Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

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.