a long, long time.”

  “So how come you wound up in the Secret Service?”

  “The Old Man,” Clarence shrugged. “After the election, he called me to ask me to come back to work for him in my old capacity. ‘As a historian?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘historians I don’t need. Washington is full of them. I want you to be at my side, ready with all the facts I need, just like during the war. I also need a man I can trust implicitly to take care of highly confidential and sensitive projects and missions. Someone with a low profile who can come and go as he wishes from the White House at all hours without arousing any attention.’ I objected, thanking him for the offer, but said that I was quite content to be back at Notre Dame teaching history. Then he hit me in my weak spot, ‘Jones,’ he said, ‘would you rather be teaching history, or helping to make it?’ And, my friend, that’s how Clarence David Jones, mild-mannered history professor, became a G-man.” Jones pull the car over to the side of the narrow road.

  “This is my favorite place. I think you’ll like it too.” We had parked next to an imposing statue of Robert E. Lee astride Traveller. We gazed at the statue in silence for a moment; then Clarence turned around and gestured across the open field to the top of Cemetery Ridge. “You see that small clump of trees at the top of the ridge?” I nodded. “That was their objective. It’s just a little more than a mile away. At about one o’clock on July 3, Confederate artillery opened up from these woods to the right and left of us, 140 guns in what was the biggest artillery bombardment in history. No one had ever seen anything like it. The firing went on for two hours in an attempt to soften up the center of the Union line. The Union guns were responding, and, to many, it seemed like the end of the world. Finally, a little after three o’clock, when the guns on both sides fell silent and the ground stopped shaking, the silence was eerie. What happened next only added to the haunting, otherworldly atmosphere. In the hush that followed, 15,000 gray-and butternut-clad men emerged from these woods, 15,000 men in a line a mile wide. Up ahead on Cemetery Ridge, the Union troops were awestruck. Because what they saw, as Bruce Catton describes it, ‘was an army with banners, moving out from the woods into the open field … moving out of shadow into eternal legend, rank upon endless rank drawn up with parade-ground precision, battle flags tipped forward, sunlight glinting from musket barrels—General George Picket’s Virginians, and ten thousand men from other commands, men doomed to try the impossible and to fail.’ In another of his works, Catton suggests that Pickett’s Charge was the Civil War in microcosm—doomed from the very beginning to failure, it was a gallant effort to storm the very stars themselves. And still, through sheer raw courage and will, it almost succeeded.

  “Lee stood here and watched them go, three divisions of his incomparable Army of Northern Virginia. He watched Union artillery blow huge gaps in their ranks, then saw the ranks close up as his men continued marching across that bloody mile. When they reached Emmitsburg Road up there, about the halfway mark, the line narrowed, as they all prepared to converge on that clump of trees. Once across the road, they began to double time as the Union troops poured increasingly withering fire into their ranks. The Union artillery began to use canister, then as the Confederates got closer, double canister, mowing down whole companies like ripened wheat. The lines began to ripple as they got within musket range of the Union troops.
They were outnumbered, outgunned, and the enemy held the high ground. Nevertheless, through sheer iron nerve and guts, they breached the Union line. You see that low stone wall to the left of the trees? That’s where they broke through. General Armistead led two hundred men through the line, and, for a brief time, silenced the Union guns at that point. But it was too late. The Unions troops quickly rallied, and, in any event, there were by that time simply no Confederate troops left to exploit the situation. There was bitter hand-to-hand fighting, and the gap was closed. Armistead and most of his men were killed. And that, my friend, marks the High Water Mark of the Confederacy. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a fair fight compared to this.

  “Lee began to ride forward to meet the dazed and bloody survivors,” Clarence said as we walked forward, and I got a vivid picture of it in my mind’s eye. The grand, gray, beloved old man with his regal bearing, for whom his men would have gladly marched into hell. And just had. “No one had ever seen him like this,” Clarence continued. “‘It’s all my fault,’ he kept repeating to them. ‘It’s all my fault.’ Neither the Army of Northern Virginia, nor, I suspect, General Lee, was ever able to recover from what happened on this field that day.” Clarence ended softly. The wind picked up and screamed through the barren trees in the wintry landscape. The sky darkened suddenly and, for some inexplicable reason, I could see that gallant old man looking down upon me from that majestic horse, ineffable pain in his eyes, saying softly, “It’s all my fault.” Just for a moment, that man was Eisenhower. I shivered and pulled my collar tighter around my neck.