The Speed of Light

STARS AND STRIPES

SIXTEEN YEARS HAVE NOW gone by since that spring afternoon I spent in Rantoul, but, perhaps because during all that time I've known that sooner or later I'd have to tell it, that I couldn't not tell it, I still remember quite accurately the story Rodney's father told me in the course of those hours. I have a much less precise memory, on the other hand, of the circumstances surrounding them.

I arrived in Rantoul shortly after midday and found the house with no trouble. As soon as I rang the bell, Rodney's father opened the door and invited me into the living room, a spacious, bright and cosy room, with a fireplace and a leather sofa and two wingback chairs at one end, and at the other, beside the window that faced Belle Avenue, an oak table and chairs, walls lined to the ceiling with perfectly ordered books and floor covered with thick burgundy-coloured rugs that hushed footsteps. The truth is, after our unexpected phone conversation, I had almost anticipated that from the start Rodney's father would display a cordiality unheralded by our first encounter, but what I could in no way have predicted is that the diminished and intimidating man who, in dressing gown and slippers, had dispatched me without a second thought just a few months earlier would now receive me dressed with a sober elegance more suitable to a venerable Boston Brahmin than a retired, country doctor in the Midwest, apparently converted into one of those false elderly men who strive to exhibit, beneath the unwelcome certainty of their many years, the vitality and poise of someone who has not yet resigned himself to enjoying only the scraps of old age. However, as he came out with the story I had gone to hear, that deceptive fagade began to crumble and reveal its flaws, damp stains and deep fissures, and by the middle of his story Rodney's father was no longer talking with the exuberant energy he'd started with — when he spoke as if possessed by a long-deferred urgency, or rather as if his life depended on the act of talking and my listening to him, insistently looking me in the eye just as if he sought there an impossible confirmation of his tale — because by that point his words no longer quivered with the slightest vital impulse, but only the venomous and inflexible memory of a man consumed by regret and devastated by misfortune, and the grey light that entered through the window wrapping the living room in shadows had erased from his face all traces of his distant youth, leaving a bare preview of his skull. I remember that at one point I began to hear the pattering of rain on the porch roof, a pattering that almost immediately turned into a jubilant spring downpour that obliged us to turn on a floor lamp because by then it was almost night and we'd been sitting for many hours face to face, sunken in the two wingback chairs, he talking and me listening, with the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts and on the table an empty coffee pot and two empty cups and a pile of much-handled letters that carried US Army postmarks, letters from Saigon and Da Nang and Xuan Loc and Quang Ngai, from various parts of the Batagan peninsula, letters that spanned a period of more than two years and carried the signatures of his two sons, Rodney and also Bob, but mostly Rodney's. They were very numerous, and were ordered chronologically and kept in three black cardboard document cases with elastic closures, each of which had a handwritten label with the name Rodney and the name Bob, the word Vietnam and the dates of the first and last letter it contained. Rodney 's father seemed to know them off by heart, or at least to have read them dozens of times, and during that afternoon he read me some fragments. That didn't surprise me; what did surprise me — what left me literally dumbfounded — was that at the end of my visit he insisted I take them with me. 'I don't want them any more,' he said before I took my leave, handing me the three document cases. 'Please, keep them and do with them as you see fit.' It was an absurd request, whichever way you look at it, but precisely because it was absurd I couldn't or didn't know how to refuse. Or perhaps, after all, it wasn't so absurd. The fact is, during these sixteen years I haven't given up trying to explain it to myself: I've thought he entrusted his sons' letters to me because he knew he didn't have much time left and he didn't want them ending up in the hands of someone who was unaware of their significance and who might just get rid of them; I've thought he entrusted the letters to me because doing so amounted to a symbolic and hopeless attempt to forever free himself of the story of the disaster they contained and that transferring them to me would make me the repository of the tale or even responsible for it, or because in doing so he wanted to compel me to share with him the burden of his guilt. I've thought all these things and many more besides, but of course I still don't know for certain why he entrusted me with those letters and now I'll never know; perhaps he didn't even know himself. It doesn't matter: the fact is he entrusted them to me and now I have them before me, while I write. During these sixteen years I've read them many times. Bob's are few and brief, absent-mindedly kind, as if the war entirely absorbed his energy and his intelligence and made everything alien to it seem banal or illusory; Rodney's, the other hand, are frequent and voluminous, and in their craftsmanship one notices an evolution that is undoubtedly a mirror of the evolution that Rodney himself experienced during the years he spent in Vietnam: at the beginning they are careful and nuanced, careful not to let reality show through more than by way of a sophisticated rhetoric of reticence, made of silences, allusions, metaphors and implications, and at the end torrential and unbridled, often verging on delirium, just as if the uncontainable whirlwind of the war had burst a dam through the cracks of which had spilled a senseless avalanche of clear-sightedness.

