The Speed of Light (8 page)

One afternoon in the summer he graduated from university, while spending some time with his family in Rantoul, Rodney received his draft notice from the army. He undoubtedly expected it, but that wouldn't have made it alarm him any less. He didn't say anything to his parents;nor did he seek refuge with Julia or the advice of any of his comrades in the peace movement. Rodney knew he couldn't put forward any real excuses to evade that order, so it'spossible he spent the days that followed torn between the fear of deserting, taking the path to exile in Canada that so many young men of his age had taken then, and the fear of going to a remote and hateful war against a martyred country, a war he knew for certain that he — unlike his brother Bob, who he rightly considered a man of action and incalculable cunning — could not survive. One of those days of pressing doubts a letter from Bob arrived at the house and, as usual, his father read it aloud at the dinner table, peppering the reading with proud elucidation that was like a rebuke, or that in his fearful nervousness his son interpreted as a rebuke. The thing is that, in the middle of one of his father's comments, Rodney interrupted him, the interruption degenerated into an argument and the argument into one of those fights in which the two contenders, because they know each other better than anybody, know better than anybody where to wound to make the other bleed most. In this one there was no blood — at least no physical blood, no blood not merely metaphorical — but there were accusations, insults and slamming doors, and the next morning, before anyone had woken up, Rodney took his father's car and disappeared and, when he returned home after three days without a word, he called his father and mother together and unceremoniously announced, giving them no chance to reply, that in two months' time he was enlisting in the army. Almost twenty years after that fateful August day, sitting across from me in the same wingback chair where he had heard Rodney's words of no return, while he held a cup of cold coffee and searched my eyes for the relief of a glimmer of exoneration, Rodney's father was still wondering where his son had been and what he'd done during those three days of flight, and was still also wondering, as he'd done over and over again for the last twenty years, why Rodney had not deserted and had ended up complying with the order to go to Vietnam. In all that time he'd been unable to find a satisfactory answer to the first question; not so the second. 'People tend to believe that many explanations are less convincing than one alone,'Rodney's father told me. 'But the truth is there's more than one reason for almost everything.' According to Rodney'sfather, he would not have joined the army if he could have legally got out of it, but he didn't feel able to deliberately contravene the law — although he considered it unjust — and much less to humiliate himself by asking his father to pull some professional strings to get one of his colleagues to agree to commit fraud by inventing some reason for a medical exemption. On the other hand, refusing to go to war in the name of his pacifist convictions would have cost Rodney two years in prison, and the option of exile in Canada wasn't without risks either, among them that of not being able to return to his country for many years. 'Besides,'Rodney's father went on, 'deep down he was still a boy with his head full of adventure novels and John Wayne movies: he knew his father had fought a war, that his grandfather had fought a war, that war was what men did, that only in war does a man prove he's a man.' So Rodney's father guessed that in some hidden corner of his son's mind, fed by the notions of bravery, manliness and rectitude he'd inculcated in him, and in the struggle with his own nascent ideas of a young man just out of adolescence, he still cherished, a secret but powerful, heroic and romantic concept of war as an essential fact of a man's life, which explined the conviction, matured over twenty years, that if his son had betrayed his anti-war views, swallowed his fear and obeyed the order to go to Vietnam it had really been out of shame, because he knew if he hadn't, he'd never be able to face the simple folk of his country again, because he'd never be able to face his brother or his mother again, but most of all — above all else — because he'd never be able to face him again. 'So it was me who sent Rodney to Vietnam,' Rodney's father said. 'Just as I'd done to Bob.'

