THE CALLING OF CHARLIE LITEKY

FROM 'NAM TO A FAST OF PROTEST, MAKING A STATEMENT WITH HIS LIFE.

He sits there so beatifically, with his Contadora sign and his code-blue armband and his plastic gallon jug of water, all in the name of love toward his bleeding brothers in far-off Nicaragua. He hasn't eaten for 33 days.

The other evening, when I reached over to touch him lightly, I couldn't stop myself from recoiling. I thought one of his shoulder blades was sticking through his back.

There are four veterans fasting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, withering there for our moral contemplation. They are trying to galvanize the country against contra aid, ignite old flames of the protest movement.

But there is only one fasting there whom I can really think about, only one who seems to be rolling through my sleep like a boulder. His name is Charlie Liteky, and I have known him for over 25 years, in lesser and greater ways. What is more, we first knew each other in religious life, when both of us shared a simple dream of one day helping people. We were all in training to be fishers of men in that little hick, holy, Alabama seminary school that now seems like something from back beyond time.

The place was called Holy Trinity, and it was a kind of ramshackle cell at the outback of Christianity. Eventually it locked its doors and sent most of us out into a wider world. A few among us made it all the way to priesthood. Charlie Liteky was among that narrow percentage. A little while later, he went overseas and won the congressional Medal of Honor. The hero priest of 'Nam, they called him.

He saved 20 men in a jungle firefight without so much as a helmet or a flak jacket on, pulling them out on his belly. Lyndon Johnson decorated him in the East Room of the White House. My old seminary friend, Charlie Liteky, was an American hero. "Son," LBJ said, draping the rich blue ribbon around Charlie's neck, "I'd rather have one of these babies than be president."

Afterward he left the priesthood and began to wander the earth, though not aimlessly. For a time he lived on an island in Florida, in a scrap-wood cabin that looked out to an infinity of sea. He said he was trying to get in touch withhis prayer life again. He got in rhythm with the tides. He bought an old truck, and he hauled people's trash, and he got by okay on the government pension Medal of Honor winners get for the rest of their lives. One day he moved on. When I caught up with him five or six years ago, he was living in a cheap hotel on Eddy Street in San Francisco, with $50 hookers outside the door. He said he felt he had some responsibility to the rest of man.

And now the "Veterans Fast for Life" against "the new Vietnam" in Central America is grinding resolutely toward its sixth week, picking up the curious and the bereaved and the conflicted and, at last, the media powers that be.

Someone has written a song called "Fasting." A few congressmen have come by, not very many. Benjamin Spock stopped by a week ago. The mail now begins to pile up -- more than 1,000 pieces on a recent day -- in the Fast office on Massachusetts Avenue. On a good day, maybe 100 people show up at the steps for the 6 p.m. prayer vigil.

A couple weeks ago I saw Tip O'Neill smile and wave from behind the shaded glass of his big glossy limo. Charlie gave some literature about the fast to the speaker's driver. The man was closing the car's trunk. In a moment the limo rolled away.

This is all going on 10 blocks from where I live comfortably with my wife and baby son.

Once, my old seminary friend Charlie Liteky went suicidally beautiful into the fields of Asian brightness. And now he is encamped on the steps of a cathedral of power. I was certain he'd be dead by now, which shows how much I really know about him. If anything his mental energy has seemed to grow sharper in the past week, even as one of the others fasting with him seems on the very lip of death.

In fact, I have seldom heard Charlie so lucid or passionate or articulate. Nearly a year ago he went to Nicaragua to see the bleeding for himself.

But what is it exactly that he wants? Sometimes I'm not sure he knows.

"The contras do not now, nor have they ever, received the support of the majority of the Nicaraguan people," he says.

"President Reagan has a road to Damascus to face," he says.

"When I wake up I'm going to see the face of God," he says again.

There have been moments when I have truly hated him for this thing he is doing with his life. As the geek of death creeps closer now, grinning on its haunches at the fringe of the feast, the fast has sometimes struck me not as something profound or spiritual but as some awful perversion of the lessons Christ tried to teach with His own life. It has seemed like no more than emotional blackmail.

And yet, just when I feel the rising anger of that, comes something else, and then the revulsion and fright and contempt begin to dissolve, and in its place is suddenly -- what? Something close, in texture and kind, to the old holiness I used to know a long time ago, when the softness of a seminary hymn came wafting round.

"O Clemens," we used to sing. "O Pia."

"Oh, merciful, oh, sweet."