What follows is Rodney's story, or, at least, his story as his father told me that afternoon and as I remember it, and as it appears in his letters and in Bob's letters. There are no fundamental discrepancies between those two sources, and although I've checked some names, some places and some dates, I don't know which parts of this story correspond to the truth of the story and which parts to attribute to the imagination, bad memory or bad conscience of the narrators: what I'm telling is just what they told (and what I deduced or imagined from what they told), not what really happened. I should add that, at twenty-five, when I heard Rodney's story that afternoon from his father, I knew nothing or almost nothing about the Vietnam War, which was then (I suspect) no more than a confusing background noise on the television news of my adolescence and an annoying obsession of certain Hollywood film makers, and also that, despite having been living in the United States for almost a year, I couldn't even imagine that although it had officially ended over a decade earlier, in the minds of many Americans it was still as vivid as on 29 March 1973, the day on which, after the deaths of almost sixty thousand of their compatriots — the vast majority of them boys around twenty years of age — and having completely devastated the invaded country, dropping more than eight times as many bombs on it as on all of Europe during the entire Second World War, the United States Army finally left Vietnam.

Rodney had been born forty-one years before in Rantoul. His father came from Houlton, in the state of Maine, in the northeast of the country, way up near the Canadian border. He'd studied in Augusta, where his family had moved after his grandfather was ruined in the economic crisis of 1929, and then in New York. After graduating from medical school at Columbia in 1943, he enlisted in the army as a private, and during the next two years fought in North Africa, France and Germany. He was not a religious man (or he wasn't until very late in life), but he'd been raised with that strict sense of justice and ethical probity that seems to be the patrimony of Protestant families, and he felt a private satisfaction at having fought for the triumph of liberty and that, thanks to his sacrifice and that of many other young Americans like him, the United States had saved the world from the wicked abjection of fascism; he was also convinced that, having risen in arms to guarantee freedom, his country could not shy away, whether out of complacency or cowardice, from the moral commitment it had contracted with the rest of the world, could not leave abandoned in the hands of terror, injustice or slavery anyone who requested its help to liberate them from oppression. He returned from Europe in 1945. That same year he began to practise medicine in the public hospitals of the Midwest, first in St Paul, Minnesota, and then in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, until, for reasons he didn't want to explain and I didn't want to inquire into (but which, he implied or I deduced, undoubtedly had something to do with his idealism or his candour and with his absolute disillusionment with the way public medicine was run), he put down roots definitively in Rantoul, which was strange and even enigmatic, because it's impossible to imagine a destination less brilliant for a cosmopolitan and ambitious young doctor like him. There, in Rantoul, he married a girl from a very humble background he'd met in Chicago; there, that same year, Rodney was born; Bob was born the following year.

From the beginning Rodney and Bob were two thoroughly opposite boys; the passing of time did nothing but accentuate this opposition. Both had inherited their father's physical fortitude and iron constitution, but only Bob felt comfortable with them and was able to take advantage of them, while for Rodney they seemed little less than an unhappy accident of nature, a personal circumstance that it was necessary to battle against as naturally or with the same resignation with which one battles against a congenital illness. As a child Rodney was extroverted to the point of naivete, vehement, spontaneous and affectionate, and this straightforward temperament, on top of his love of reading and his brilliance at school, turned him into his father's undisguised favourite. On the other hand — and possibly to reap the benefits of their progenitor's guilty conscience over his open preference for Rodney — Bob's relations with the family evolved into a reserved and defensive, often tyrannical, moodiness abounding in reckonings, stipulations and caution, which at the beginning was maybe only a way of demanding the attention he was denied, but which insidiously became a strategy destined to hide personal and intellectual deficiencies that, with or without reason, made him feel inferior to his brother, which in time would end up turning him into one of those classic younger sons who, because they gather up the family ruses the first-born squanders, always seem much more mature than him, and often are. Nevertheless, these imbalances and dissimilarities never translated into hostility between the two brothers, because Bob was too busy accumulating rancour towards his father to feel any towards Rodney, and because Rodney, who hadn't the slightest motive for antagonism towards Bob and who was aware of needing his brother's physical competence and vital shrewdness much more than his brother needed his affection or intelligence, knew how to constantly make amends in their shared games, their shared love of hunting, fishing and baseball, their shared outings and friendships. So, by one of those unstable balancing acts upon which the most solid and lasting friendships are based, the disparity between Rodney and Bob ended up constituting the best guarantee of a fraternal complicity that nothing seemed able to break.

