Baltimore Catechism: Sacrament of Reconciliation

By John T. Hourihan

Those who were never in war forgot that war is hell. It is not a euphemism. It is actually hell.

He'd survived elementary school with the nuns. He lived through a year in the southwest, making friends in the barrio. He endured the class warfare of his Massachusetts high school.

So when college did not work out t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948979887

Book preview

1.png

Baltimore Catechism

Sacrament

of

Reconciliation:

Vietnam

John T. Hourihan Jr.

Aster Press

Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC

BALTIMORE CATECHISM: SACRAMENT OF RECONCILIATION

Copyright © 2022 by John T. Hourihan, Jr.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

For information contact :

Blue Fortune Enterprises, LLC

Aster Press

P.O. Box 554

Yorktown, VA 23690

http://blue-fortune.com

Book and Cover design by Blue Fortune Enterprises, LLC

ISBN: 978-1-948979-88-7

First Edition: October 2022

Other titles by John Hourihan

Baltimore Catechism: The Mass of the Faithful

Baltimore Catechism: A Year of Confirmation

Baltimore Catechism: Clean Slate

The Mustard Seed: 2130

The Mustard Seed: 2110

The Mustard Seed: 2095

Beyond the Fence: Converging Memoirs

(with author Amanda Eppley)

Baseball: Play Fair and Win

Parables for a New Age

Praise for Book 1 of the Baltimore Catechism Series:

The Fall and Rise of a Catholic Boy

This autobiographical romp through the Baltimore Catechism is a heartwarming, funny and at times sad memoir of growing up poor and Irish Catholic in the country. Those of us educated by nuns will find some humorous reminders. And in spite of it all, John Hourihan Jr. found his faith. A fun read.

Susan Williamson, author of Desert Tail, Tangled Tail, Dead on the Trail and Dead in the Loft.

The narrator meets life’s difficulties with an equanimity unusual in a six-year-old, and that is the book’s charm. No wounded soul here; though he lives with poverty and occasional violence, such elements are but threads in the larger tapestry of his life. That life is nurtured and sustained by his rowdy extended family, especially his mother, and, eventually, the gift of religion.

Karen Cavalli, author of Bad Mind, Undercover Goddess and Down.

John Hourihan’s Baltimore Catechism: Clean Slate is a charming account of a precocious child’s struggle with his Catholic school first grade year. This fictionalized memoir tells how the boy John struggles with the contradictions in Catholic teachings and the difficulties his family faces. The writing is lively and insightful.

Robert Archibald, author of Roundabout Revenge, Guilty Until Proven Innocent, Crime Does Not Pay and Who Dung It.

This book is a gem. This story of a young Irish boy trying to understand the seeming difference between religion and reality is laugh out loud funny. But you don’t have to be Irish or Catholic to enjoy this nostalgic journey into the past as he struggles to do the right thing.

Patti Gaustad Procopi, author of Please… Tell Me More and I’ll Get By.

As a fellow writer of semi-autobiographic fiction, I applaud John Hourihan’s new book, Baltimore Catechism. Told with the innocence of childhood and the tongue-in cheek irony of adulthood, the book brings out the conflict between religion and reality. Through the eyes of a young Irish-American boy, the book explores what it means to be religious. The author’s sardonic whit, coupled with his poignant visual, auditory and olfactory images of people, places and events, makes the book an enticing read. This book is a paean to our common humanity and to what is good in all of us.

Christian Pascale, author of Memories Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Poetry of Wonder, and Windows of Heaven.

Dedicated to Jose Ortiz, who was killed in Vietnam.

To George Duggins, who became the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America, and David Mitchell, who played drums on the first recording of Rockin’ Robin, both who died from the effects of Agent Orange.

This book is fiction but based on a true story. Many of the names and identifying factors have been changed to ensure the privacy of individuals. Some of the characters are composites of several different people, and any similarities to actual people or incidents are coincidental. The timeline may be skewed in parts.

The Baltimore Catechism calls the Sacrament of Reconciliation the Sacrament of Penance and describes it in this way:

What is the Sacrament of Penance?