At such moments, I begin to feel that what Charlie Liteky is attempting to say with his life is something far beyond me, far beyond any of us, trying to gaze in on it from the outside. Then I tend to shrug and think of it as just one more Byzantine turn -- the last, apparently -- in a deep Christian's search for sanctity. If Charlie makes sainthood somewhere on the other side of here, it won't be the kind that will ever find itself enshrined in stained glass in the Vatican; no, his was ever and only the sanctity of being, as a mutual priest friend of ours once said.

The lives of the other three men are every bit as sacred as Charlie's life, of course, and each has his own deep history to relate. I have somewhat come to know Duncan Murphy and Brian Willson and George Mizo in these past few weeks, and I feel that they are men of conscience and bravery, flawed and needful and willful and wry, like the best of us. ("I'm a Cardinal fan since 1953, when Harvey Haddix was a first baseman," Willson told me the other day. "I hope I make the World Series. I'll tell you, yesterday I wanted a hot dog and a vanilla milkshake so bad it was killing me.")

Willson and Murphy started their fast on Sept. 15. George Mizo, who was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, began with Charlie on the 1st. He is the one appearing to sink most rapidly. He has contracted a respiratory infection, and although doctors were able to get him into a hospital for tests, he has refused to quit. This weekend he is scheduled to be taken, at his own insistence, to a peace event in New England.

Last weekend, Charlie flew to Los Angeles to make an appearance at a $100-a-plate dinner on behalf of Central America. He felt a little dizzy getting off the plane, he said.

One of Charlie's fellow fasters told me the other evening, "If you want to know, I wish to hell sometimes your friend Charlie never won that goddam medal." What he meant, I think, is that Charlie is the quarterback of this event, the one everybody's watching. It was ever thus.

The immediate event that brought these four veterans to the east side of the Capitol was the Senate's approval in August of $100 million to the Nicaraguan contras. But I am somehow inclined to believe that there is a richer and stranger destiny that has yoked these lives together, like bridge-crossers on the way to San Luis Rey. I have heard someone try to describe it as "prophetic disequilibrium," and that may be as good an explanation as any.

I will say this and be done with it: For as long as I have known him, Charlie has been giving things back. I don't really know why, but I have come to accept it as fact. This past summer he gave his medal back. (He put it in a manila envelope and set it at the base of one of the panels at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ironically, that event drew far more attention than this fast, at least thus far.)

A decade or so ago, he gave his priesthood back. There have been various other give-backs in between. And now he seems ready to give the ultimate gift back. I have wondered if this awful need isn't tied up with a fundamental sense of unworthiness, and if all of it doesn't go back to his earliest family roots -- and then complicates itself by the holy guilt of religious life.

Somehow I can't help feeling that Charlie wants to go home very badly. In truth, he once said this to me in nearly these words. This was in San Francisco five or six years ago, and our lives had rejoined after a long absence. I was trying to write a book about his life and my life and some other seminary lives.

"I just have never clung to this life," he said. "I'm not anxious to die, but I look forward to that moment when I can get away from this violence, the cruelty, the uncertainty of the world. I think I'll be happy to go home when the time comes."

And yet, just lately, I have heard hints from him about "life after the fast."

He told me this past summer, when he had decided to go ahead, that he was sure he could last for 50 days. "Course, after 20 you're in the danger zone," he said almost airily. "You know, blindness, pneumonia, base-line heart problems, that sort of thing. I guess you know both my parents died of heart attacks."

The way he said it, I had the distinct feeling he was looking forward to the first set of complications. He also had said this: "Frankly, I don't expect to make it." What I heard more than anything was the eagerness. There have been other times when I have heard the preachiness, the ego, the seeming messianic impulses.

At one point Charlie talked about trying to bring 100,000 people to the lawn of the Capitol in protest against our "proxy killers" in Nicaragua. There is not much talk of that now. What Charlie and the others want is an end to U.S. militarism in Central America, and to that end they are suggesting rallies, vigils, write-ins to Congress, national prayer and fasting in solidarity with their own fasting. And some of this is happening. Still, to me at least, the goals seem ill-focused, and maybe unattainable.

But I have been wrong about this man many times before in my life, and maybe I am wrong again, and anyway there are such unknowable levels of reality here, mystical and spiritual levels, profane and tawdry levels.

Because at another point this summer, when I suspect it was all beginning to grow and spread in his head, like foxfire, he said meekly: "I just pray for clarity of vision, Paul, the courage to stay with this stuff. I feel if I moved away from this line I'm on now, I might lose my own soul. Sometimes I think I'm losing my mind. As someone who was very close to that once, I think about it quite often. But then someone comes along and says, no, Charlie, you're not crazy."