Not even the war. In the middle of 1967 Bob enlisted voluntarily in the Marine Corps, and a few months later arrived in Saigon as part of the First Infantry Division. The decision to sign up was entirely unexpected, and Rodney's father didn't rule out various different but complementary reasons that might explain it: his incapacity to face up to the demands of a degree in medicine that, out of pride rather than inclination — to demonstrate to himself he could be as good as his father — he'd begun to study for the previous year, and the insatiable eagerness to garner his family's admiration by that unexpected act of bravery. If that was the case — and in Rodney's father's judgement nothing seemed to lead one to suspect it was not — Bob's decision had been a good one, because as soon as he heard of it, his father could not help feeling secretly proud of him: like so many other Americans, Rodney's father then considered the Vietnam War a just war, and with that impetuous decision his son wasn't doing anything but continuing in southeast Asia the work he'd started in Europe twenty-four years earlier, freeing a distant and defenceless country from an ignominious tyranny. Perhaps because he knew him better than his parents did, Bob's decision didn't surprise Rodney, but it did horrify him and, given that he was the only member of the family to know of it before it was made, he did all he could to dissuade him from his determination and, once he'd done it, to persuade him to undo it. He wasn't able to. At that time Rodney was in Chicago, despite his father'sveiled but firm initial opposition, studying philosophy and literature, and his opinion on the war differed starkly from that of his brother and his father, who attributed his firstborn's position to the influence of the dissolute, anti-war atmosphere that prevailed at Northwestern University, as it did on so many campuses across the length and breadth of the United States. The fact is, however, that by the time Bob enlisted in the army, Rodney had quite a clear idea of what was going on in South Vietnam as well as in North Vietnam: he didn't just follow the vicissitudes of the war closely in the American and French newspapers, but also, as well as a complete history of Vietnam, he'd read everything he could get his hands on about the subject, including the analyses of Mary McCarthy, Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture and the books of Harrison Salisbury, Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden, and he'd arrived at the conclusion, much less impulsive or more reasoned than that of many of his classmates, that the declared motivations of his country's intervention in Vietnam were false or spurious, its aim confusing and in the end unjust, and its methods of an atrociously disproportionate brutality. So Rodney began to participate very early on in all sorts of activities protesting against the war, during one of which he met Julia Flores, a Mexican girl from Oaxaca, a mathematics student at Northwestern, cheerful and uninhibited, who integrated him fully in the pacifist movement and initiated him in love and marijuana and sprinkled his rudimentary Spanish with swearwords.

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.

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.

The truth is that those were all completely different letters to the ones he'd written up till then, and in time his father ended up attributing this change — maybe because he needed to attribute it to some tangible reason — to Rodney'sexcessive reliance on marijuana and alcohol since his first months at the front. In his earlier letters Rodney tends mostly to note down events and in general avoid abstract reflections; now events and people have disappeared and barely anything is left but thoughts, singular thoughts of a vehemence that horrified his father, and that soon led him to the unhappy conclusion that his son was irremediably losing his mind. 'Now I know the truth of war,' Rodney writes, for example, in one of his letters. 'The truth of this war and of any other war, the truth of all wars, the truth that you know as well as I do and that anybody who's been to war knows, because deep, deep down this war is no different from but rather identical to all other wars and deep, deep down the truth of war is always the same. Everybody here knows this truth, it's just that nobody has the guts to admit it. They all lie. So do I. I mean I lied too until I stopped lying, until I got sick of lying, until the lie sickened me more than death: the lie is filthy, death is clean. And that is precisely the truth that everybody here knows (that anybody who's ever been to war knows) and nobody wants to admit. That all this is beautiful: that war is beautiful, that combat is beautiful, that death is beautiful. I'm not referring to the beauty of the moon rising like a silver coin in the stifling night of the rice paddies, or to the threads of blood the tracer bullets draw in the darkness, or to the miraculous instant of silence that sometimes cuts through the constant racket of the jungle at dusk, or to those extreme moments in which you seem to cancel yourself out along with your fear and anguish and solitude and shame, which fuse with the shame and solitude and anguish and fear of those at your side, and then your identity happily evaporates and you're nobody any more. No, it's not just that. Most of all it's the joy of killing, not just because while others die you stay alive, but also because no pleasure can compare with the pleasure of killing, no feeling can compare with the powerful feeling of killing, of taking away absolutely everything from somebody, and, because it's another human being absolutely identical to you, you feel something then that you couldn't even have imagined it was possible to feel, a feeling similar to what we must feel when we're born and that we've forgotten, or what God felt when he created us or what it must feel like to give birth, yes, that's exactly what you feel when you kill, don't you think, Dad, the feeling that you're finally doing something important, something truly essential, something you've unknowingly spent your whole life preparing for and that, if you couldn't have done it, would inevitably have turned you into debris, into a man without truth, without coherence or substance, because to kill is so beautiful it completes us, obliges you to arrive at parts of yourself you never even discerned, it's like discovering yourself, discovering immense continents of unknown flora and fauna where you'd imagined there was nothing but colonized land, and that's why now, after having known the transparent beauty of death, the limitless and gleaming beauty of death, I feel as if I were bigger, as if I'd stretched and lengthened and extended far beyond my previous boundaries, so paltry, and that's why I also think everybody should have the right to kill, to stretch and lengthen and extend themselves as far as they can, to attain those faces of ecstasy or beatitude I've seen on people who kill, to know yourself thoroughly or as far as war will allow, and war lets you go very far and very fast, farther and faster still, faster, faster, faster, there are moments when everything suddenly speeds up and there's a blaze, a maelstrom and a loss, the devastating certainty that if we were able to travel faster than the speed of light we'd see the future. That's what I'vediscovered. That's what I now know. What all of us who are here know, and what all those who were here and aren't any more knew, and also the deluded or valiant ones who never were here but it's as if they had been, because they saw all this long before it existed. Everybody knows it, everybody. But what disgusts me is not that this is true, but that nobody tells the truth, and I'm at the point of asking myself why nobody does and something occurs to me that had never occurred to me, and it's that perhaps nobody says it, not out of cowardice, but simply because it sounds false or absurd or monstrous, because nobody who doesn't know the truth beforehand is qualified to accept it, because nobody who hasn't been here is going to accept what any foot soldier here knows, and it's that things that make sense are not true. They're just sawn-off truths, wishful thinking: truth is always absurd. And worst of all, only when you know this, when you learn what you can only learn here, when you finally accept the truth, only then can you be happy. I'll put it another way: before, I hated war and hated life and most of all I hated myself; now I love life and war and most of all I love myself. Now I'm happy.'

