OK. OK—
A land-reform lab in beautiful Sweden and when he got there he saw this TV broadcast he said, and he knew he’d done the right thing. No words for it. It was of a South Vietnamese officer hustling this wiry bare little VC along by the arm like some farmer who got drunk and disorderly on market day, and yelling at him and getting worked up, then in the middle of the street headed for the lockup or interrogation pulling a pistol and bombing that little VC just like that at right angles, bumping him off literally, a sideways bump in the head, the VC tipped over.
I’d been building this fence all day with — you know them—
Of course.
The girl. The guy. The other girl.
Right, right.
You know their names.
They don’t matter.
But it was them, you see.
The black-haired one whispers something with the word forget. And Dagger for a moment has cut around to me I don’t know why, the second unit on my shoulder strap, mike held out, dumbly alert I guess I look.
But, says the deserter, it was a good afternoon. We built that fence together and it was for us and the girl Joan—
Cool it. It was Joanne, wasn’t it? It doesn’t matter.
You kidding?
The deserter mouthed something, then said OK. To me it matters. We knew each other from the start and we came back after work and went down and swam in the cold lake, and we got off, and we had supper and then we saw the news on TV, and I knew I’d made the right move because I’d been more scared than I knew, worse than Vietnam, scared of white armbands in the night — but the TV news made me see.
In Sweden.
In my head, which is anywhere!
OK, baby.
That TV news changed my head.
The deserter is playing with his fingers. He looks at the camera and back at his friend, and says, What are we doing here?
They exchange formulas for gelatin dynamite, kidding. Big issue: do you use woodmeal with gun cotton or gun cotton alone? Let’s ask Mr. Johnson in Senior Chem.
The black-haired one says, Where were we?
Here.
They laugh.
The black-haired one very composed in the midst of his laughter as his friend also laughing is not, says, A friend of a friend is making an experimental film.
More laughter.
The black-haired one says, Therefore talk. How come you left a good set-up? Affluent Sweden.
It was a visit only to a girlfriend of the deserter’s sister who was in Norway. Trondheim. Some institute. Walked north and overland to cross into Norway south of the railway line that runs from Östersund in Sweden right over to Trondheim, but had to stay north enough to miss the higher mountains so they were in some uplands between the railway and the bad mountains. And well in Trondheim, you know what happened then. Joan decided to go back to the States and the deserter got in with an American like nobody he’d ever seen who said he was a geologist but he was a water freak working on his sixth or seventh boat, it was a broad-beamed converted trawler fitted up with the works, he had the bread.
The black-haired one says, This is all meaningless, you know.
We’re off to the Faeroe Islands then, where the skipper wants to look at some curious rock formations, and in the Faeroes I started not being able to remember what happened to me, just knew I had to keep going on, and I got in with a fishing crew from the Hebrides who’d lost a man who’d gone off to the Orkneys to haul seaweed — like those northern islands are something else, no words for it.
The Hebrides are called the western isles.
So I came down to the Outer Hebrides and lived in a hut north of Mount Clisham, bleak and Puritan. I could have stayed there. Just stayed. You know the rest.
You found us.
But listen, I almost stayed up there. I mean you know how he is.
The deserter’s voice has dropped on these last words and just as suddenly his friend says, These rich sailors they’re all the same.
But the deserter says, I didn’t mean — and his friend cuts in No, I do know how it is.
Why?
In a military situation you learn what to say and what to leave out.
More I think of it, it’s a meaningless war. But where does that leave me? (The deserter wants to give with some on-camera dialogue, and coming up with some comes up with a genuine thought:) I mean, I made it mean something in my life.
You weren’t in it, man, says the black-haired one. You were in Heidelberg. You were signed up for a course with University of Maryland at the base. I knew it long before you knew I knew and long before you knew me. And don’t forget, the Visiting Forces Act says the English police can pick you up.
The deserter shrugs his shoulders in embarrassment, seems stumped: You saying I’m Visiting Forces?
You got away, man, what do you know?
I’m a Vietnam vet, man.
Why you don’t know a thing about the war.
I know what you know.
Less, much less.
What do you know?
The correlation between this war and the nature of unearned income.
What about Billy Smith at Bien Hoa? This is a race war. Vietnam is the cheap Chink cunt.
Who’s Billy Smith?
He’s black. They charged him with fragging an officer’s barracks.
What’s fragging, soldier?
Fragmentation bombing. They say he tossed a grenade that killed two lieutenants.
That’s fireworks, not ideology, says the older one, then raises a hand. I’m bugging you, I don’t mean to bug you, not here.
There’s a contradiction in what you said. (The clear simplicity of force in the words seems to have been drawn from the deserter by our scene.)
There is no contradiction.
Anyway, Smith may get off.
It’s irrelevant.
Right — and all contradictions will be resolved, right? including the struggle of the individual, right? that’s what your boss said.
Others have said it.
I glance at Dagger; the distance between us is secret; I might learn something seeing these blokes as he sees them.
Mao for one, says the deserter.
The dialogue has a strangely official spontaneity.
Got enough? asks the black-haired costar.
Dagger has switched off now; my sync unit is off.
You fellows are so good I’ve never in my career had less directing to do.
They laugh.
I’m going to let you have another minute, how’s that?
They relax again, having been ready to get up. There is a bridge during which nothing happens but the sound of the Beaulieu and the phone ringing once. Dagger turns the camera on me: its sound almost visualized in my headset and preoccupations, the camera goes lower to my hands, my feet.
The deserter says, Well there it is.
The black-haired man bursts into a spiel, surprisingly exasperated, something has gotten to him. The war, he says, is ultimately a good thing because it significantly accelerates the decline of the democracies. The British filled the vacuum after the Japanese left, and this let something happen that would have delayed this process of decline for generations. What it did was keep Ho Chi Minh from moving in, and instead the French took over; and when the Americans filled the vacuum later when the French got out it was the same thing. So Ho didn’t become what it would have been in the interests of the western capitalist democracies to have him be, namely a Southeast Asian Tito. The war had been a good thing, yes.
Hey, said the deserter, war’s not that good. Think of all the things the POW’s missed. And think of those kids with their backs skinned. But nothing’s going to come out of this war.