The Speed of Light (10 page)

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.