One afternoon in the summer he graduated from university, while spending some time with his family in Rantoul, Rodney received his draft notice from the army. He undoubtedly expected it, but that wouldn't have made it alarm him any less. He didn't say anything to his parents;nor did he seek refuge with Julia or the advice of any of his comrades in the peace movement. Rodney knew he couldn't put forward any real excuses to evade that order, so it'spossible he spent the days that followed torn between the fear of deserting, taking the path to exile in Canada that so many young men of his age had taken then, and the fear of going to a remote and hateful war against a martyred country, a war he knew for certain that he — unlike his brother Bob, who he rightly considered a man of action and incalculable cunning — could not survive. One of those days of pressing doubts a letter from Bob arrived at the house and, as usual, his father read it aloud at the dinner table, peppering the reading with proud elucidation that was like a rebuke, or that in his fearful nervousness his son interpreted as a rebuke. The thing is that, in the middle of one of his father's comments, Rodney interrupted him, the interruption degenerated into an argument and the argument into one of those fights in which the two contenders, because they know each other better than anybody, know better than anybody where to wound to make the other bleed most. In this one there was no blood — at least no physical blood, no blood not merely metaphorical — but there were accusations, insults and slamming doors, and the next morning, before anyone had woken up, Rodney took his father's car and disappeared and, when he returned home after three days without a word, he called his father and mother together and unceremoniously announced, giving them no chance to reply, that in two months' time he was enlisting in the army. Almost twenty years after that fateful August day, sitting across from me in the same wingback chair where he had heard Rodney's words of no return, while he held a cup of cold coffee and searched my eyes for the relief of a glimmer of exoneration, Rodney's father was still wondering where his son had been and what he'd done during those three days of flight, and was still also wondering, as he'd done over and over again for the last twenty years, why Rodney had not deserted and had ended up complying with the order to go to Vietnam. In all that time he'd been unable to find a satisfactory answer to the first question; not so the second. 'People tend to believe that many explanations are less convincing than one alone,'Rodney's father told me. 'But the truth is there's more than one reason for almost everything.' According to Rodney'sfather, he would not have joined the army if he could have legally got out of it, but he didn't feel able to deliberately contravene the law — although he considered it unjust — and much less to humiliate himself by asking his father to pull some professional strings to get one of his colleagues to agree to commit fraud by inventing some reason for a medical exemption. On the other hand, refusing to go to war in the name of his pacifist convictions would have cost Rodney two years in prison, and the option of exile in Canada wasn't without risks either, among them that of not being able to return to his country for many years. 'Besides,'Rodney's father went on, 'deep down he was still a boy with his head full of adventure novels and John Wayne movies: he knew his father had fought a war, that his grandfather had fought a war, that war was what men did, that only in war does a man prove he's a man.' So Rodney's father guessed that in some hidden corner of his son's mind, fed by the notions of bravery, manliness and rectitude he'd inculcated in him, and in the struggle with his own nascent ideas of a young man just out of adolescence, he still cherished, a secret but powerful, heroic and romantic concept of war as an essential fact of a man's life, which explined the conviction, matured over twenty years, that if his son had betrayed his anti-war views, swallowed his fear and obeyed the order to go to Vietnam it had really been out of shame, because he knew if he hadn't, he'd never be able to face the simple folk of his country again, because he'd never be able to face his brother or his mother again, but most of all — above all else — because he'd never be able to face him again. 'So it was me who sent Rodney to Vietnam,' Rodney's father said. 'Just as I'd done to Bob.'
Before he went to Vietnam Rodney spent an initial period of training ('basic training', they called it) at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and a second period ('advanced training', they called it) at Fort Polk, Louisiana. His first letters date from that time. 'The first thing you notice upon arrival here,' Rodney writes from Fort Jackson, 'is that reality has receded to a primitive stage, because in this place only rank and violence hold sway: the strong survive, the weak do not. As soon as I came through the door they insulted me, shaved my head, put me in new clothes, took away my identity, so no one needed to tell me that if I wanted to get out of this alive, I had to try to blend into the background, dissolve into the crowd, and I also had to be more brutal than the rest of my comrades. The second thing you notice is something even more elemental. I already knew that perfect happiness does not exist, but here I've learned that perfect unhappiness doesn't exist either, because even the slightest breath is an infinite source of happiness.' Rodney lost ten kilos in his first three weeks at Fort Jackson. There and at Fort Polk, there were two feelings dominant in Rodney's mind: strangeness and fear. The majority of his comrades, eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys mostly, were younger than him: some of them were delinquents whom the judge had given a choice of prison or the army; others were unfortunates who, since they didn't know what to do with their lives, had rightly imagined that the army would give them a sense of mission and meaning; the immense majority were uneducated workers who adapted to the rigours of military life with less difficulty than did he, who, despite being used to outdoor life and having a long familiarity with firearms, had led too comfortable an existence up till then to survive undamaged the roughness of the army. But there was also the fear: not fear as a state of mind, but as a physical sensation, cold, humiliating and sticky, which had hardly any resemblance to what he'd called fear until then, not fear of a distant enemy, still invisible and abstract, but fear of his commanders, his comrades, loneliness and himself: a fear that, contradictory though it may seem, didn't keep him from loving them all. There's a letter from Xuan Loc dated 30 January 1969, when Rodney had been in Vietnam for almost a year, in which he tells in detail an anecdote from those months of instruction, as if he'd needed a whole year to digest it, or to resolve to tell it. A few days before his departure for Vietnam they called him and his comrades all together in the functions room in Fort Polk for a last-minute talk by a captain and a sergeant recently returned from the front on techniques of evasion and survival in the jungle. While the captain — a man with an impassive smile and cultivated manners — was speaking, the sergeant held a perfectly white, soft and nervous rabbit, with astonished childlike eyes, that captured the attention of all the soldiers with its inopportune presence. At a certain moment, the rabbit squirmed out of the sergeant's hands and ran away;the captain stopped talking, and a jubilation took over the hall while the rabbit scurried among the desks, until someone finally caught the animal and handed it back to the sergeant. Then the captain took it and, before the ruckus had entirely died down and a brutal silence filled the hall, in a couple of seconds, the smile never leaving his lips and barely getting a drop of blood on himself, broke its neck, tore it to pieces, ripped out its entrails and threw them over the soldiers.