I could gather a handful of analogous passages extracted from the letters Rodney wrote in that time: all in a similar tone, all equally dark, immoral or abstruse. It's true that one is assaulted by the temptation to recognize in these crazy words something like an X-ray of Rodney's mind at that point in his life, and even read into them many more things than Rodney perhaps meant to include. I shall resist the temptation, I shall avoid interpretations.

As soon as he was discharged from the hospital, Rodney rejoined his company, and two months later, when he had only a few days left until his obligatory stay in Vietnam was up, thanks to an acquaintance who got him into the American embassy in Saigon, he phoned his parents for the first time and told them he wasn't coming home. He'dresolved to re-enlist in the army. Maybe because they immediately grasped that the decision was irrevocable, Rodney's parents didn't try to get him to reconsider, but only tried to understand. They couldn't. Nevertheless, after a long conversation choked with entreaties and sobs, they were eventually left clinging to the precarious hope that their son hadn't lost his mind, but the war had simply changed him into another person, he was no longer the boy they'd begotten and raised and that's why he could no longer imagine himself back home as if nothing had happened, because even the prospect of returning to his student life (prolonging it by doing a doctorate, as he had originally intended) or looking for work in a high school or, much less, having a long spell of rest to recover the provincial placidness of Rantoul, now seemed ridiculous or impossible to him, and overwhelmed him with a panic they just could not understand. So Rodney stayed another six months in Vietnam. His father knew almost nothing about what happened to his son during that time, when Rodney's correspondence with his family stopped altogether, no news arrived from him except for a few telegrams in which, with military concision, he informed them that he was fine. The only thing Rodney's father could find out later was that his son was then fighting in an elite anti-guerrilla unit known as Tiger Force, part of the 101st Airborne Division's first battalion, and it's beyond doubt that during those six months Rodney engaged in combat much more often than he had done up till then, because when at the end of 1969 he finally flew back home he did so with his chest emblazoned with medals — a Silver Star for bravery and a Purple Heart figured among them — and a hip injury that would stay with him for life, condemning him to walk forever with a stumbling, unsteady, defeated gait.

