Dan Quinn: The Odyssey of an Irish Lad

By Paul Moroney

Rip a young boy of fourteen from his Impoverished Irish family in the middle of the twentieth century and send him off to live with virtual strangers in Chicago. Raise him well. Then watch him survive the hell of Viet Nam.

Meet Dan Quinn. A story of love and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483623474

Paul Moroney

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Copyright © 2013 by Paul Moroney.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/18/2013

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Contents

Preface

Call Me Ishmael

Leaving Ireland

Bound For Ameriky

Uncle Mike

Settling In

Vito Mariani

Celeste

Growing Up

Moving On

The secret

A Coming Awareness

Saying Goodbye

The Corps

Nam

The Confrontation

Homecoming

Staff Sergeant Rufus Walker

Vito Comes Home

War Stress

Our Trip to Ireland

The Dinner Table Is No Coincidence

Post script

Our Viet role ‘poppycock’: ex-Marine boss

A Marine’s Song

Happy the Man and he alone,

he who can call today his own.

He, who secure within can say,

tomorrow, do thy worst,

for I have lived today.

Horace

Preface

Far kindlier gods would have allowed the island we call Ireland to simply drift off, away from England and into a remote spot in the middle of a protective sea at about the turn of the first millennium AD. For the land and its people had very successfully completed the task for which it had been born, simply the preservation of ancient learning for western Europe; the wisdom of the Greeks and the ingenuity of the Romans.

The first settlers of the island were Bronze Age wanderers followed by Phoenician voyagers. Though the Celts were relative latecomers, their culture was dominant and within a few centuries, the earlier inhabitants were neatly folded into that culture. Today few traces of earlier languages pre-date the Celtic.

Above all else and beyond any other consideration, that Celtic culture was tribal, purely. Any concept of nationalism simply did not exist. That lack would curse the Irish throughout most of two millennia.

Then, about 400 AD, missionaries came to this remote island to announce Christianity. Obviously, Patrick deserves the credit he receives. But there were others as well, some decades earlier.

Patrick was born a Christian Roman citizen living a comfortable life in a fine villa in what is now Wales. At the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped and spent the next six years as a slave, shepherding a flock in the hills of north Ireland. Eventually, he escaped and vowed to return as a missionary. Throughout his life, though, he was continually looked down upon by his contemporaries for his lack of a proper education, lost during his years of captivity.

Interestingly, the Irish conversion produced not a single martyr. None. Rather than fight the old gods, Patrick and his companions simply fused Christianity and Paganism. The best example is the Irish cross. Two symbols, the cross of Christ and a pagan circle representing the sun. The Celts were sun worshipers. Another good example; The first Bridget began her career as a pagan goddess. Today, there are too many Saint Bridget churches in Ireland to catalogue properly.

Yes, the missionaries did create a rather unique concept of Christianity so far away from Rome with greater emphasis on Benediction than on the Mass. They also taught the Irish to read and to write in the Latin form and within a few hundred years, the Irish began to return the gift, sending their own missionaries into Britain and on to the continent, building centers of learning all the way into Italy.

The Irish also created a system of jurisprudence called Brehon Law that was wildly progressive in its time, covering everything from human rights to land rights to woman’s rights. Divorce was a well defined option. All manner of civil life was included.

For Ireland, it was a Golden Age. But no less tribal.

At about 800 AD, the Vikings came and plundered for gold. Some left with their treasures. Others stayed to create Ireland’s first towns. Place names like Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick were born as Viking settlements. After a few hundred years, those warriors disappeared into the fabric of Irish life. If you are redheaded and claim Irish heritage, there’s a drop of Danish blood hiding in your veins.

Then came the Normans on their huge armored war horses. They cared little about going home and built drafty castles around the island. The Irish tribes simply retreated into the hills. But soon enough, as the saying goes, the Normans became, ‘More Irish than the Irish’. If you have a Fitz attached to your name, or if your name sounds vaguely French, well, guess what!

