You Will See Fire

For the Kisii, the supernatural was everywhere, but they lacked what some anthropologists called “an organized cosmology.” Their religion was essentially an ancestor cult. In a volcanic peak, shapeless as the wind that swirled around its high ridges, dwelled immortal ancestor spirits called “grandfathers”—a fickle, prickly, demanding pack that meted out rough justice in human affairs, punishing homicide and adultery and incest. They sent death and disease, killing bolts and madness, barren wombs and ruined crops. They were not deities, the object of daily prayer and ritual, but their hand was detected when misfortune struck; in this sense, they more closely resembled demons or furies. When angry, they placed omens in your path—an aardvark or copulating snakes—to signal their need for appeasement by funerary and animal sacrifices.

Kaiser perceived the Kisii outlook as one of profound “fear and fatalism,” akin to the pagan Europe of his Irish and German forebears. This enlarged the exhilaration of his missionary work. He saw himself bringing the good news of Christ’s victory over death and evil, liberating a superstition-enslaved people from their terrors. People sought his protection against the curse left by a lightning strike on a homestead; a sprinkling of his magic water could remove it. Once, he came upon the corpse of a young girl killed by a lightning bolt, and was warned not to touch her: It was certain to bring death, unless goats were sacrificed. Kaiser disregarded the warning, hammered together a wooden coffin, and lifted her into it for burial. If he didn’t banish the belief in curses, he seemed at least to possess a special power to defeat them. His celibacy set him apart from the community’s normal rhythms and aspirations, and that sense of apartness—coupled with his connection to the spirit world, his ability to influence hidden forces—made him a relation of traditional Kisii diviners.

In a study of the Kisii conducted a few years before Kaiser’s arrival, ethnographers Robert and Barbara LeVine described them as a “distinctively paranoid” people who viewed families and neighbors as nests of potential enemies. They sued one another with astonishing frequency—over stolen cattle, boundary lines, beer-party brawls. Litigants were expected to fabricate elaborate stories to avoid admitting guilt, which is why, outside the courthouses, there stood small flowering omotembe trees—oath trees—on which they were made to swear; to lie was to invite supernatural disaster, and to refuse the oath was tantamount to confession. In matters of justice, families closed ranks, and many killers avoided trial for want of witnesses. Punishment by the human justice system was regarded as meaningless against the rage of the spirits.

Studying the Kisii, the ethnographers found a streak of sexual puritanism and sadomasochism. Women who initiated sex were seen as prostitutes; faced with a male overture, they were expected to demonstrate serious reluctance, a practice that obscured distinctions between consensual sex and rape. On her wedding night, the bride mounted a show of resistance while the groom’s clan mates tore off her clothes and forced her onto the marriage bed. In a kind of ritualized contest, she would have stashed a piece of knotted grass under the bed or a piece of charcoal in her mouth, magic amulets meant to render the groom impotent. Multiple sessions of intercourse were expected of him that night; it was cause for pride if he injured the bride so badly that she couldn’t walk. There was also a form of ritualized rape (still enduring in the late 1950s, though growing less frequent) called “taking by stealth”: On the occasion of annual initiation ceremonies, boys were permitted to sneak into girls’ huts, where “a few boys achieve a hurried and fearful act of coitus with girls who pretend to be sleeping.”

As in the midwestern farmland of Kaiser’s youth, cows were ubiquitous in Kisii country. Along with the number of wives he managed to collect, cattle was the mark of a man’s wealth and status. They were a dowry for a daughter and an insurance policy, convertible to cash in emergencies that required payments to a witch-smeller or medicine man. And as in the Midwest, the rhythms of life in Kisiiland were dominated by the seasons, the rain and the crops, and survival depended on how well you read the signs. The year began with groups of women entering their little fields, their infants bound to their backs, their panga knives slashing the underbrush, their hoes pulverizing clumps of dirt in preparation for the broadcasting of millet and corn. Then came the long rains and the weeding and the waiting, and by August the granaries would be depleted, and the families, when they ate, survived on sweet potatoes and bananas. In the months that followed came the harvesting, and with it the initiation ceremonies, including mass clitoridectomies, the culture’s central ritual for girls. To an outsider, the rite involved bewildering dramas. Girls expressed great eagerness for the painful procedure in the face of older women who mockingly discouraged them. By this playacting, girls were signaling their mental readiness to enter the hut of the surgeon, who waited with a harvesting knife or razor; to flee the ceremony, once it had begun, was a disgrace to the family and an affront to the spirits.

