Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

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.'