The homecoming was catastrophic. Rodney's father remembered his son's arrival in Chicago all too well. For two weeks he and Julia Flores, who barely knew each other, had been phoning back and forth to finalize the preparations, but when the great day arrived everything went wrong from the start: the Greyhound bus he and his wife took from Rantoul to Chicago arrived almost two hours late because of a traffic accident; Julia was waiting for them there, got them into her car and drove as fast as possible towards O'Hare Airport, but there was a traffic jam on the way as well, so by the time they got to the terminal an hour had already gone by since Rodney's flight had landed. They asked here and there, and finally, after going around and around and making many inquiries, they had to go and find Rodney in a police station. They found him there alone and shaken, but he didn't offer any explanation, not that day or ever and, so as not to further ruin the reunion, they preferred not to ask the police for one. Only several months later did Rodney's father get a precise idea of what happened that morning in the airport. It was after the court case against Rodney — as a result of which he was sentenced to a fine, which his family paid — a case that Rodney forbade his father and mother from attending and the contents and development of which they didn't find out about until a secret interview with their son's defence lawyer. The lawyer, a well-known left-winger called Daniel Pludovsky, who had accepted the case because he was a friend of a friend of Rodney's father and who from the beginning of the conversation made an effort to calm him by trying to play down the episode, received him in his office on Wabash Street and started by telling him that Rodney had made the three-day return trip from Vietnam with a black soldier (first from Saigon to Tokyo in an Air Force C-41, then from the Philippines to San Francisco in a World Airways jet, and finally from there to Chicago) and that, disembarking in Chicago and finding no one waiting for them, the pair decided to go and have breakfast in a cafeteria. The terminal was unusually busy and a festive atmosphere prevailed, or at least that was the first, bewildering and happy impression the two recent arrivals had, until at a certain point, as they dragged their kit bags down a crowded corridor, a girl broke away from a group of students, came up to Rodney, who was the only one of the two veterans still in uniform, and asked him if he was coming from Vietnam. Surprised by the absence of his parents and Julia, who had promised to be waiting for him at the airport, Rodney might have imagined that the girl had been sent by them, so he stopped and smiled and cheerfully said yes. Then the girl spat in his face. Looking at her uncomprehendingly, Rodney asked the girl why she'd done that, but, since she didn't answer, after a moment'shesitation he wiped the saliva off his face and carried on walking. The students followed them chanting anti-war slogans, laughing, shouting things they didn't understand and insulting them. Until Rodney couldn't take any more, turned around and confronted them; the black soldier grabbed his arm and begged him not to pay any attention to them, but Rodney pulled away and, while the students kept on with their chants and their shouts, he tried to talk to them, tried to reason with them, but finally gave up, said they hadn't done anything to them and asked them to leave them alone. They were about to go on when an abusive or defiant comment, hurled by a guy with very long hair, was heard above the commotion of the students, and Rodney was instantly on top of the guy and started beating him up and would have killed him if not for the last-minute intervention of the airport police. 'And that was it,' Pludovsky told Rodney's father, leaning back in his armchair with a cigarette in hand and an undisguised air of satisfaction, downplaying it with the tone of someone who's just told a tale of amusing childish mischief. Rodney's father did not smile, said nothing, just remained silent for a few moments and then, without looking up, asked the lawyer to tell him what it was the boy had said to Rodney. 'Oh, that.' Pludovsky tried to smile. 'Well, the truth is I don't remember exactly.' 'Of course you remember,' Rodney's father said without a doubt. 'And I want you to tell me.' Suddenly uncomfortable, Pludovsky sighed, put out his cigarette, folded his hands on top of his large oak desk. 'As you wish,' he said with annoyance, as if he'd just lost a case at the last minute in the stupidest way imaginable. 'What the boy said was: "Look what cowards they are, these baby-killers".'

By the time Rodney's father left the lawyer's office he already understood that the altercation at O'Hare had just been one reflection of what had happened in the last few months and a foreshadowing of what was going to happen in the future. He was not wrong. Because Rodney's life never again resembled the one he'd been forced to leave behind a year and a half earlier to go to Vietnam. The day of his arrival in Rantoul his old friends had organized a homecoming party; his mother convinced him to go, but, although he left the house dressed for the occasion and with the car keys in hand and returned in the early hours, the next morning his parents found out that he hadn't even shown up at the party, and in the following days discovered from neighbours and friends that he'd spent that night talking on the phone from a booth near the train station and driving around town in his father's Ford. A few months later he and Julia got married and went to live in a suburb of Minneapolis where she was teaching in a secondary school. The union lasted barely two years; in fact, it took her much less time to realize that the marriage was impossible, just as any other Rodney might have attempted then would have been. Physically, he had returned from Vietnam, but actually it was as if he were still there, or as if he'd brought Vietnam home with him. Worse still: while he was in Vietnam Rodney never stopped talking about Vietnam in the letters he wrote to his parents, to Julia, to his friends;now he ceased entirely to do so, and not, perhaps, because he didn't want to — the truth was most likely the opposite: there was probably nothing in the world he wanted as much — but because he couldn't, who knows whether because he harboured the certainty that no one was in a position to understand what he had to tell, or because he thought he shouldn't do so, as if he'd seen or experienced something that those who knew him should remain unaware of. What's certainly clear is that, if while he was in Vietnam he didn't think about anything but the United States, now that he was in the United States he didn't think about anything but Vietnam. It's possible that he often felt nostalgia for the war, that he thought he should never have come home and that he should have died over there, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. It's possible that he often felt, compared to the life of a cornered rat he now led in the United States, life in Vietnam was more serious, more real, more worth living. It's possible that he realized he could never return to the country he'd left to go to Vietnam, and not only because it didn't exist any more and was now another, but also because he was no longer the same person who'd left it. It's possible that he might very soon have accepted that no one comes back from Vietnam: that, once you've been there, return is impossible. And it's almost surely the case that, like so many other Vietnam veterans, he felt mocked, because as soon as he set foot back on American soil he knew the whole country spurned him or, at best, wished to hide him as if his very presence was an embarrassment, an insult or an accusation. Rodney could not have expected to be received as a hero (because he wasn't one and because he was not unaware that the defeated were never received as heroes, even if they were), but neither could he have expected that the same country that had demanded he ignore his own conscience, not desert to Canada, fulfil his duty as an American and go to a despicable, faraway war, should now shrink from his presence as though he were a criminal or had the plague. His presence and that of so many veterans like him, who, if they were guilty of something, were guilty because of the brutal circumstances of a war they'd been pushed into and the country that had forced them to fight. Or at least that'swhat Rodney must have thought then, just like so many other Vietnam veterans when they went home. As for his former anti-war activism, Rodney undoubtedly now had many more reasons than in his student years to consider the war a deception orchestrated by politicians' fanaticism and irresponsibility, stoked by the fraudulent use of the rhetoric of old-fashioned American values, but it's also indisputable — or at least it was for Rodney's father — that the fact of being for or against the war had been reduced to an almost banal matter in his eyes, relegated to the background by the lacerating disgrace of the United States having sent thousands and thousands of boys to the slaughter and then abandoned them to their fate in a lost little corner of the globe, sick, exhausted and crazed, drunk on desire and impotence, fighting to the death against their own shadows in the swamps of a country reduced to ashes.

