The Speed of Light (9 page)

During all the time he spent in Saigon that was possibly the only occasion on which he felt the nearness of death, and the fact that he'd escaped it providentially did nothing but reinforce his baseless conviction that while he stayed there he wasn't in danger, that he was going to survive, that soon he'd be back home and then it would be as if he'd never been in that war.

The one who really was in the war was Bob. Since his arrival in Vietnam Rodney received frequent news from him and, every time Bob came to Saigon on leave, he went to great pains to receive him in style: he lavished black-market gifts on him, took him drinking to the terrace of the Continental, to dinner at Givral's, a small restaurant with air conditioning on the corner of Le Toi and Tu Do, and then to exclusive places in the city centre — including, as Bob incomprehensibly took it upon himself to specify in several of his letters, the Hung Dao Hotel, a famous and popular three-storey brothel located on Tu Do street, not far from Givral's — places where the drinks and conversation would often go on into the blazing dawns of Lam Son Square. Rodney devoted himself entirely to his brother during those visits, but, when the two of them said goodbye after a week of daily binges, he was never left feeling satisfied that he'd helped Bob forget for a time the harshness of the war; he was always overcome by a vague unease that left embers of sorrow in his stomach as if he'd passed those fraternal days of laughs, confidences, alcohol and staying up all night trying to make amends for a sin he hadn't committed or didn't remember having committed, but that stung him as if it were real. At the end of May the brothers saw each other in Hue, where Rodney had gone in an advisory capacity with a famous country singer and his troupe of go-go girls. By then Bob had only a month till his discharge; a while before he'd discarded the idea, which he'd nurtured for a time and even announced to his parents in a letter, of re-enlisting in the army, and at that moment he was elated, eager to return home. Back in Saigon, Rodney wrote a letter home telling of his encounter with Bob and describing his brother bursting with optimism, but two weeks later, when he arrived at the office one morning, the captain he served under called him into his office and, after a preamble as solemn as it was confusing, told him that during a routine reconnaissance mission, on a path that emerged from the jungle into a village near the Laos border, Bob or someone walking beside Bob had stepped on a 150pound mine, and the only thing that remained of his brother's body and those of the four of his comrades who had had the misfortune to be with him at that moment were the bloody tatters of uniforms they'd been able to collect from the area surrounding the 30-foot-wide crater the explosion had left. Bob's death changed everything. Or at least that's what Rodney's father thought; it's also borne out by events. Because, not long after his brother died, Rodney renounced in writing the possibility of considering his military service finished and going home — a possibility he could have been legally entitled to thanks to Bob's death — and submitted a request to join a combat unit. None of his letters give the reasons for this decision, and his father did not know the real motives that induced him to make it;undoubtedly they were linked to his brother's death, but it could also be that it was an unpremeditated or instinctive decision, and that Rodney himself did not know the reasons. In any case the fact is that his letters from that point on became more frequent, longer and darker. Thanks to them, Rodney's father began to understand or imagine (as perhaps anyone who had received them would have) that this was a different sort of war from the one he had fought in, and maybe from all other wars: he understood or he imagined that in this war there was an absolute lack of order or meaning or structure, that those who were fighting had no defined sense of purpose or direction and therefore never achieved objectives, or won or lost anything, nor was there any progress they could measure, nor even the slightest possibility, not even of glory, but of dignity for anyone fighting in it. 'A war in which all the pain of all wars prevailed, but where there was no place for the slightest possibility of redemption or greatness or decency that was befitting to all wars,' Rodney's father said to me. His son would have approved of the sentence. In a letter from the beginning of October 1968, where the somewhat obsessive and hallucinatory tone of his later missives is already perceptible, he writes: 'The atrocious thing about this war is that it's not a war. Here the enemy is nobody, because it could be anybody, and they're nowhere, because they're everywhere: inside and out, up and down, in front and behind. They're nobody, but they exist. In other wars you tried to defeat them; not in this one: in this one you try to kill them, even though we all know that by killing them we won't defeat them. It's not worth kidding yourself: this is a war of extermination, so the more things we kill —people or animals or plants, it's all the same — the better. We 'll devastate the country: we won't leave anything. And still, we won't win the war, simply because this war cannot be won or no one but Charlie can win it: he's willing to kill and to die, while the only thing that we want is for the twelve months we have to spend here to go by as fast as possible so we can go home. In the meantime we kill and we die. Of course we all make an effort to pretend we understand something, that we know why we're here and killing and maybe dying, but we do it only so we don't go completely crazy. Because here we're all crazy, crazy and lonely and without any possibility of advancing or retreating, without any possibility of loss or gain, as if we were going endlessly round and round an invisible circle at the bottom of an empty well, where the sun never reaches. I 'm writing in the dark. I'm not afraid. But sometimes it scares me to think I'm on the verge of discovering who I am, that I'll come around a bend on a path some day and see a soldier, and it will be me.'