Before he went to Vietnam Rodney spent an initial period of training ('basic training', they called it) at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and a second period ('advanced training', they called it) at Fort Polk, Louisiana. His first letters date from that time. 'The first thing you notice upon arrival here,' Rodney writes from Fort Jackson, 'is that reality has receded to a primitive stage, because in this place only rank and violence hold sway: the strong survive, the weak do not. As soon as I came through the door they insulted me, shaved my head, put me in new clothes, took away my identity, so no one needed to tell me that if I wanted to get out of this alive, I had to try to blend into the background, dissolve into the crowd, and I also had to be more brutal than the rest of my comrades. The second thing you notice is something even more elemental. I already knew that perfect happiness does not exist, but here I've learned that perfect unhappiness doesn't exist either, because even the slightest breath is an infinite source of happiness.' Rodney lost ten kilos in his first three weeks at Fort Jackson. There and at Fort Polk, there were two feelings dominant in Rodney's mind: strangeness and fear. The majority of his comrades, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys mostly, were younger than him: some of them were delinquents whom the judge had given a choice of prison or the army; others were unfortunates who, since they didn't know what to do with their lives, had rightly imagined that the army would give them a sense of mission and meaning; the immense majority were uneducated workers who adapted to the rigours of military life with less difficulty than did he, who, despite being used to outdoor life and having a long familiarity with firearms, had led too comfortable an existence up till then to survive undamaged the roughness of the army. But there was also the fear: not fear as a state of mind, but as a physical sensation, cold, humiliating and sticky, which had hardly any resemblance to what he'd called fear until then, not fear of a distant enemy, still invisible and abstract, but fear of his commanders, his comrades, loneliness and himself: a fear that, contradictory though it may seem, didn't keep him from loving them all. There's a letter from Xuan Loc dated 30 January 1969, when Rodney had been in Vietnam for almost a year, in which he tells in detail an anecdote from those months of instruction, as if he'd needed a whole year to digest it, or to resolve to tell it. A few days before his departure for Vietnam they called him and his comrades all together in the functions room in Fort Polk for a last-minute talk by a captain and a sergeant recently returned from the front on techniques of evasion and survival in the jungle. While the captain — a man with an impassive smile and cultivated manners — was speaking, the sergeant held a perfectly white, soft and nervous rabbit, with astonished childlike eyes, that captured the attention of all the soldiers with its inopportune presence. At a certain moment, the rabbit squirmed out of the sergeant's hands and ran away;the captain stopped talking, and a jubilation took over the hall while the rabbit scurried among the desks, until someone finally caught the animal and handed it back to the sergeant. Then the captain took it and, before the ruckus had entirely died down and a brutal silence filled the hall, in a couple of seconds, the smile never leaving his lips and barely getting a drop of blood on himself, broke its neck, tore it to pieces, ripped out its entrails and threw them over the soldiers.

A few days after witnessing this spectacle, intended as a foretaste or a warning, Rodney landed at the Ton Son Nhut military airport in Saigon, after a Braniff Airlines flight that lasted almost thirty hours, during which uniformed stewardesses fattened them up with hot dogs. That happened at the beginning of 1968, just when the Tet Offensive was starting and in the city — then converted into a garbage dump of dead flowers, paper and spent firecracker casings from the recently concluded festival, blown about by a damp and pestilent wind that reeked of urine and human excrement — fear was palpable everywhere, like an epidemic. That was the first thing Rodney noticed when he got to Vietnam: the fear, again the fear. The second thing he noticed was the strangeness. But in this case the reason for the strangeness was different: the Vietnam he'd shaped in his mind hadn't the slightest similarity with the real Vietnam; in fact, you could say they were two different countries, and the surprising thing was that the Vietnam imagined from the United States seemed much more real than the real Vietnam and, in consequence, he felt much less alien to that one than to this one. The result of this paradox was another paradox: despite still despising what the United States was doing to Vietnam (what he was contributing to the United States doing to Vietnam), in Vietnam he felt much more American than he did in the United States, and that, despite the respect and admiration the Vietnamese soon inspired in him, he felt much further away from them there than he had in his own country. Rodney assumed that the cause of this incoherence was his absolute incapacity to communicate with the few Vietnamese people he had any contact with, and not only because some of them didn't know his language, but because even those who did know it overwhelmed him with their exoticism, their lack of irony, their incredible capacity for self-denial, their incredible and permanent serenity, their exaggerated courtesy (which wasn't difficult to confuse with a servility that inspired fear) and with their dull credulity, to the point that, at least during the first days of his time in Saigon, he often couldn't dispel the suspicion that these small men with oriental features who looked, without exception, ten years younger than they actually were and who, no matter how old they might be, didn't go bald or even grey were, also without exception, more succinct or less complicated than he, a suspicion that, despite being genuine, filled him with a vague sense of guilt. These initial impressions undoubtedly changed with time (although his letters barely register the change, surely because, by the time it happened, Rodney already had other preoccupations), but Rodney didn't take long to notice that the combined force of Vietnam and the army also robbed him of complexity, and this, which he recognized as a mutilation of his personality, secretly provided him with a source of relief: being a soldier practically destroyed any degree of personal autonomy, but that prohibition of deciding for himself, that subjugation to strict military hierarchy, humiliating and brutalizing as it was, operated at the same time as an anaesthetic that earned him an unknown and abject happiness that was no less real for being abject, because at that moment he discovered in his own flesh that freedom is richer than slavery, but also much more painful, and that at least there, in Vietnam, what he wanted least was to suffer.