But all this is nothing but conjecture: it's reasonable to imagine that, for a long time after his return from Vietnam, Rodney might have thought or felt like that; it's not impossible to imagine that he might have thought or felt the exact opposite. Facts, however, are facts; I'll stick to them. In the first months he spent back in the United States Rodney barely left his house (neither his family home in Rantoul nor the one he shared with Julia in Minneapolis), and when he began to go out it was only to get involved in fights almost invariably provoked by his irrepressible tendency to interpret any mention of Vietnam or his time in Vietnam, no matter how trivial or innocuous, as a personal affront. He lost his Chicago friends and his Rantoul ones, and he cut off all connections to his old comrades from Vietnam, maybe because, voluntarily or involuntarily, he wished to hide the fact that he was an ex-combatant, which would explain the fact that for a long time he categorically refused to go for help or company to the offices of the Veterans' Association. Despite Julia's unceasing efforts, shortly after their wedding the marriage had deteriorated irreversibly. As for his family, he only kept in touch with his mother, while for years he avoided his father's company and conversation. He drank and smoked a lot, whisky and beer, tobacco and marijuana, and often fell into slumps that would plunge him into deep depressions lasting weeks or months and oblige him to stuff himself with pills. He never hunted or fished again. He never mentioned his brother Bob again. He lived in a continual state of anxiety. For almost a year and a half, he suffered from a relentless insomnia, and only managed to overcome it when he went to the movies with Julia, who held his hand and felt him gradually abandon himself in the murmuring darkness of the cinema and finally immerse himself in sleep as if it were the depths of a lake. During the day he never sat with his back to a window, and he was obsessed with keeping all the blinds in the house closed. He spent his nights giving vent to his anxiety in the hallways and, before finally getting futilely into bed, he would begin a nightly ritual that involved inspecting each and every one of the doors and windows of the house, making sure there was no obstacle that might hinder his escape and that everything he needed to defend himself was at hand, as well as mentally running through the appropriate modus operandi in the implausible case of an emergency. With time he managed to fall asleep in his own bed, but he was frequently assaulted by nightmares, and an inoffensive noise in the yard would be enough to wake him and cause him to rush outside to find out what had made the noise. When he and Julia divorced he moved back to his parents' house in Rantoul, and in the years that followed crossed the country from sea to sea several times: he'd suddenly pack his bags one day, load up the car and leave without any warning or fixed destination, and after one or two or three or four months he'd come home without the slightest explanation, as if he'dbeen out for a stroll around the neighbourhood. He survived two suicide attempts, as a result of the second he eventually agreed to be admitted to the Chicago VA Medical Centre. He didn't take long to start looking for a job, but he did in finding one, because, although being an ex-combatant entitled him to certain privileges, for a long time he considered it humiliating to take advantage of them, and each time he went to an interview he returned home seized by an uncontrollable rage, convinced that prospective employers began to see him as a two-headed monster as soon as they found out he was a war veteran. The first job he got was an easy and not badly paid administrative position in a jam factory, but he barely lasted a few months in it, more or less like the ones that followed. Later he tried giving language classes in Rantoul or around Rantoul, and also tried to take up his studies again, enrolling in a master's course in philosophy at Northwestern. It was all futile. When Rodney returned from Vietnam converted into a broken-down shadow of the brilliant, hard-working and sensible young man he'd once been, his father was sure that time would eventually restore his lost nature, but eight years had gone by since his return and Rodney was still immersed in an impenetrable fog, transformed into a ghost or a zombie; in Rantoul he spent whole days lying in bed, reading novels and smoking marijuana and watching old movies on television, and when he went out it was only to drive for hours on highways that led nowhere or to drink alone in the bars around town. It was as if he was hermetically sealed inside a steel bubble, but the strange thing (or what his father found strange) is that he didn't seem to experience that situation of neglect and absolute solitude as an affliction, but rather as the triumphant fruit of a precise calculation, like the ideal antidote to his exorbitant suspicion of other people and his no less exorbitant suspicion of himself. And so at some point Rodney's parents ended up accepting, with a resignation not devoid of relief, that Vietnam had changed their son forever and that he would never go back to being who he used to be.

