As a paratrooper and a noncommissioned officer, Kaiser earned $50 a month on top of his $120 wages, and he sent as much home to his family as he could. At the firing range, Kaiser proved an expert shot. He learned to take apart his M1 rifle and reassemble it blindfolded, to disable an enemy with a thrust of the butt plate to the jaw, and to kill with a lunge of the bayonet. To strengthen their legs for parachute jumps, the soldiers endured endless marching and running, the men in formation counting cadence in eight-mile jogs around the base, sounding off, and in the blazing summer heat stripping to the waist, so they ran only in boots and khakis, the sweat from one man’s swinging arm splattering the bare back of the man ahead, and that man’s sweat hitting the man ahead of him, all the way through the ranks in the unremitting North Carolina sun. Over and over, they practiced the paratroop roll, learning to let their weight hit the ground in degrees, bodies folding up accordionlike to lessen the shock of impact. Suited up, latched into the restraining rig, they left the tarmac in C-119 Flying Boxcars and sat in two facing rows, twenty men on each side, climbing above cotton and peanut country dotted down below with the tiny shapes of farmers and mules. Look straight out, not down. A layer of planes leveled out at eighteen hundred feet, another at three thousand. Then came the interminable moment: standing at the open bay door, waiting for the green light to trigger the plunge. Then the air filled with falling soldiers, two thousand at once, “like Cheerios in a bowl of milk,” Meek recalled, jostling one another as parachutes opened.
By now Kaiser could lift more than his two-hundred-pound weight over his head. His hand still crept to his heart, a decade after his fever, as if to suggest why he seemed to spend every free minute conditioning his body with push-ups and sit-ups and barbell curls, an exercise regimen so intense that Meek thought it bordered on the neurotic. Once they were swimming in Chesapeake Bay, Kaiser and Meek and another soldier, diving, having a hell of a time, and found themselves about a mile offshore in the shipping lanes. They had brought an army air mattress in case someone cramped up, and an exhausted Meek wanted to ride it back to shore. Kaiser would not surrender it, announcing, “You’re just now building muscle.” When Meek insisted, Kaiser answered by letting the air out of the mattress. Meek cursed and started swimming, and succeeded in making it back under his own steam. How had Kaiser calibrated the risk? Perhaps he believed he’d be able to rescue his friend with little trouble should he flounder; nobody doubted that he would have risked his own life to do so. Still, Meek thought that the Minnesota soldier’s behavior was foolish, stubborn.
By all accounts, Kaiser relished the physical life of a soldier and considered it, for a time, a vocation. It’s possible that military existence, with its elaborate codes and structures, rituals and hierarchies, supplied a kind of peace to a man whose energies sometimes threatened to over-top their banks; an impetuous temperament can find psychic freedom in order, routine, and clear lines of authority. Still, he seemed to like skirting rules. He kept a .22-caliber pistol buried in a plastic bag at the base, Meek recalled, though he couldn’t say what Kaiser intended it for. And Kaiser once staged the clandestine nighttime excavation of a buried crate of surplus ammo—he could not abide the waste of good bullets—and then smuggled it out of the base in his car trunk, with his mother smiling obliviously from the passenger seat.
Kaiser faithfully attended the Latin Mass on the base and wrestled with the possibility he might have to take a human life in war. The fearsome presence of the water-cooled, tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun that, as a squad leader, he carried—the weapon spewed six hundred rounds a minute, punctuated by phosphorescent tracers, and grew so hot that it boiled the water in the tanks—made it impossible to ignore the question. The army was shaping him with ruthless efficiency into a Red-killing machine. “We discussed that very thing,” Meek said. “I had a lot of problems myself with it, if I could fire into human beings with that weapon or not.” Still, he recalled Kaiser as “very much a patriot,” a full-blooded soldier ready to follow orders. Ecclesiastes told him there was a time to kill, as did the Church doctrine of a just war. Deeply embedded in his ideological firmament was a sense of the malignancy of global communism and the “materialistic atheism” it represented; the struggle against the Soviet Union was nothing less than a fight against the principalities of darkness. It was one thing to pray for the conversion of Russia, as every good Catholic did, but only a fool forgot his gun.
NEAR THE END of Kaiser’s three-year army stint, he was demoted from sergeant to corporal in an incident whose details remain obscure. Having lost certain archives in a warehouse fire, the army has no record of what cost Kaiser his rank. “Some of the black soldiers under his supervision refused to work and he confronted them,” according to an FBI summary of his sister Carolita’s account. “As a result of his intolerance of reverse discrimination and his actions at the time, he was demoted.” Later, she said her brother’s solidarity with the black soldiers got him in trouble—racist townsmen surrounding the Fort Bragg base were aghast at the presence of the black soldiers Kaiser had stationed to guard a barracks of white nurses. Refusing to remove the black soldiers, or to apologize to the townsmen, he accepted demotion rather than relent.
That account was echoed by Kaiser’s brother Francis, who portrayed him as a victim of the army’s racial backwardness and cowardice: “The townfolks didn’t want ‘niggers’ guarding people. He said, ‘I don’t have niggers. I have soldiers.’”
It takes only a little imagination to reconcile the variations of the story. It’s easy to picture Kaiser as a hard-driving, brook-no-nonsense commander who demanded the strictest discipline; he obeyed orders unstintingly and likely expected the same from his troops, who might have bristled at his harshness. It’s possible that his black soldiers, sensing the danger, did not particularly relish the duty of guarding a barracks of white nurses in the Jim Crow South of 1957. It would have been consistent with Kaiser’s character to insist: Right is right; wrong is wrong.
By the time he was demoted, his sister recalled, he had already made the decision to leave the army. He had grown tired, he would later tell people, of teaching recruits how to kill.
His time in uniform coincided with a tense but quiet period for America’s fighting forces, and he left the service, unlike his brother, without having seen a battle zone. There is no record of a sudden mystical experience, an epiphany, a catalyzing moment that led to his enrollment, at age twenty-five, at the Mill Hill Missionaries’ Jesuit school at St. Louis University, in Missouri. His decision to pursue the priesthood surprised no one, since he had spoken of its appeal for years. He told people that he considered it the world’s most important job.
“He was sidestepping God until he couldn’t do it anymore,” as his sister put it, though he did not relish the prospect of urban priesthood and “having to go to ladies’ circles, all the stuff you have to do.” Missionary work seemed the logical fit for a midwestern farm boy still seeking adventure and a measure of freedom.
Mill Hill, a London-based missionary society, had a reputation as a strict and exacting order. Kaiser got a single bed in a little wood-frame house, and he became fast friends with his roommate, a former air force pilot named Tony Barnicle. Their long nighttime chats flouted the rule of magnum silencium, or “the great silence,” which students were expected to observe through the night and morning rituals. The course load encompassed metaphysics, Latin, Plato, Aristotle, and massive doses of Thomas Aquinas.
In snatches of downtime, the seminarians watched films on a sixteen-millimeter projector and played fiercely competitive games of bridge and Monopoly in smoke-choked rooms. Everyone save Kaiser seemed to smoke. Even as they immersed themselves in doctrine, they wrestled with the prospect of giving up any semblance of a normal life. There was a sense of terror, of the massive weight they had agreed to shoulder, when strangers on campus noticed their cassocks and greeted them as “Father.”
“Both of us had a lot of doubts,” Barnicle