And that was the order of things for close to four hundred years. Oh, the English tried to subjugate the tribes repeatedly. And repeatedly, with poor success. They more or less gained a foothold in a small half-moon area surrounding Dublin that came to be known as The Pale. Few Englishmen dared to risk all by going ‘Beyond The Pale’.

It was also widely believed by most of the English that the Irish had tails.

But then came the Protestant Reformation. The Tudor monarchs, most notably Elizabeth, realized that Catholic Ireland would naturally align itself with England’s two worst enemies, Catholic France and Catholic Spain. Without England’s absolute control of the Irish island, Protestant Britain would be ever in danger from the west. Ireland must be subjugated at all costs.

The battles on Irish soil continued for almost one hundred years until Oliver Cromwell and his army of Puritan Roundheads slaughtered a goodly percentage of the Irish population, destroying its architecture, its agricultural base and driving much of the remaining population into the largely barren West on the cry, ‘To Hell or to Connaught!’ Then Cromwell redistributed virtually the entire landmass of the island to his army in payment for a job well done.

The Irish were reduced to peasantry and pauperism. And after all that came the Penal Laws, a violent range of laws designed by the usurpers to enslave the many.

No Irishman could practice his religion.

No Irishman could receive an education in Ireland.

No Irishman could receive an education in a foreign land.

No Irishman could own a horse of greater value than five pounds.

No Irishman could own a weapon for his own protection.

No Irishman could vote.

No Irishman could practice law.

No Irishman could buy property.

No Irishman could enter the military.

The list goes on, an horrendous, nefarious attempt to enslave an entire people for the sole benefit of the few. And precious few there were, those English or certainly Anglo Irish Protestants who objected to this enslavement. Perhaps Jonathan Swift comes to mind. He sarcastically proposed eating Irish babies.

And they wondered why we were violent!

Eight million Irish subsisted on leased hard scrabble land, usually of little less than an acre or more. Their diet was simple. The potato together with buttermilk. Nothing more through a lifetime. If need demanded, you could do it, too. The potato is highly nutritious.

Until the crop fails.

The English adopted a laissez faire attitude regarding the whole tragedy of the Irish Famine and politely washed their hands. Now, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but not by much. Organizations like the Quakers did all that they possibly could but, truly, it hardly made a dent, particularly in the English mindset. And Guinness, a Protestant-owned brewery cemented its place in Irish hearts by nature of their enormous charity during the several famines, not just the Great Famine By the 1930’s Guiness was listed as the seventh largest company in the world, though I don’t know what that says about the Irish.

In a five year period, of an initial population of about eight million Irish souls, two million of them died on the land. Another two million made it onto ‘coffin ships’, hardly seaworthy vessels headed for ports around the world, most to the Americas. It is impossible to tell how many bodies, young and old, were slipped into a watery grave during these many crossings.

During the Great Famine, starvation welcomed its evil twin brother, cholera, to the island and onto the coffin ships. The Saint Lawrence River was virtually clogged with coffin ships quarantined because of the deadly cholera epidemic. Their passengers had no option but to wait for death.

Throughout the centuries since the Protestant Reformation, the English had attempted to suppress the Catholic Church in Ireland. However, they were nothing if not cunning and eventually sought the support of the Catholic bishops to join in battle to control the Irish population. The English cared not a wit for the goals of the hierarchy to repress the Irish tendency towards sins of the flesh but if the church adopted a stern attitude against subversive nationalistic thought and activity, surely that was worth the investment of finally allowing a few new churches to be built.

Eventually though, Irish Nationalism did win out in bloody conflict, allowing three of the four Irish provinces to gain a semblance of national identity. Ulster, the only industrialized province, with about a 50/50 split between Catholics and Protestants, continues to fly the Union Jack. And will for many years to come.

Meanwhile, the lower three provinces, Leinster, Munster and Connaught continued to struggle throughout most of the Twentieth Century with an agrarian, non-industrialized society that could not support its citizens. To top it off, a goodly portion of the clergy were schooled in a Hell’s Fire theology totally lacking in freedom of thought.

