Absolution

by Alice McDermott

We’d all read The Quiet American. The Ugly American, too. But Saigon was still a lovely, an exotic, adventure (we’d also seen The King and I—in fact, I saw it four times)

I guess you could say that the miraculous, portentous, historical alignment of the stars that had so inspired my husband before we got to Saigon—two Catholic presidents standing together to defeat the march of communism, to fulfill Our Lady’s promise at Fátima—had become in retrospect the very thing that sent our good intentions all awry. They never saw the hand of God in it, Peter later said of his superiors in Saigon. “But they made useful fools of those of us who thought we did.”