I think of Mitch Snyder and then I think of Gandhi and then I wonder: where do you fit, Charlie?

The other evening, a mutual friend from the seminary called. Butch lives in Birmingham. He's been trying to pick up whatever news of Charlie he can from National Public Radio. (They have been reporting on it since the start.) We talked about Charlie for half an hour, and then Butch said, as if to dispense with something that is impenetrable, "It's Calvary. An internal creation, an external destruction."

Charlie's wife Judy is on on the steps with him now. She arrived from San Francisco two weeks ago. At first no one knew for sure that she would come. Charlie had indicated to me a while ago that he had given Judy a certain veto power over the fast. "Yes, that's true," Judy told me the other night, as we sat on the steps together and alternately held hands and laughed nervously. "But frankly, our understanding is it will only be invoked if I mentally start to break down."

Judy is a former nun, with her own long dedication to justice and social causes. But she wants to work within the despised "system," while her husband has journeyed over to the other side of some revolutionary vision. If Charlie survives this, I doubt they can really stay together, except in spirit. They got married just three years ago this month, with a pact to each other that neither would ever try to stop the other from following a call that seemed beyond the other's capability to comprehend.

"He's tender, I promise you he's being tender to me," she said.

The other evening, Judy got up and said a prayer aloud, asking the 50 or so people in attendance to "try to pray for the thing that touches the heart that makes the spirit go on."

He was many classes ahead of me at Holy Trinity, which was located far out into the scabbed red dirt and fragrant scrub-pine of Russell County, Ala. In a school full of heroes and Christ figures, Charlie Liteky had his own kind of legend. Actually, I never got to know him until the year before I went to the novitiate. Then we spent a summer together on a mission. I remember how he used to mesmerize those rural kids during catechetic class. He drove an old yellow school bus, picking them up each morning, and I rode along with him and tried to copy his songs and stories.

In the seminary, his classmates used to say that if Charlie hadn't come to God, he would have gone to Vince Lombardi. He could throw a football 70 yards -- flick it, like a rock. Somebody would hike it to Brother Angelo (we had all given up our regular names and adopted religious names, to show we were dead to the world) and everybody on his team would go out for the pass. Charlie, ever the quarterback, would dance in the backfield, eluding his captors, then heave the bomb at the first seminarian to reach the end zone. It was only pickup football, shoved in between Cicero and trigonometry, but legends like that die hard.

Charlie Liteky, superstar.

There has always seemed something mythic about his life. He once told me the story, in a kind of dead monologue, of the drowning of his younger brother, Jimmy Liteky. There used to be three Liteky brothers -- Charlie, Pat, and Jimmy. Two went to Holy Trinity; the third, Jimmy, stayed home. Jimmy drowned in a Florida river in 1959, nine months before Charlie was ordained to the priesthood. He was such a fine swimmer, such a standout athlete. He just dove in that day and never came up.

Charlie was the one in the family who found the body. For three days grappling hooks had been skimming a dark murky river. Below the chemical riffles, divers labored. They could find nothing. On the third day of the search, Charlie and some other men put their boat toward the point of an island. It was dusk. They were letting themselves drift in the current. The boat was riding past the little green island, and Charlie was standing up in the bow, peering down into the darkened waters, saying to himself, Come on, Jimmy, goddammit, just come on, when -- suddenly -- there was Jimmy. He just rose up, right in front of his big brother, clean and beautiful and smiling, with a gash over his forehead and his arms outstretched. It was as if his brother were trying to get into the boat with him. The body seemed to be projecting right out of the water into Charlie's arms. Charlie grabbed for his little brother, and then the smell was nearly overwhelming.

At the funeral, Charlie's mother, Gertrude Liteky, a kind of suffering Monica, had her first heart attack. And Charlie's father, the old hardened Navy chief, the King Lear of this family, said: "Well, God took two of my sons. Now he's got the third."

I have been keeping haphazard notes, almost in spite of myself, on this fast. On the 17th day I started off intending to tell Charlie to go to hell for what he was doing on the steps of the Capitol, disturbing my life like this with his damn prophetic disequilibrium. It didn't work out that way.

I suppose what I was angry about, but didn't really want to face, was my own silent lie in the matter. Because I had been riding my bike over to the Capitol steps every few days since the fast began, like a voyeur at a car wreck who can't stop himself. Always I had stood at the edge of the fasters' 6 o'clock prayer vigil, not really participating in the prayers and singing, just wishing with lasers of intensity that Charlie, and the other three as well, could be shown the light to give this insanity up.