So Rodney's first months in Vietnam weren't too hard. Luck contributed to that. Unlike his brother, posted to a combat battalion as soon as he arrived, by some chance he never fully understood (and that in time he ended up attributing to a bureaucratic error) Rodney was assigned to a subordinate post in a unit with headquarters in the capital, in charge of providing the troops with entertainment. The war was reassuringly far away from there, and besides, the work was not unpleasant: he spent most of his time in an air-conditioned office, and when he was obliged to go out it was only to accompany singers, movie stars and comedians from the airport to their hotel, make sure they had everything they needed or drive them to the place they'd be performing. It was a privileged job in the rearguard, with no greater risk than that of living in Saigon; the problem was that even living in Saigon then constituted a considerable risk. Rodney had occasion to see that for himself just a month after arriving in the city. The following is the story just as he told it in one of his letters.

One afternoon, after work, Rodney went into a bar near the bus stop where he caught his lift every day out to the army base where he slept. In the bar there were just two groups of soldiers sitting at tables and a noncommissioned officer from the Green Berets drinking by himself at one end of the bar; Rodney leaned his elbow on the bar at the other end, ordered a beer and drank it. When he asked how much he owed, the waitress — a young Vietnamese woman, with delicate features and evasive eyes — told him that it was already paid for and pointed to the NCO, who without turning to look at him raised a lethargic hand in greeting;Rodney thanked him from afar and left. After that he got into the habit of having a beer in that bar every evening. At first the ritual was always the same: he went in, sat at the bar, drank his beer, exchanging smiles and the odd Vietnamese word with the waitress, then he paid and left, but after four or five visits he managed to overcome the mistrust of the waitress, who turned out to speak elementary but sufficient English and who from then on began to spend her free moments chatting with him. Until one fine day all that ended. It was a Friday evening, and, as on every Friday evening, soldiers packed into the bar to celebrate the beginning of the weekend with their first drinking binge and the waitresses couldn't cope with all their orders. Rodney was about to pay for his drink and leave when he felt a clap on the shoulder. It was the NCO from the Green Berets. He said hello with exaggerated enthusiasm and offered to buy him a drink, which Rodney felt obliged to accept; he shouted for a beer for Rodney and a double whisky for himself. They talked. As they did so, Rodney took a good look at the NCO: he was short, solid and wiry, his face racked with lines, he had violent, sort of disoriented eyes, and he reeked of alcohol. It wasn't easy to understand his words, but Rodney deduced from them that he was from a small town in Arizona, had been in Vietnam for more than a year and that he only had a few days left before he went home; for his part he told him he'd only been in Saigon for a few weeks and told him about the work he was doing. After the first whisky came the second, and then the third. When the NCO was going to order the fourth Rodney announced he was leaving: it was the third time he'd done so, but on that occasion he felt a hand like a claw grip his arm. 'Relax, recruit,' said the NCO, and Rodney noted beneath that vaguely friendly form of address a vibration like the blade of a newly-whetted knife. 'It's the last one.' And he ordered the whisky. While he was waiting to be served he asked Rodney an unintelligible question. 'I said what do you think we've come here to do?' the NCO repeated in his increasingly slurred voice. 'To this bar?' asked Rodney. 'To this country,' the NCO clarified. It wasn't the first time he'dbeen asked that question since he'd been in Saigon and he already knew the regulation reply, especially the regulation reply to give an NCO. He recited it. The NCO laughed as if he was belching, and before returning to the conversation, asked again for his whisky, which hadn't arrived. 'Not even you believe that. Or maybe you believe we're going to save these people from communism with this bunch of drunks?'he asked, indicating the bar full of soldiers with an affected and mocking gesture. 