In the letters from those first months that he spent away from the deceptive security of Saigon Rodney never mentioned Bob, but he did record in detail the novelties that abounded in his new life. His battalion was stationed in a base near Da Nang, but that was just the resting place, because they spent most of the time operating out in the region, by day squelching through the rice paddies and scouring the jungle inch by inch, asphyxiated by the heat and humidity and mosquitoes, enduring biblical downpours, covered in mud up to their eyebrows, devoured by leeches, eating canned food, always sweating, exhausted, their bodies aching all over, stinking after entire weeks without a wash, oblivious to any effort other than that of staying alive, while more than once — after walking for hours and hours armed to the teeth, carrying backpacks and conscientiously making sure of every spot they placed their feet to avoid the mines planted along the jungle paths — they surprised themselves by hoping shots would just start to be fired, if only to break the exhausting monotony of those interminable days when the boredom was often more enervating than the proximity of danger. That was during the day. During the night — after each of them had dug their sniper pits in the red twilight of the paddies, while the moon rose majestically on the horizon — the routine changed, but not always for the better: sometimes they had no choice but to try to get some sleep while rocked by the shelling of artillery, the roar of helicopters landing or shots from M16s; other times they had to go out on patrol, and they did so holding hands, or clutching the uniform of the comrade in front of them, like children terrified of getting lost in the dark; there was also guard duty, eternal shifts when every sound in the jungle was threatening and during which they had to struggle tooth and nail against sleepiness and against the unsleeping ghosts of their dead comrades. Because it was in those days that Rodney came to know what it meant to feel death breathing down his neck daily. 'I once read a phrase by Pascal where he said that no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune,' Rodney writes two months after his arrival in Da Nang. 'When I read that it struck me as mean and false; now I know it to be true. What makes it true is that "entirely". Since I've been here I've seen several friends die: their deaths have horrified me, infuriated me, made me cry, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't felt an obscene relief, for the simple reason that the dead man was not me. Or to put it another way: the horror lies in the war, but long before it already lay within us.' These words might partially explain why in his letters of those days Rodney speaks only of his living comrades — never of the dead — and of his living commanding officers — never of the dead; I've often wondered if it also explains why they're full of stories, as if for some reason Rodney might not have wanted to say directly what the stories were able to say in their lateral or elliptical way. They are stories that had happened to him, or to someone close to him, or that he'd simply been told; I reject the hypothesis that some of them might be invented. I'll just tell the one about Captain Vinh, because I have a feeling it might have been the one that most affected Rodney.

