An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman

James Carroll Houghton Mifflin, $23.95 by Colman McCarthy

Current Catholic teaching--if I have this right--allows members of the flock a number of theological choices on the issue of people killing each other in armed governmental combat. If you believe in the "just war" theory, as did bishops on the German and French side in World War II, fine. If you are selective about favoring wars, fine again. If you are conscientiously against all wars always, in the manner of such Catholic pacifists as Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan, no problem here, either. It wasn't for nothing that James Joyce liked to say of the Catholic Church, "Here comes everybody."

The family of three-star General Joseph Carroll, the director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency during most of the war in Southeast Asia, was one where the choosing took a fierce turn. The general, an Americanist who ardently believed in the moral rightness of his nation's military adventures, saw Vietnam as a just war. His son James, second of the five Carroll boys raised on General's Row next to General Curtis Lemay's manse at a Washington air base, condemned the U.S. role as "immoral savagery."

Was the son concluding, therefore, that his military father, tight with McNamara and Cardinal Francis Spellman, a man who blessed bombers in Vietnam, was an immoral savage? The answer, far beyond the boundaries of a yes or no, emerges slowly and gracefully in this well-crafted narrative about a family rended by conflict and, like the nation, knowing little of the art of unhurtful conflict resolution.

James Carroll, a husband and father in his mid-50s, is a novelist and teacher living in Boston, where he writes a weekly column for The Boston Globe. After a year at Georgetown University in 1961, where he was honored as ROTC Cadet of the Year, Carroll chose the priesthood and entered the novitiate of the Paulist Fathers. In early 1969, he was ordained in New York by Terrence Cardinal Cooke, the U.S. military vicar. He celebrated his first Mass the next day at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Chapel at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, his parents' home parish.

I was at that Mass to write a piece for The Washington Post about Carroll. The news was that this young independent-thinking priest signed on just when others of the collar were departing in protest over one Vatican policy or another. The Mass was meant to be a grace-giving sacramental moment. Carroll, surrounded by his proud dad and fellow...