Despite the vast cultural differences, Kaiser felt a kinship with his parishioners. They reminded him of the Scandinavian farmers he’d known as a boy in Minnesota. They were “tenacious and stubborn, yet warmhearted and generous, tightfisted and grasping, superstitious and religious—perceiving the influence of the spirit world in every occurrence,” he wrote in a memoir late in life. Kaiser came to respect native medicine men who used herbs and leaves to rescue people from the throes of mental breakdowns after modern medicine had failed. A sick Kisii saw no contradiction in treating his affliction with both a pill and a sacrifice to an offended ancestor.

This, then, was the land that Kaiser entered in his early thirties, the place he would spend much of his life. He came to regard himself not just as an African generally but as a Kisii in particular.

THE COUNTRY, WITH its fierce light and impenetrable dark, its jumbo maize rows and seasons of starvation, was immense, large enough to contain his clashing selves: the priest and the paratrooper, the healer and the hunter, the collar and the gun, the man of obedience who chafed at authority. The duality of his character had been obvious since his childhood, and partly a function of it. He was born in November 1932, the second of four children in a devoutly Catholic family in Otter Tail County, a backwoods patch of wild Minnesota where the children worked the farm and wandered deep woods of ash and poplar and basswood, and where learning to shoot was both survival and a poor boy’s central entertainment. The young John Kaiser, thin and sandy-haired, evinced a penchant for solitude, and he thought it would be a fine life to live as a trapper. He spent dark winter mornings roaming with his .22 rifle or single-barrel shotgun, hunting for muskrats and inspecting traps he had set. He became renowned for the speed with which he could detach a skin from the carcass. Animal fur earned the family a few dollars for a day’s work.

Religion, like firearms, saturated the Kaiser farm’s rhythms. Prayers began on awakening. Mom and Dad drilled their children in the proper responses to the Latin Mass. Their small, white, steepled church had frosted glass, plain wooden pews with uncushioned kneelers, and a wood furnace under the sanctuary. At the pulpit, a German-born priest named James Mohm upbraided parishioners by name for their sins and for their ignorance of the faith. He was opinionated, confrontational, deeply involved in the life of the congregation, and widely loved, a man Kaiser would later describe as a strong influence.

One Christmas at his one-room country school, Kaiser drew a nativity scene on the school chalkboard, carefully detailing the three kings, lovingly texturing the wool of the sheep, scrupulously shaping the halo around baby Jesus’ crib. Nights at home, he sat with the family around the kerosene lamp, creating images that might have sprung from the covers of a boys’ pulp magazine: horses, sheriffs, gunslingers, elaborate battle scenes. In one image of men at war, he lavished detail on the soldiers’ uniforms, on the sights of their M1 rifles, on their anguished faces as bullets riddled their bodies.

His capacity for concentration was married to an impetuous streak. One winter morning as a high school freshman, he and his elder brother, Francis, were exploring the deep woods with their rifles in search of mallards. Coming upon an ice-sheathed pond, the boys approached on elbows and knees, waiting silently for ducks to cluster in the pond’s melted center. They fired; the birds shuddered and lay floating. John Kaiser plunged into icy water above his waist to retrieve their prize. He emerged trembling uncontrollably and unable to speak. He ran home, a good mile’s distance, to be wrapped in a quilt and warmed by the potbellied cast-iron stove.

Rheumatic fever came on quickly, confining him to his bed for months, the vibrant sandy-haired boy shrunk to the bones. From his bed, he tracked animals with his rifle through the open window. The seasons changed around him, sending their messages: howling blizzards, snowmelt trickling from the eaves, the scratching of june bugs against the screens.

He would never forget his body’s capacity to betray him. During the slow recovery and afterward, he hardened it against another possible mutiny, steeling it with endless sit-ups and barbell curls, pushing it beyond endurance.

For years, people noticed his hand fluttering up to his heart involuntarily; in photographs of the period, people remarked that he stood like Napoléon. The habit lasted through his years at St. John’s Preparatory School, where he grew tall and fast and strong, catching footballs one-handed and setting a class record in pole vaulting, and through his two years at St. Louis University, where he competed formidably on the wrestling team. It survived well into his army career.

Kaiser had enlisted, following the example of his brother Francis, who had fought in Korea. What survives in official army archives is scant. He served from April 29, 1954 to April 26, 1957, and was discharged as a corporal at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was part of the Eighty-second, also known as the “All-Americans,” a celebrated elite airborne division that fought in some of World War II’s decisive battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, and participated in the invasion of Normandy.

