but had lost for ever the desire to be looked at. Now, for him, the world didn’t go beyond the limits of his own shadow.
Behind him, Colonel Lensky, the army psychiatrist, was seated in a leather armchair, a friendly presence in a defensive position. It had been months, maybe years, in fact centuries, that they had been meeting in this room that couldn’t erase from the air the slight smell of rust you always found on military premises. Even though this wasn’t a barracks, but a hospital.
The colonel was a man with sparse brown hair and a calm voice. At first sight, you’d think he was a chaplain rather than a soldier. Sometimes he was in uniform, but mostly he wore civilian clothes. Quiet clothes in neutral colours. A nondescript face, one of those people who you meet and immediately forget.
Who want to be immediately forgotten.
But in all that time, he had listened to his voice more than he had looked at his face.
‘So, tomorrow you’ll be leaving us.’
Those words meant many things: a final discharge, boundless relief, inescapable solitude.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you feel ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
His voice had been firm. Or at least it had seemed firm to him as he uttered that sentence that condemned him to the world. And even if it hadn’t been, Colonel Lensky clearly preferred to think that it was. As a man and as a doctor, he had chosen to believe that his job was over, rather than admit that he’d failed. That was why he was prepared to lie to him.
‘That’s good. I’ve already signed the papers.’
He heard the creak of the armchair and the rustle of cotton pants as the colonel stood up. Corporal Wendell Johnson sat up on the couch and for a moment did not move but looked out through the open window at the grounds, where green treetops framed a patch of blue sky. From that position, he could not see what he would certainly have seen if he had gone to the window. Sitting on benches or propped in the hostile relief of a wheelchair, standing under the trees or attempting those few faltering movements that some called self-sufficiency, were men just like him.
When they had left they were called soldiers.
Now they were veterans.
A word without glory, which attracted not attention but silence.
A word that meant that they had survived, that they had come out alive from the hellish pit of Vietnam, where nobody knew what sin he had to atone for even though everything around him showed him how to atone for it. They were veterans and each of them bore, more or less visibly, the burden of his personal redemption, which began and ended within the confines of a military hospital.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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,