Penance is a Sacrament in which the sins committed after Baptism are forgiven.

Has the word Penance any other meaning?

The word Penance has other meanings. It means also those punishments we inflict upon ourselves as a means of atoning for our past sins; it means likewise that disposition of the heart in which we detest and bewail our sins because they were offensive to God.

CHAPTER ONE

The Descent

IT WAS FEBRUARY 1970, 110 degrees, like any other day in February. Sweat poured down my back, pooling under my shirt as I sat inside a C-141 on the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut airbase, headed home. I barely noticed the heat. I looked down at the blue cardboard cover sheet on the packet of papers on my lap and smiled. United States of America v. John T. Hourihan it said on the first page of the Record of Trial of my Special Court Martial.

I had an honorable discharge.

I was going home.

I was proud of it.

I had won.

I sat in a red plastic strap seat along the inside of the cargo jet with about six other live soldiers leaving Vietnam. We were all spent. Our fatigues were worn and dirty, but not as worn and dirty as what they covered. The one soldier who still had a Class A uniform didn’t fill it anymore. When I first saw him step inside the door of the plane, I thought of Dopey the dwarf and how his clothes were always too big for his body. My jungle boots were torn on the sides where they were made out of canvas and cracked where they were made out of leather. The boy’s face I had brought with me across the Pacific Ocean was now wrinkled at the corners of my eyes, and my mouth had almost forgotten how to smile. I was twenty-four years old, and I had just finished three tours in Vietnam.

In the middle of the plane were rows of metal coffins draped with canvas tarps. They left little room for our feet. A boy next to me put his feet up and tried to get comfortable for our long flight to Elmendorf, Alaska and then to the Oakland Army Base where I would be discharged from the Army. My four-year-three-month-sixteen-day enlistment was up.

Do you think this is alright? he asked, nodding at his feet propped up on the coffin in front of him.

I thought about it for a few seconds, seeing not a coffin but Jose Ortiz, one of the friends I had served with. It was as if Jose was lying in that coffin looking up at me. He had been one of the most intelligent, accommodating, and friendly people I’d ever known. He had become my brother. Jose died about a year ago on his flight from Pleiku to Saigon. He was on his way out of the country when his plane hit the side of a mountain. This wasn’t his coffin, but it was someone’s just like him, just like us.

I don’t think he’d mind, I said, and the boy thanked me.

I closed my eyes, and, as the hum of the engines lulled me to sleep, I thought about the day I had landed at Tan Son Nhut airbase. It was nearly three years ago.

That’s a little over a thousand in war years.

In February 1967, I was nineteen years old and had just landed in Saigon. The first sign I saw was Căn cu không quân Tân Son Nhut. It felt good that I could read it. It said I had just descended into Tân Son Nhut airbase.

The pilot sat in his new commercial plane, in his pristine, shining, plastic cockpit, with his World’s Best Daddy mug filled with coffee beside his chair. In a few hours, he would fly back to the world and, most likely, a nice dinner at a classy restaurant. He had made a joke about the weather.

Good morning, troops. We have just landed at Tan Son Nhut Airbase in Saigon. This is now the busiest airport in the not-so-civilized world. The temperature is ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, sunny skies, and there is moderate to heavy ground fire. Good luck.

If I had known what was coming, I would have gone up to the cockpit and kicked his ass for being so cavalier.

Instead, I collected the plastic food tray, from which I had, only a half-hour before, eaten my hot chicken and rice dinner. I put it into the trash bag the stewardess carried up the aisle. I stood holding onto scrubbed and polished seat backs with the rest of the soldiers on the Northwest Orient flight. We used the seats for balance as the plane rolled closer toward the buildings. No one smiled. Most bent over at the waist to be able to see out the side windows for our first glance of our new home for a year. The air conditioning we had flown with across the Pacific was now turned off. We all began to sweat, and it was difficult to breathe in the hot air mixed with the smell of airplane food, English Leather, and Old Spice.

