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.
‘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.’
He took a deep breath, as if he needed a lot of air to say what he was about to say.
‘I curse myself because I’m like this, but most of all because I’d give the lives of millions of those people just to have my legs back.’
He looked him in the eyes again.
‘What happened, Wen? More than that,
‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone will ever know, not really.’
Jeff placed his hands on the wheels and moved the chair back and forth a little, as if that gesture was enough to remind him that he was still alive. Or maybe it was just a moment of distraction, one of those moments when he thought he could stand up and walk away. He was pursuing his own thoughts and it took a while before they became words.
‘They used to say the Communists ate children.’
As he spoke, he looked at Wendell without seeing him, as if he was visualizing the image those words evoked.
‘We fought the Communists. Maybe that’s why they didn’t eat us.’
He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was a whisper.
‘Only chewed us up and spat us out.’
He pulled himself together and held out his hand. Wendell shook it: Jeff had a firm grip.
‘Good luck, Jeff.’
‘Now fuck off, Wen. And go quickly. I hate crying in front of a white man. On my skin, even the tears look black.’
Wendell walked away, with the distinct feeling that he was losing something. That both of them were losing something. He had only taken a few steps when Jeff’s voice forced him to stop.
‘Hey, Wen.’
He turned and saw him, the silhouette of a man and a machine against the sunset.
‘Get laid for me,’ Jeff said, making an unambiguous gesture with his hand.
Wendell smiled in reply. ‘OK. When I do, it’ll be in your name.’
Corporal Wendell Johnson walked away, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his walk still, in spite of himself, a soldier’s walk. He reached the accommodation block without greeting or talking to anyone else. He entered his quarters. The bathroom door was closed. He always kept it closed, because the mirror faced the main door and he preferred to avoid his face being the first image to greet him.
He forced himself to remember that from the next day onwards he would have to get used to it. There were no charitable mirrors, only surfaces that reflected exactly what they saw. Without pity, and with the involuntary cruelty of indifference.
He took off his shirt and threw it on a chair, away from the masochistic spell of the other mirror, the one inside the wall closet. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head, rough skin against rough skin, a sensation he was used to.
Through the half-open windows, like an emanation of the darkening sky, came the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker hidden somewhere in the trees.
Memory turned in its vicious circle, and the sound became the muted splutter of an AK-47 and then a tangle of voices and images.
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