Suddenly everything changed. A year and a half before Rodney began giving classes at Urbana, his mother died of stomach cancer. Her suffering was long but not terrible, and Rodney endured it without frights or dramatics, giving up from one day to the next his vague, lazy habits to take care of his dying mother, who during all those years of convalescence from the war had been his sole and silent moral support; the afternoon they buried her no one saw him shed a single tear. Nevertheless, days later, returning from a house call, Rodney's father found his son leaning on the kitchen table, lit up by the bright midday sun that was pouring in through the window, crying his eyes out. He couldn't remember having seen Rodney cry since he was a boy, but he didn't say a thing: he left his things in the hall, went back to the kitchen, made two cups of camomile tea, one for his son, the other for himself, sat down at the table, held his son's big, rough, veiny hand, and stayed beside him for a long time, in silence, sipping his camomile tea and then Rodney's as well, without letting go of his hand, listening to him cry as if he'd stored up an inexhaustible reserve of tears during all those years and he wasn't ever going to stop crying. For a long time father and son had been living in the same house hardly ever speaking to each other, but that evening Rodney began to talk, and it was only then that his father had a blinding glimpse of the vertigo of remorse his son had been living in for all those years, because he came to understand that Rodney didn't only feel he was to blame for the deaths of his brother and his mother and an indefinable number of people, but also for not having had the courage to obey his conscience and having yielded to the order to go to war, for having abandoned his comrades there, for having witnessed the unmitigated horror of Vietnam and for having survived it. The conversation ended in the early hours, and the next day, when they woke up, Rodney asked to borrow his father's car and went to Chicago. The trip was repeated the following week and the one after that, and Rodney's visits to the capital soon became a weekly ritual. At first he'd go and come back on the same day, leaving very early in the morning and getting home at night, but as time went by he began to spend two or sometimes three days away from Rantoul. In order not to spoil the improvement in relations with his son since the death of his wife, Rodney's father didn't make enquiries, but merely lent him the car and asked when he thought he might be back. But one evening, on his return from one of those journeys, Rodney told him: told him that he went each week to the Chicago headquarters of the Vietnam Veterans' Association — the same place where he'dbeen admitted twice in the past and treated with Largactil injections — where he received the help of a psychiatrist who specialized in war-induced disturbances and where he got together with other veterans with whom he collaborated in the organization of public functions, demonstrations and conferences, as well as the production of a magazine in which for several years he published articles on film and literature and furious denunciations of the culpable frivolity of his country's politicians and their servile compliance with the dictates of big corporations. The news didn't surprise Rodney's father, who by then had been noticing for a while the changes his son had undergone in just a few months, and not just in relation to him; Rodney had stopped drinking and smoking marijuana, had started to share in the running of the house, to eradicate his eccentric habits and recover some of his old friends. Gradually that transformation became more solid and more visible because Rodney soon accepted a job keeping the books for a restaurant in Urbana, began to work as a volunteer for a small independent trade union and to frequent the local chapter of the Association of Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was as if Rodney's entire life had hit crisis point with the death of his mother: as if, thanks to his trips to Chicago and the help of the Veterans' Association, the bubble he'd spent more than fifteen years suffocating inside had begun to disintegrate and he was overcoming the shame of being a former Vietnam combatant or finding some form of pride in the fact of being a survivor of that phantasmagoric war. So, by the time he got his job as a Spanish teacher at Urbana, Rodney led such an orderly and industrious life that there was no reason to suspect he hadn't left behind once and for all the infinite consequences of his stint in Vietnam.