Well, like they say, war is hell. It sure felt like it so far.

The heat haze rippled the tarmac, but it didn’t look, at first glance, any different from Logan or Oakland. It had the same equipment crawling around on the airstrip beside the buildings, but the luggage on the carts was mostly dull green duffle bags instead of multi-colored suitcases. We milled in the aisle in the same way we might have if we had just landed in Atlanta.

My God, what am I doing here? I asked. I may have said it out loud, but I’m not sure. It wouldn’t have mattered. Everyone here was thinking the same thing.

Then the world changed.

A soldier, maybe twenty years old, in jungle fatigues, dark sunglasses, and an Army baseball cap stepped inside the front door of the plane on the left side. He was the only soldier on the plane who knew exactly what he was doing.

Okay, don’t run, but don’t take your time. I need you to get off the plane and move quickly across the blacktop to the terminal. Your bags will be brought in. We don’t like being a sitting duck here. C’mon. Move.

The line sped up, and soon I stood on a stairway that had been rolled up to the front door of the huge, dull silver jet. I descended into hell, holding onto the chrome railings of the mobile stairway as if I never wanted to let go. Breathing in the heavy, heated air had become a conscious effort.

Within minutes, we were all approaching the terminal.

Inside, it was easy to see which soldiers were arriving and which were leaving. Those of us getting off the plane from America had wide eyes, clean uniforms, shined shoes, and as we were told later, We were still pissing stateside beer.

The other group was tired, beaten up, and although they didn’t move much, their eyes darted around the rooms like furtive cats. They sat or squatted against the walls, or used their duffels for pillows and slept, as people walked by only inches from their heads or stepped over them as if they were just so many bumps on the floor. They are leaving, I thought. Why aren’t they happier than this?

There was a third group. The Vietnamese came in two types. There were the emaciated ARVN soldiers, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, who were the South Vietnamese military. They wore crisp uniforms and moved purposefully in small packs through the crowd, holding hands with each other. We linguists had been told by our teachers in the Defense Language Institute in Monterey that Vietnamese men would sometimes hold hands. It meant best friend, ban tot, nothing else. The civilians, who we were told to call local nationals, were mostly women, very young children, and very old men.

Our February-in-America bodies, coming directly from places like Massachusetts and Montana, were not ready for a nearly hundred-degree crowded terminal full of sweating people. An acrid smell of fish, jet exhaust, and body odor swept through the rooms as we were herded to the far end of the building.

My attention was taken by a skinny, rat-faced, gray-haired old lady wearing black silk pajama bottoms, a white long-sleeve shirt, and a conical straw hat. The lines in her face looked like the roadmap of a very hard life. She was squatting next to a bench, eating a sandwich.

Chào bà, I said. Chào em, she answered. She smiled. We had said hello. Ba meant woman. Em meant child.

Her mouth was filled with purplish black teeth from chewing betel nut, which gave older Vietnamese people a combination of a botanical high, dark purple teeth, solace from toothaches, and caused cancer. It scared the crap out of me. I turned quickly away and was faced with a young boy. He came up to my chest and held his hand out to me for money. He had no nose, just two holes submerged in a red scar in the middle of his face. He smiled. I nearly lost my airplane meal. I fumbled for the change in my pocket and dumped it into his outstretched palms.

Feeling faint, I looked for a place to sit. The heat clamped onto me, and my body reacted. I bent my head down to try to get back my equilibrium and noticed the floor. What had once been the expensive tan tile of an air terminal that, not so long ago, had catered to affluent European visitors arriving at what was called The Paris of the Orient, was now covered with an inch or so of silt and spit carrying the boot imprints of America.

Hey, soldier.

I looked up to see the three stripes of a buck sergeant, but instead of being the bright gold stripes I was used to, his were a muted olive green. He stood over me. You just came in on the Northwest Orient flight?

I nodded, not yet trusting my voice.

You have to come with me. He smiled and reached down to help me up.

Come on, he said as he pulled me to my feet. "Saw the kid with