'I'm going to tell you something: these people don't want us to save them. I'm going to tell you something else: the only thing we've come here to do is to kill gooks. See that girl?' he went on to say, pointing at a waitress walking towards them weighed down with a tray full of drinks and negotiating with great difficulty the superabundance of customers. 'I asked her for a whisky half an hour ago, but she hasn't brought it. You know why?No, of course you don't. . . But I'm going to tell you. She hasn't brought it because she hates me. It's that simple. She hates me. She hates you too. If she could she'd kill you, just like me. And now I'm going to give you some advice. Some friendly advice. I advise you to kill her before she can kill you.' Rodney couldn't say anything, because at that moment the waitress passed in front of them and the NCO tripped her so she ended up sprawled on the floor amid a crash of broken glass. Rodney bent down instinctively to help the waitress up and help pick up the mess. 'What the hell are you doing?' he heard the NCO say. 'Damn it, let her deal with it herself.' Rodney ignored him, and then felt a light kick in the ribs, almost a shove. 'I told you to leave it, recruit!' repeated the NCO, this time shouting. Rodney stood up and said without thinking, as if talking to himself:'You shouldn't have done that.' He immediately regretted his words. For two seconds the NCO looked at him with curiosity; then he roared with laughter. 'What did you say?'Rodney noticed the bar had gone quiet and that he was the target of every gaze; the waitress with evasive eyes was watching him, unblinking, from behind the bar. Rodney heard himself say: 'I said you shouldn't have tripped the girl.' The slap caught him on the temple; then he heard the NCO shout at him, insult him, mock him, hit him again. Rodney endured the humiliation without moving. 'Aren't you going to defend yourself, recruit?' the NCO shouted.'No,' answered Rodney, feeling the fury rise in his throat.'Why not?' the NCO shouted again. 'What are you? A fag or a fucking pacifist?' 'I'm a recruit,' answered Rodney.'And you're an NCO, and you're also drunk.' Then the NCO slowly removed his stripes without taking his eyes off Rodney, and then, as if his voice was emerging from the depths of a cavern, said: 'Defend yourself now, you fucking coward.' The fight lasted barely a few seconds, because a swarm of soldiers broke in between the two adversaries straight away. Otherwise, Rodney didn't come off too badly in the skirmish, and for the next few days waited with resignation to be put on report for having punched an officer, but to his surprise it never happened. He didn't return to the bar for a while, and when he did the manager told him his friend didn't work there any more and that he had the impression she'd left Saigon. He forgot the episode. He tried to forget the waitress. But a few weeks after that visit to the bar he saw her again. That afternoon Rodney was waiting at the bus stop, surrounded by soldiers like himself preparing to return to base, when one of the teenage beggars who often milled around there insisted so much on shining his boots that he finally let him do it. There he was, with one foot on the shoeshine case, when he raised his eyes and to his delight caught sight of the girl: she was across the street, looking at him. At first he thought she was happy to see him too, because she was smiling at him or he thought she was smiling at him, but he soon noticed that it was a strange smile, and his delight turned into alarm when he saw that actually the girl was motioning him urgently to come over there. He left the bootblack and started walking quickly towards where the girl was, but as he was crossing the street he saw the bootblack run past him, and at that moment the explosion went off. Rodney fell to the ground in the middle of the roar, was stunned or unconscious for an instant or two, and when he came to, a catastrophic chaos reigned in the street and the bus stop had become a jumble of wreckage and death. Only hours later did Rodney find out that five American soldiers had lost their lives in the attack, and that the charge had been hidden in the shoeshine case where moments before the explosion he had been resting his foot. As for the bootblack and the waitress, he never saw them again, and Rodney came to the inevitable conclusion that the waitress who had saved his life and the bootblack who'd been about to snatch it away had been two of the perpetrators of the massacre.