Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

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.