In the letters from those first months that he spent away from the deceptive security of Saigon Rodney never mentioned Bob, but he did record in detail the novelties that abounded in his new life. His battalion was stationed in a base near Da Nang, but that was just the resting place, because they spent most of the time operating out in the region, by day squelching through the rice paddies and scouring the jungle inch by inch, asphyxiated by the heat and humidity and mosquitoes, enduring biblical downpours, covered in mud up to their eyebrows, devoured by leeches, eating canned food, always sweating, exhausted, their bodies aching all over, stinking after entire weeks without a wash, oblivious to any effort other than that of staying alive, while more than once — after walking for hours and hours armed to the teeth, carrying backpacks and conscientiously making sure of every spot they placed their feet to avoid the mines planted along the jungle paths — they surprised themselves by hoping shots would just start to be fired, if only to break the exhausting monotony of those interminable days when the boredom was often more enervating than the proximity of danger. That was during the day. During the night — after each of them had dug their sniper pits in the red twilight of the paddies, while the moon rose majestically on the horizon — the routine changed, but not always for the better: sometimes they had no choice but to try to get some sleep while rocked by the shelling of artillery, the roar of helicopters landing or shots from M16s; other times they had to go out on patrol, and they did so holding hands, or clutching the uniform of the comrade in front of them, like children terrified of getting lost in the dark; there was also guard duty, eternal shifts when every sound in the jungle was threatening and during which they had to struggle tooth and nail against sleepiness and against the unsleeping ghosts of their dead comrades. Because it was in those days that Rodney came to know what it meant to feel death breathing down his neck daily. 'I once read a phrase by Pascal where he said that no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune,' Rodney writes two months after his arrival in Da Nang. 'When I read that it struck me as mean and false; now I know it to be true. What makes it true is that "entirely". Since I've been here I've seen several friends die: their deaths have horrified me, infuriated me, made me cry, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't felt an obscene relief, for the simple reason that the dead man was not me. Or to put it another way: the horror lies in the war, but long before it already lay within us.' These words might partially explain why in his letters of those days Rodney speaks only of his living comrades — never of the dead — and of his living commanding officers — never of the dead; I've often wondered if it also explains why they're full of stories, as if for some reason Rodney might not have wanted to say directly what the stories were able to say in their lateral or elliptical way. They are stories that had happened to him, or to someone close to him, or that he'd simply been told; I reject the hypothesis that some of them might be invented. I'll just tell the one about Captain Vinh, because I have a feeling it might have been the one that most affected Rodney.
Captain Vinh was an officer in the South Vietnamese army who was assigned as guide and interpreter to the unit my friend served in. He was a gaunt, cordial thirty-year-old with whom, according to Rodney's letter that tells the story, he'd spoken more than once as they got their strength back bolting down their field rations or smoked a cigarette while resting on a march. 'Don't go near him,' a long-serving member of his company said after seeing him chatting amicably with the captain one afternoon. 'That guy's a fucking traitor.' And he told Rodney the following anecdote. One time they captured three Vietcong guerrilla fighters, and an intelligence officer put the three of them in a helicopter and asked the captain and four soldiers, among them the old hand, to come with him. The helicopter took off and, when it was at a considerable altitude, the officer began interrogating the prisoners. The first refused to talk, and without the least hesitation the officer ordered the soldiers to throw him out of the helicopter into the void;they obeyed. The same thing happened with the next prisoner. The third one didn't have to be interrogated: crying and begging for mercy, he started talking so fast and desperately that Captain Vinh barely had time to translate his words, but when he finished his confession he met the same fate as his comrades. 'We went up in the helicopter with three guys and landed with none,' the veteran said. 'But no one asked any questions. As for the captain, he's garbage. He 's seen what we're doing to his people and he keeps helping us. I don't know how they allow him to carry on here,' he complained. 'Sooner or later he'll betray us.' Not much later Rodney would have cause to remember the long-serving soldier's prediction. It all began the morning his company turned up at a village that had been occupied by the Vietcong the night before. The aim of the Vietcong'sincursion had been to recruit soldiers, and to that end the guerrillas requested the help of the village leader, who seemed reluctant to cooperate with them. The guerrillas'response was so sudden and devastating that when the man tried to make amends it was already too late: they grabbed his two daughters, six and eight years old, raped them, tortured them, slit their throats and threw their mutilated bodies down the well to contaminate the village's only source of drinking water. Rodney's whole company took in the story in silence, except for Captain Vinh, who was literally sickened by it. 'My daughters,' he moaned over and over again to whomever would listen, to no one. 'They're the same age, those girls were the same ages as my daughters.' Two months later, the same day he arrived back in Da Nang after a week's leave in Tokyo, Rodney had to help with the evacuation of the thirteen dead and fifty-nine wounded of a combat company, which that very morning had been the victim of an ambush in the jungle. The event made a deep impression on him, but the impression turned into cold fury when he discovered that the rapid investigation that followed had concluded that the butchery could only have been the result of a tip-off and the perpetrator of that tip-off could only have been Captain Vinh. In his letter Rodney affirms that, when he found out about the officer's treachery, if he'd been able to he would certainly have killed 'that murderous rat with whom I'd shared food, tobacco and conversation,' but now it wasn't necessary, because the interpreter had been handed over to the South Vietnamese army, who had executed him without delay; Rodney added that he was glad of the news. The next letter Rodney's parents received was just a note: in it their son records succinctly that the same intelligence officers who had revealed Captain Vinh's treachery had just arrived at the conclusion that the officer had given the Vietcong communists the tip-off because they'd kidnapped his two daughters and threatened to kill them unless he collaborated.