But I had never really said this, in so many words, and certainly never to Charlie. There has always been a resistance in me to try and tell him anything, partly, I suppose, out of a fear he'll go the other way -- he's always been that perverse.

So, this particular evening, on the 17th day, I said, nearly startling myself: "But why, Charlie, I want to know right now, tell me why you are doing this to people you love." I didn't mean myself primarily, for though I love him all right, I would consider it obscene to suggest that his apparent approaching death is doing to me even half of what it is doing to Judy.

What prompted my remark was that Charlie had just said again, almost by rote, the words I have heard him say repeatedly since the summer: "I'm ready to die, Paul." He had said this several times in my own house, especially as the fast began. (He lived with us for the first seven days, as he has on and off since he came to town last February and began working with a group called Americans for Peace in the Americas and another called Witness for Peace.)

He was sitting on a goofy blue plastic cushion made by the Shamrock Sport Bag Co., the kind people lug to football stadiums. The words "Fighting Irish" were emblazoned on the pad. He was sipping water from a styrofoam cup as if it contained all the sustenance mankind had ever known. The skin around his Adam's apple hung like turkey flesh.

"To make a statement, make a statement with my life, that's all," he said, with no discernible tension in his voice. "Because I feel I can make a bigger statement with my death right now than with my life, and so that's what I'm prepared to do. This is coming from the inside. This is a spiritual thing, that's what you've got to understand, that's what I've been trying to tell you from the beginning." He hesitated. "You see, we're so inured. We've just been saturated with pleasure."

"But who's going to give a damn, Charlie, don't you understand that?" I said now. "You're going to die on these lousy steps because we voted $100 million to the contras. Okay, big deal, it'll be in the paper the next day, National Public Radio will do a eulogy, but then who gives a damn a week later? It's all just a macabre joke, a joke on you, Charlie. Don't you see that?"

"Maybe the people in Nicaragua won't see it as some macabre joke," he said softly. And this from a man who has been far from soft in his life. Because when you say everything else about Charlie Liteky, you must also say that there is an anger, a terrible frightful anger, he has never really come to terms with.

"I made a mistake with Vietnam. I thought it was a just war. It was a travesty. It was a filthy lie, from the Gulf of Tonkin onward. I can't stand by and let Vietnam happen all over again. This is the only way I know. Let others work it out as a cerebral problem. I see the thing as a burning house, and I'm going in."

"But will it make any difference?" I said.

"I don't know that it will," he said.

I wanted to say, "Do you think you're Jesus Christ or something?" but instead I said:

"What about Judy?" Again, I wanted to say, but didn't, "Yeah, you save Nicaragua, and you kill your wife, eh, Charlie."

He didn't really answer, just nodded beatifically.

Prophetic disequilibrium.

About the beaver:

My son is 2 1/2, and nearly from the moment that Charlie came to Washington last winter to be a full-time peace advocate, he and Matthew have had a wonderful rapport. They have gotten down on the floor of our living room and kitchen to play a game called "How 'Bout" that I really don't understand.

But in the early days of his fast, Charlie did something that upset Matthew terribly. He lost the beaver. The beaver is just a cruddy little plastic likeness of a beaver that we had attached to a key chain and given to Charlie, so that he could come and go from our house as he pleased. Charlie misplaced the key ring with the beaver on it. (He's always traveled light and left things here and there; he's the least materially oriented person I've ever known.) Matthew couldn't understand this.

"But Charlie, where's the beaver?" he kept saying.

Charlie didn't have an answer.

"Will you look for the beaver, Charlie?" Matthew kept saying. "I want you to look for the beaver, Charlie. Look for it|" He said it with the same insistence with which he demands things of his adoring parents, which I think only suggests how close he and Charlie have become in these last few months.

On the eighth day of his fast, Charlie called my house. "I have wonderful news," he said with true jubilation in his voice.

Jesus, I thought, he's going to stop the fast.

"Paul, I found the beaver|" he said. "Can I give it to you tonight on the steps?"

We took Matthew over that night. He and Charlie hugged. "The beaver|" Matthew crowed. Later, Charlie told me, "You know, Paul, I was really afraid that the only memory Matthew was ever going to have of me was that I lost the beaver."@Charlie Liteky fasting on the Capitol steps: "This is the only way I know. Let others work it out as a cerebral problem. I see the thing as a burning house, and I'm going in."@From left, Duncan Murphy, George Mizo, Mrian Wilson and Charlie Liteky fast at the Capitol.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.