But he hadn't left them behind. Rodney's father realized it one night over the Christmas holidays in 1988, a few months before he told me his son's story in his house in Rantoul, just a few days after Rodney and I had said goodbye at the door of Treno's with the finally frustrated promise that we'd see each other again as soon as I got back from my road trip through the Midwest in the company of Barbara, Gudrun and Rodrigo Gines. That evening a man had telephoned the house asking for his son. Rodney was out, so his father asked who was calling. 'Tommy Birban,' said the man. Rodney's father had never heard that surname, but the fact didn't surprise him, because since Rodney had broken out of the confinement of his bubble it was not unusual for strangers to call the house. The man said he was a friend of Rodney's, promised to call back in a while and left a phone number in case Rodney wanted to call him first. When Rodney got home that night, his father handed him a piece of paper with his friend's phone number on it; his son's reaction surprised him: slightly pale, taking the paper he was handing him, he asked if he was sure that was the name of the stranger and, although he assured him it was, he made him repeat it several times, to convince himself his father hadn't been mistaken. 'Is something up?' Rodney'sfather asked. Rodney didn't answer or answered with a gesture both discouraging and disparaging. But later, when they were having dinner, the telephone rang again, and before his father could get up to answer it Rodney stopped him sharply with a shout. The two men sat and looked at each other: that was when Rodney's father knew something was wrong. The telephone kept ringing, until it finally stopped. 'Maybe it was someone else,' said Rodney's father. Rodney said nothing. 'He's going to call again, isn't he?'t Rodney's father asked after a while. This time Rodney nodded. 'I don't want to talk to him,' he said. 'Tell him I'm not here. Or better yet, tell him I'm away and you don't know when I'll be back. Yeah: tell him that.' That night Rodney's father didn't risk any more questions, because he knew his son was not going to answer, and he spent the whole next day waiting for Tommy Birban's call. Of course, the call came, and Rodney's father picked up the receiver quickly and did what his son had asked him to do. 'Yesterday you didn't tell me Rodney was away,' Tommy Birban said suspiciously. 'I don't remember what I said yesterday,' he answered. Then he improvised: 'But it would be better if you didn't call here again. Rodney has gone away and I don't know where he is or when he'll be back.' He was just about to hang up when Tommy Birban's voice on the other end of the line stopped sounding threatening and began to sound imploring, like a perfectly articulated sob: 'You're Rodney's father, right?' He didn't have time to answer. 'I know Rodney's living with you, they told me at the Chicago Veterans' Association, they gave me your number. I want to ask you a favour. If you do me this favour I promise I won't call again, but you have to do this for me. Tell Rodney I'm not going to ask anything of him, not even that we see each other. The only thing I want is to talk to him for a while, tell him I only want to talk to him for a while, tell him I need to talk to him. That's all. But tell him, please. Will you tell him?' Rodney's father didn'tknow how to refuse, but the fact that his son received the message without batting an eyelid or making the slightest comment allowed him to kid himself that this episode he couldn't understand and didn't want to understand had concluded without any grave consequences. Predictably, a few days later Tommy Birban called again. Rodney was no longer answering the phone, so it was Rodney's father who picked it up. He and Tommy Birban argued for a few seconds fiercely, and he was about to hang up when his son asked him to hand him the phone; with some hesitation, and warning him with a look that there was still time to avoid the mistake, he handed it over. The two old friends talked for a long time, but he wouldn't allow himself to listen to the conversation, of which he only caught a few unconnected snippets. That night Rodney couldn't get to sleep, and the next morning Tommy Birban called again and the two talked again for several hours. This ominous ritual went on for over a week, and the morning of New Year's Day Rodney's father heard a noise downstairs, got up, went out onto the porch and saw his son putting the last piece of luggage in the trunk of the Buick. The scene didn't surprise him; actually, he was almost expecting it. Rodney closed the trunk and came up the steps to the porch. 'I'm off,' he said. 'I was going to come up to say goodbye.' His father knew he was lying, but he nodded. He looked at the snow-covered street, the sky almost white, the grey light; he looked at his son, tall and broken in front of him, and felt the world was an empty place, inhabited only by the two of them. He was about to tell him. 'Where are you going?' he was about to ask. 'Don't you know the world is an empty place?' but he didn't say that. What he said was: 'Isn't it about time you forgot all that?' 'I've already forgotten, Dad,' answered Rodney. 'It's all that that hasn't forgotten me.' 'And that's the last thing I heard him say,' Rodney's father concluded, sunken in his wingback chair, as exhausted as if he hadn't dedicated that endless afternoon in his house in Rantoul to reconstructing his son's story for me, but rather trying to scale an impassable mountain weighed down with useless equipment. 'Then we hugged and he left. The rest you know.'

That's how Rodney's father finished telling his story. Neither of us had anything to add, but I stayed a little longer with him, and for an indeterminate space of time, which I wouldn't know whether to calculate in minutes or hours, we sat facing one another, keeping up a faint imitation conversation, as if we shared a shameful secret or the responsibility for a crime, or as if we were looking for excuses so I wouldn't have to face the road back to Urbana alone and he the springtime loneliness of that big house with nobody in it, and when, past midnight, I finally decided to leave, I was sure I'd always remember the story Rodney's father had told me and that I was no longer the same person who that afternoon, many hours earlier, had arrived in Rantoul. 'You're too young to think of having children,' Rodney's father said to me as we parted, and I haven't forgotten. 'Don't have any, because you'll regret it; although if you don't have any you'll regret that too. That's life: no matter what you do, you regret it. But let me tell you something: all love stories are absurd because love is an illness that only time can cure; but having a child is risking a love so absurd that only death can end it.'

That's what Rodney's father said to me, and I have not forgotten.

Otherwise, I never saw him again.