For most of the Twentieth Century, the most sardonic and valid joke about the island was that, Ireland’s greatest export is its own sons and daughters.

Such was the ‘Birthing Blanket’ that Dan Quinn was laid upon during the Spring of 1940.

Ireland was a grim land.

Call Me Ishmael

My name is Dan Quinn.

Daniel Aloysius Quinn to be more precise.

And because I realize that I am old and at the end of my time, I feel the need to tell my grandchildren the story of those earlier days while my mind is still clear.

I was born in Ireland in 1940, in County Mayo. More accurately, on a small farm a bit outside of Ballina, the second child of Nial and Nellie Quinn. They were good people though for quite some time, I was very angry at them. I’ll come to that in a bit.

By the time I was fourteen, my brother Liam was already out of National School and was working the farm with my father full time. Liam was also a good four years older than me. Now don’t get me wrong. The twins, Mary and Ellen, and I would surely have our chores as well. But Liam was finished with his schooling and it was his responsibility to turn full hand towards the land. It was also understood that he would inherit the farm without division of that land when Duddy grew old. It had been that way in Ireland since The Great Famine. The rest of us, well that would be another story for another time.

It was a good farm, a bit less than ten acres as I recall. It provided our food and a bit to sell. We had some sheep and a couple cattle set in a meadow. The girls took care of the chickens and helped Mammy run the cottage and make the butter to sell. We also raised some grain to feed the livestock and the chickens. I did whatever needed to be done. I was a tall boy and my strength came early. I loved working alongside my Duddy and Liam and they were not shy about giving me manly work. I’m not sure that it ever crossed my mind back then but in reflection I must have known that I was loved.

Again, looking back, I never thought that my family was poor. I suppose all our neighbors were poor, a season or two away from starvation once again. But then, the word poor needs a comparison. If everyone is poor, perhaps no one is poor. Do you know what I mean?

Oh, yes, there were some merchants in Ballina who wore a gentleman’s coat and kept a shop. But I always considered the Ballina blacksmith, a good man and strong, to be the best man in town, no different than Duddy. And to my young mind, he was a romantic hero. I thrilled to watch him toil, repairing tools that farmers like my father would bring to him or creating new tools and other such things from raw metal in a white-hot forge, sparks flying off his hammer.

Our cottage was typical of what was found in County Mayo back then, a one story stone and mud mortar structure, white washed and with, usually, a thatched roof and a fireplace at one end that served as both cooking stove and the only source of heat. It’s also where Duddy kept his chair.

The entire cottage had but one window. That was because before independence, landlords based rents on the number of windows in a cottage. Also. most of the cottages in the area still had earthen floors. But years earlier my grandfather had laid down flagstone about three feet square throughout the interior. I suppose that they kept the house cleaner. But every time it rained, a very common occurrence in that part of County Mayo, the stones wept. Not a comfortable experience for young children who saved their one pair of shoes for school and Sunday. There were also two faded color pictures hanging on the wall. One was of The Sacred Heart, the other, of the Virgin Mary.

It seemed that Mammy never stopped working. Or pushing the girls and me toward our evening studies. The entire cottage was not much larger than the garage where my oldest son parks his cars today. But it was sturdy and Duddy was proud that the thatched roof was always kept in fine repair. The well was good and the privy was moved regularly.

At the opposite end from the fireplace was a small bedroom that my parents claimed as their own. Above, in the rafters there were two tiny lofts, opposite each other. Liam and I slept on mats in one, the girls, the other. There was also another very small room on the southeast corner of the house that no one ever dared enter, not even Duddy. It was where the spirits of our ancestors lived. And, the wee people would visit regularly. Now, I swear to God that both my mother and my father would laugh and say that they didn’t believe in such things. But no one ever opened that door. Ever. Not even Duddy.

Throughout the day and particularly in the night when the big door was closed, the house smelled of peat glowing gently in the fireplace. Good Lord, I would love to get a whiff of that again! Peat was God’s gift to the poor peasant and also gave light to