About Bleeding in Babylon

 

            A year after causing his best friend’s death in an automobile crash, Thomas DeCordiva, a Catholic priest in Los Angeles, can no longer separate his secrets from his vows. Now addicted to cheap Valium and sleeping pills, he is crumbling, unable to keep a graveside promise to watch over his friend’s 19-year-old son, a National Guardsman deployed to Iraq. The widow Marybeth is unaware of Thomas’ role in her husband’s accident and has come to rely on him as they grieve together. For Thomas, however, their mutual dependence has become an attraction he is unable to repress.

            Due to military security, Marybeth knows only her son’s approximate location near an insurgent-ridden village. She compulsively watches news of the war then is determined to see him in Iraq before he becomes another casualty of a roadside bomb. Torn between his devotion to Marybeth and his duties as priest, unable to have both or abandon either, Thomas accompanies her to the war zone, where a local family befriends them and offers their home as a safe haven.

           During the weeks searching the village and surrounding country, Marybeth surmises that Thomas was involved in her husband’s death. Eventually the guilt overwhelms him and he admits his role in the accident. Marybeth is stunned by her earlier blindness and repulsed by Thomas’ betrayal. But in a culture where a lone woman is suspect, she needs his help as much as he needs her forgiveness. They have no choice but to continue the search, together, in awkward silence.

         Having already suffered the loss of a daughter—shot driving past a checkpoint at the beginning of the war—the family despairs again as one of the sons is dying of dysentery. While bringing the boy to a U.S. military post for medical attention, Thomas is critically injured in an insurgent attack, leaving Marybeth to decide whether to continue looking for her son or bring Thomas home.

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