Giorgio Faletti: I'm God

Colonel Lensky waited for him to stand and turn before he approached him. He held out his hand and looked him in the eye. Corporal Johnson sensed the effort the colonel was making to stop his gaze turning away from the scars that disfigured his face.

‘Good luck, Wendell.’

It was the first time he had ever addressed him by his first name.

A name doesn’t mean a person , he thought.

There were so many names around, carved on white crosses arranged in rows with military precision. That changed nothing. Nothing would help to bring those young men back to life, to remove from their lifeless chests the numbers they kept pinned to them like medals in honour of lost wars. He would always be merely one of the many. He had known lots like him, soldiers who moved and laughed and smoked joints and shot up with heroin to forget that they were constant targets. The only difference between them lay in the fact that he was still alive, even though, to all intents and purposes, he felt as if he was one of those crosses. He was still alive, but the price he had paid for this negligible difference had been a leap into the grotesque void of monstrousness.

‘Thank you, sir.’

He turned and walked to the door. He felt the doctor’s eyes on the back of his neck. It was some time since he had last been expected to give a military salute. It wasn’t required of those who were being reconstructed piece by piece in body and mind with the sole purpose of allowing them to remember for the rest of their lives. And the rest of the mission had been accomplished.

Good luck , Wendell.

Which actually meant: Fuck off, corporal.

He walked along the light green corridor. The dim light that filtered through the small skylight reminded him of rainy days in the forest, when the leaves were so shiny they were like mirrors and the hidden part seemed made of shadow. A shadow from which the barrel of a rifle could emerge at any moment.

He left the building.

Outside was the sun and the blue sky and different trees. Trees easy to accept and forget. They weren’t scrub pines or bamboo or mangrove or aquatic stretches of paddy fields.

This wasn’t Dat-nuoc.

The word echoed in his head, in its correct, slightly guttural pronunciation. In the spoken language of Vietnam it meant country, although the literal translation was land-water, an extremely realistic way to express the essence of the place. It was a happy image for some, provided you didn’t have to work there with your back stooped, or walk with a pack on your back and an M16 slung over your shoulder.

Now the vegetation he had around him meant home. Although he didn’t know exactly what place to call by that name.

The corporal smiled because he could find no other way to express his bitterness. He smiled because smiling didn’t hurt any more. The morphine and the needles under the skin were almost faded memories. Not the pain, no, that would remain a yellow stain in his memory every time he undressed in front of a mirror or tried in vain to pass a hand through his hair and found only the rough texture of burn scars.

He set off along the path, hearing the gravel crunch beneath his feet, leaving Colonel Lensky and everything he stood for behind him. He reached the strip of asphalt that was the main thoroughfare and turned left, heading unhurriedly towards one of the white buildings that stood out in the middle of the grounds.

There was all the irony of the beginning and the end, in this place.

The story was coming to an end where it had begun. A few dozen miles from here was Fort Polk, the camp for advanced training before shipping out for Vietnam. When they arrived, they’d been a group of boys that someone had dragged away from their normal lives and claimed to be able to turn into soldiers. Most of them had never left the state they lived in, some not even the county where they were born.

Ask not what your country can do for you …

None of them did ask that, but none of them were ready to confront what their country would ask of them.

In the southern part of the fort, a typical Vietnamese village had been reconstructed, down to the last detail. Straw roofs, wood, bamboo reeds, rattan. Strange tools and utensils, oriental-looking instructors who were in fact more American than he was. None of the materials and objects was familiar to them. And yet in these buildings, this idealized version of a place thousands of miles away, there was both a threat and something ordinary, everyday.

This is what Charlie ’ s house looks like , the sergeant had told them.

Charlie was the nickname thay gave the enemy. The training had begun and ended. They had learned everything there was to know. But they had done it in a hurry and without too much conviction, because there wasn’t much conviction around in those days. Everyone would have to fend for himself, especially when it came to figuring out, among the many identical faces they saw around them, who was Vietcong and who a friendly South Vietnamese citizen. The smiles on their faces were the same, but what they were carrying might be completely different. A hand grenade, for example.

The black man who was coming toward him, propelling his wheelchair forward with sturdy arms, was a good example of what could happen. Among the veterans admitted to the hospital for reconstruction, he was the only one Wendell had become friendly with.

Jeff B. Anderson, from Atlanta. He had been the victim of a bomb attack as he was leaving a Saigon brothel. Unlike his companions he had survived, but was paralysed from the waist down. No glory, no medal. Just medical care and embarrassment. But in Vietnam glory was a chance occurrence, and medals sometimes weren’t worth the metal they were made of.

Jeff brought the wheelchair to a halt by placing his hands flat on the wheels. ‘Hi, corporal,’ he said. ‘They’re saying some strange things about you.’

‘In this place, a lot of the things people say turn out to be true.’

‘So they’re right. You’re going home.’

‘Yup, I’m going home.’

The next question came after a fraction of a second, a brief but interminable pause: it was surely a question Jeff had asked himself many times.

‘Will you make it?’

‘How about you?’

They both preferred not to answer that, but to leave it to each other’s imagination.

‘I don’t know if I should envy you or not.’

‘For what it’s worth, neither do I.’

Jeff’s jaw contracted, and his voice emerged as if broken by a belated, pointless anger. ‘If only they’d bombed those fucking dikes…’

He left the sentence hanging. His words evoked ghosts that they had both tried many times to exorcize in vain.

Corporal Wendell Johnson shook his head.

Despite the massive bombardment to which North Vietnam had been subjected, despite the fact that three times the number of bombs had been dropped than in the Second World War, nobody had ever given the order to hit the dikes on the Red River. Many thought it would have been a decisive move. The water would have flooded the valleys, and the world would have branded as a war crime what in all probability would have been close to genocide. But maybe the conflict would have had a different outcome.

Maybe.

‘Hundreds of thousands of people would have died, Jeff.’

Jeff looked up. There was something indefinable in his eyes. Maybe it was an ultimate plea for mercy, a mixture of regret and remorse for what he was thinking. Then he turned his head and looked out at some point beyond the treetops.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘there are times when I get to thinking, and I put my hands on the armrests and try to stand. Then I remember the state I’m in and I curse myself.’