Kaiser joined during one of the hotter periods of the Cold War—the armistice that brought a cease-fire to the Korean conflict was just nine months old, and an uneasy peace prevailed. The Eighty-second had been kept in strategic reserve from the conflict, poised to repel Soviet invasions elsewhere. Ready to fly, ready to jump: That was the unit’s raison d’être, its outsized pride, the justification for a training crucible that made the men swagger even in the company of marines. “We were much more disciplined than the Marine Corps because of our unique position,” recalled William Meek, the son of a Kentucky coal miner, who roomed with Kaiser at Fort Bragg and trained with him in Company D, a heavy-mortar platoon in the Eighty-second. “We were to be prepared within a few hours’ notice to go anywhere in the world where there was a trouble spot. We were to stay in top physical shape. Even the mess steward, if we were overweight, would determine how big a portion of potatoes we could have.” He would recall Kaiser as a loner who rarely left the base on off days, venturing instead to the library, the swimming pool, or the woods.

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 said. “Every time I was ready to leave, John talked me out of it. Every time John was ready to leave, I talked him out of it. We had both had lives as adults in the military. We had no illusions about going into a life of celibacy.” The ache was sharpened by the site of pretty coeds wandering the campus. Barnicle had had girlfriends; Kaiser acknowledged to his roommate that he was a virgin. “I’m sure he’d fallen in love a couple of times. Daily, you’re faced with the sacrifice of a family,” Barnicle recalled. “We talked about our vocations, and we talked about girls, but we mostly talked about Thomistic philosophy.”

After two years in St. Louis, Kaiser accompanied Barnicle to the four-year course at St. Joseph’s College in London, where they were among the few Americans. They received a red sash to drape over their cassocks, a sign they were willing to shed blood for the faith. Missionary work had its hazards, though it was less risky than it had been in the years before quinine, when an assignment to a place like Kenya, where Mill Hill had been sending men since 1904, often meant quick malarial death. The seminary was dominated by archaic rules, in the fashion of a Benedictine order. After night prayers, students were expected to observe the magnum silencium the instant they placed a foot on the first step leading to the dormitory area, and it reigned till morning Mass. The rooms were tiny, primitive, with a small bed, a cupboard, a desk, a lamp, a chair, a cross on the wall. To discourage “unhealthy friendships,” a euphemism for homosexual trysts, there was a strict prohibition against visiting one another’s rooms.

Harrie van Onna, a Dutch seminarian, would remember Kaiser as a quiet man of great warmth who possessed a naive idealism about the faith but sometimes clashed with the men who ran its institutions. The missionary order left little room for individual dissent on matters of doctrine—Kaiser expressed skepticism about the logic of celibacy but agreed to adhere to the vow—and the seminary structure was an infantilizing one. Like Kaiser, van Onna had commanded men in the military; now they were required to ask permission to take a trip into downtown London.

Having studied Spanish, Kaiser had anticipated a posting to South America after his ordination. But Mill Hill needed priests in Africa. He had no special knowledge of the continent and spoke none of its indigenous languages; he was not able to conceal a sense of disappointment at the assignment. Still, he was a man of obedience, and adaptable to any terrain. That had been the pride of the Eighty-second Airborne, after all: the ability to go anywhere in the world with little notice, mountain or desert, city or bush.

He would, at least, be spared the mundane duties and circumscribed routines of a big-city priest, for which he understood himself to be temperamentally unsuited. Plus, he relayed with delight to his brother Francis, he would be able to take his hunting rifle to Africa.

A YEAR AFTER his arrival in Kenya, he steered his motorcycle southward out of tightly packed Kisii country into what some people called “the other side”—the immense open plains of Masailand in the Transmara region. He stood on a hill overlooking the Migori River and beheld a vista alive with elephants, buffalo, topi, waterbuck, and impalas. He felt, he wrote, as if he had been admitted to the Garden of Eden, a hunter’s paradise. Kaiser applied for a hunting license and, on free days, when other missionaries headed to the cities, he disappeared into the tall grass, at times in the company of traditional spear-bearing Kisii hunters. Traveling the region with his gun, he learned every square mile of it. He did not pursue trophies—seeking only the game meat he used to feed himself and his parishioners—but he was thrilled by the hunt. He elbow-crawled with his shotgun to within twenty yards of a warthog, which he considered the best meat in Kenya.

This was Kenyatta’s country, still in the childhood of its independence, and Kaiser would write of its “easy peaceful aspect.”