During all the time he spent in Saigon that was possibly the only occasion on which he felt the nearness of death, and the fact that he'd escaped it providentially did nothing but reinforce his baseless conviction that while he stayed there he wasn't in danger, that he was going to survive, that soon he'd be back home and then it would be as if he'd never been in that war.
The one who really was in the war was Bob. Since his arrival in Vietnam Rodney received frequent news from him and, every time Bob came to Saigon on leave, he went to great pains to receive him in style: he lavished black-market gifts on him, took him drinking to the terrace of the Continental, to dinner at Givral's, a small restaurant with air conditioning on the corner of Le Toi and Tu Do, and then to exclusive places in the city centre — including, as Bob incomprehensibly took it upon himself to specify in several of his letters, the Hung Dao Hotel, a famous and popular three-storey brothel located on Tu Do street, not far from Givral's — places where the drinks and conversation would often go on into the blazing dawns of Lam Son Square. Rodney devoted himself entirely to his brother during those visits, but, when the two of them said goodbye after a week of daily binges, he was never left feeling satisfied that he'd helped Bob forget for a time the harshness of the war; he was always overcome by a vague unease that left embers of sorrow in his stomach as if he'd passed those fraternal days of laughs, confidences, alcohol and staying up all night trying to make amends for a sin he hadn't committed or didn't remember having committed, but that stung him as if it were real. At the end of May the brothers saw each other in Hue, where Rodney had gone in an advisory capacity with a famous country singer and his troupe of go-go girls. By then Bob had only a month till his discharge; a while before he'd discarded the idea, which he'd nurtured for a time and even announced to his parents in a letter, of re-enlisting in the army, and at that moment he was elated, eager to return home. Back in Saigon, Rodney wrote a letter home telling of his encounter with Bob and describing his brother bursting with optimism, but two weeks later, when he arrived at the office one morning, the captain he served under called him into his office and, after a preamble as solemn as it was confusing, told him that during a routine reconnaissance mission, on a path that emerged from the jungle into a village near the Laos border, Bob or someone walking beside Bob had stepped on a 150pound mine, and the only thing that remained of his brother's body and those of the four of his comrades who had had the misfortune to be with him at that moment were the bloody tatters of uniforms they'd been able to collect from the area surrounding the 30-foot-wide crater the explosion had left. Bob's death changed everything. Or at least that's what Rodney's father thought; it's also borne out by events. Because, not long after his brother died, Rodney renounced in writing the possibility of considering his military service finished and going home — a possibility he could have been legally entitled to thanks to Bob's death — and submitted a request to join a combat unit. None of his letters give the reasons for this decision, and his father did not know the real motives that induced him to make it;undoubtedly they were linked to his brother's death, but it could also be that it was an unpremeditated or instinctive decision, and that Rodney himself did not know the reasons. In any case the fact is that his letters from that point on became more frequent, longer and darker. Thanks to them, Rodney's father began to understand or imagine (as perhaps anyone who had received them would have) that this was a different sort of war from the one he had fought in, and maybe from all other wars: he understood or he imagined that in this war there was an absolute lack of order or meaning or structure, that those who were fighting had no defined sense of purpose or direction and therefore never achieved objectives, or won or lost anything, nor was there any progress they could measure, nor even the slightest possibility, not even of glory, but of dignity for anyone fighting in it. 'A war in which all the pain of all wars prevailed, but where there was no place for the slightest possibility of redemption or greatness or decency that was befitting to all wars,' Rodney's father said to me. His son would have approved of the sentence. In a letter from the beginning of October 1968, where the somewhat obsessive and hallucinatory tone of his later missives is already perceptible, he writes: 'The atrocious thing about this war is that it's not a war. Here the enemy is nobody, because it could be anybody, and they're nowhere, because they're everywhere: inside and out, up and down, in front and behind. They're nobody, but they exist. In other wars you tried to defeat them; not in this one: in this one you try to kill them, even though we all know that by killing them we won't defeat them. It's not worth kidding yourself: this is a war of extermination, so the more things we kill — people or animals or plants, it's all the same — the better. We 'll devastate the country: we won't leave anything. And still, we won't win the war, simply because this war cannot be won or no one but Charlie can win it: he's willing to kill and to die, while the only thing that we want is for the twelve months we have to spend here to go by as fast as possible so we can go home. In the meantime we kill and we die. Of course we all make an effort to pretend we understand something, that we know why we're here and killing and maybe dying, but we do it only so we don't go completely crazy. Because here we're all crazy, crazy and lonely and without any possibility of advancing or retreating, without any possibility of loss or gain, as if we were going endlessly round and round an invisible circle at the bottom of an empty well, where the sun never reaches. I 'm writing in the dark. I'm not afraid. But sometimes it scares me to think I'm on the verge of discovering who I am, that I'll come around a bend on a path some day and see a soldier, and it will be me.'