Captain Vinh was an officer in the South Vietnamese army who was assigned as guide and interpreter to the unit my friend served in. He was a gaunt, cordial thirty-year-old with whom, according to Rodney's letter that tells the story, he'd spoken more than once as they got their strength back bolting down their field rations or smoked a cigarette while resting on a march. 'Don't go near him,' a long-serving member of his company said after seeing him chatting amicably with the captain one afternoon. 'That guy's a fucking traitor.' And he told Rodney the following anecdote. One time they captured three Vietcong guerrilla fighters, and an intelligence officer put the three of them in a helicopter and asked the captain and four soldiers, among them the old hand, to come with him. The helicopter took off and, when it was at a considerable altitude, the officer began interrogating the prisoners. The first refused to talk, and without the least hesitation the officer ordered the soldiers to throw him out of the helicopter into the void;they obeyed. The same thing happened with the next prisoner. The third one didn't have to be interrogated: crying and begging for mercy, he started talking so fast and desperately that Captain Vinh barely had time to translate his words, but when he finished his confession he met the same fate as his comrades. 'We went up in the helicopter with three guys and landed with none,' the veteran said. 'But no one asked any questions. As for the captain, he's garbage. He 's seen what we're doing to his people and he keeps helping us. I don't know how they allow him to carry on here,' he complained. 'Sooner or later he'll betray us.' Not much later Rodney would have cause to remember the long-serving soldier's prediction. It all began the morning his company turned up at a village that had been occupied by the Vietcong the night before. The aim of the Vietcong'sincursion had been to recruit soldiers, and to that end the guerrillas requested the help of the village leader, who seemed reluctant to cooperate with them. The guerrillas'response was so sudden and devastating that when the man tried to make amends it was already too late: they grabbed his two daughters, six and eight years old, raped them, tortured them, slit their throats and threw their mutilated bodies down the well to contaminate the village's only source of drinking water. Rodney's whole company took in the story in silence, except for Captain Vinh, who was literally sickened by it. 'My daughters,' he moaned over and over again to whomever would listen, to no one. 'They're the same age, those girls were the same ages as my daughters.' Two months later, the same day he arrived back in Da Nang after a week's leave in Tokyo, Rodney had to help with the evacuation of the thirteen dead and fifty-nine wounded of a combat company, which that very morning had been the victim of an ambush in the jungle. The event made a deep impression on him, but the impression turned into cold fury when he discovered that the rapid investigation that followed had concluded that the butchery could only have been the result of a tip-off and the perpetrator of that tip-off could only have been Captain Vinh. In his letter Rodney affirms that, when he found out about the officer's treachery, if he'd been able to he would certainly have killed 'that murderous rat with whom I'd shared food, tobacco and conversation,' but now it wasn't necessary, because the interpreter had been handed over to the South Vietnamese army, who had executed him without delay; Rodney added that he was glad of the news. The next letter Rodney's parents received was just a note: in it their son records succinctly that the same intelligence officers who had revealed Captain Vinh's treachery had just arrived at the conclusion that the officer had given the Vietcong communists the tip-off because they'd kidnapped his two daughters and threatened to kill them unless he collaborated.

After receiving that briefest of notes his parents had no news from Rodney for almost a month and, when the correspondence resumed, gradually and insidiously they were overtaken by the sensation that it wasn't their son who was writing to them, but someone else who had usurped his name and handwriting. It was a strange sensation, Rodney's father told me, as if whoever was writing was Rodney but wasn't him at the same time or, stranger still, as if whoever was writing was too much Rodney (Rodney in a chemically pure state, extract of Rodney) to really be Rodney. I've read and reread those letters and, ambiguous or confused though it may be, the observation seems accurate, because in these pages, undoubtedly written in torrents, it's obvious that Rodney's writing has entered into a dubious, shimmering territory, where, although it's not difficult to identify my friend's voice in the distance, it's impossible not to perceive a powerful diapason of delirium that, without making it entirely unrecognizable, at least makes it disturbingly alien to Rodney, among other things because he doesn't always avoid the temptations of truculence, solemnity or simple affectation. I'll add that, in my opinion, the fact that Rodney wrote these letters from the hospital where he was recuperating from the ravages of the incident accounts in part for their anomalous character, but it's not enough to quash the disquieting sensation reading them brings. 'The incident': that's how Rodney's father referred to it during the afternoon I spent at his house, because it seems that's how Rodney referred to it the one time his father questioned him about it in vain. The incident. It happened during the month he had no news from his son and all Rodney's father had been able to find out over the years from various sources was that Rodney's company had taken part in some sort of raid on a village called My Khe, in the province of Quang Ngai, which had ended the lives of more than fifty victims; he had also managed to find out that, as a result of the incident or as a consequence of it, and despite having suffered no physical injury, Rodney had spent three weeks hospitalized in Saigon, and a long time later, when he was back home, he'd had to testify in a case against the lieutenant who'd been in command of his company, and who was finally acquitted of all the charges brought against him. That was all Rodney's father had managed to find out about the incident in all those years. As for his son, he never alluded to the matter other than in passing and in the most superficial way possible and only when he had no other choice but to do so, and in his letters after he got out of hospital, and the ones he wrote while he was still there, he doesn't even mention it.