By the time Rodney's father left the lawyer's office he already understood that the altercation at O'Hare had just been one reflection of what had happened in the last few months and a foreshadowing of what was going to happen in the future. He was not wrong. Because Rodney's life never again resembled the one he'd been forced to leave behind a year and a half earlier to go to Vietnam. The day of his arrival in Rantoul his old friends had organized a homecoming party; his mother convinced him to go, but, although he left the house dressed for the occasion and with the car keys in hand and returned in the early hours, the next morning his parents found out that he hadn't even shown up at the party, and in the following days discovered from neighbours and friends that he'd spent that night talking on the phone from a booth near the train station and driving around town in his father's Ford. A few months later he and Julia got married and went to live in a suburb of Minneapolis where she was teaching in a secondary school. The union lasted barely two years; in fact, it took her much less time to realize that the marriage was impossible, just as any other Rodney might have attempted then would have been. Physically, he had returned from Vietnam, but actually it was as if he were still there, or as if he'd brought Vietnam home with him. Worse stilclass="underline" while he was in Vietnam Rodney never stopped talking about Vietnam in the letters he wrote to his parents, to Julia, to his friends;now he ceased entirely to do so, and not, perhaps, because he didn't want to — the truth was most likely the opposite: there was probably nothing in the world he wanted as much — but because he couldn't, who knows whether because he harboured the certainty that no one was in a position to understand what he had to tell, or because he thought he shouldn't do so, as if he'd seen or experienced something that those who knew him should remain unaware of. What's certainly clear is that, if while he was in Vietnam he didn't think about anything but the United States, now that he was in the United States he didn't think about anything but Vietnam. It's possible that he often felt nostalgia for the war, that he thought he should never have come home and that he should have died over there, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his comrades. It's possible that he often felt, compared to the life of a cornered rat he now led in the United States, life in Vietnam was more serious, more real, more worth living. It's possible that he realized he could never return to the country he'd left to go to Vietnam, and not only because it didn't exist any more and was now another, but also because he was no longer the same person who'd left it. It's possible that he might very soon have accepted that no one comes back from Vietnam: that, once you've been there, return is impossible. And it's almost surely the case that, like so many other Vietnam veterans, he felt mocked, because as soon as he set foot back on American soil he knew the whole country spurned him or, at best, wished to hide him as if his very presence was an embarrassment, an insult or an accusation. Rodney could not have expected to be received as a hero (because he wasn't one and because he was not unaware that the defeated were never received as heroes, even if they were), but neither could he have expected that the same country that had demanded he ignore his own conscience, not desert to Canada, fulfil his duty as an American and go to a despicable, faraway war, should now shrink from his presence as though he were a criminal or had the plague. His presence and that of so many veterans like him, who, if they were guilty of something, were guilty because of the brutal circumstances of a war they'd been pushed into and the country that had forced them to fight. Or at least that'swhat Rodney must have thought then, just like so many other Vietnam veterans when they went home. As for his former anti-war activism, Rodney undoubtedly now had many more reasons than in his student years to consider the war a deception orchestrated by politicians' fanaticism and irresponsibility, stoked by the fraudulent use of the rhetoric of old-fashioned American values, but it's also indisputable — or at least it was for Rodney's father — that the fact of being for or against the war had been reduced to an almost banal matter in his eyes, relegated to the background by the lacerating disgrace of the United States having sent thousands and thousands of boys to the slaughter and then abandoned them to their fate in a lost little corner of the globe, sick, exhausted and crazed, drunk on desire and impotence, fighting to the death against their own shadows in the swamps of a country reduced to ashes.
But all this is nothing but conjecture: it's reasonable to imagine that, for a long time after his return from Vietnam, Rodney might have thought or felt like that; it's not impossible to imagine that he might have thought or felt the exact opposite. Facts, however, are facts; I'll stick to them. In the first months he spent back in the United States Rodney barely left his house (neither his family home in Rantoul nor the one he shared with Julia in Minneapolis), and when he began to go out it was only to get involved in fights almost invariably provoked by his irrepressible tendency to interpret any mention of Vietnam or his time in Vietnam, no matter how trivial or innocuous, as a personal affront. He lost his Chicago friends and his Rantoul ones, and he cut off all connections to his old comrades from Vietnam, maybe because, voluntarily or involuntarily, he wished to hide the fact that he was an ex-combatant, which would explain the fact that for a long time he categorically refused to go for help or company to the offices of the Veterans' Association. Despite Julia's unceasing efforts, shortly after their wedding the marriage had deteriorated irreversibly. As for his family, he only kept in touch with his mother, while for years he avoided his father's company and conversation. He drank and smoked a lot, whisky and beer, tobacco and marijuana, and often fell into slumps that would plunge him into deep depressions lasting weeks or months and oblige him to stuff himself with pills. He never hunted or fished again. He never mentioned his brother Bob again. He lived in a continual state of anxiety. For almost a year and a half, he suffered from a relentless insomnia, and only managed to overcome it when he went to the movies with Julia, who held his hand and felt him gradually abandon himself in the murmuring darkness of the cinema and finally immerse himself in sleep as if it were the depths of a lake. During the day he never sat with his back to a window, and he was obsessed with keeping all the blinds in the house closed. He spent his nights giving vent to his anxiety in the hallways and, before finally getting futilely into bed, he would begin a nightly ritual that involved inspecting each and every one of the doors and windows of the house, making sure there was no obstacle that might hinder his escape and that everything he needed to defend himself was at hand, as well as mentally running through the appropriate modus operandi in the implausible case of an emergency. With time he managed to fall asleep in his own bed, but he was frequently assaulted by nightmares, and an inoffensive noise in the yard would be enough to wake him and cause him to rush outside to find out what had made the noise. When he and Julia divorced he moved back to his parents' house in Rantoul, and in the years that followed crossed the country from sea to sea several times: he'd suddenly pack his bags one day, load up the car and leave without any warning or fixed destination, and after one or two or three or four months he'd come home without the slightest explanation, as if he'dbeen out for a stroll around the neighbourhood. He survived two suicide attempts, as a result of the second he eventually agreed to be admitted to the Chicago VA Medical Centre. He didn't take long to start looking for a job, but he did in finding one, because, although being an ex-combatant entitled him to certain privileges, for a long time he considered it humiliating to take advantage of them, and each time he went to an interview he returned home seized by an uncontrollable rage, convinced that prospective employers began to see him as a two-headed monster as soon as they found out he was a war veteran. The first job he got was an easy and not badly paid administrative position in a jam factory, but he barely lasted a few months in it, more or less like the ones that followed. Later he tried giving language classes in Rantoul or around Rantoul, and also tried to take up his studies again, enrolling in a master's course in philosophy at Northwestern. It was all futile. When Rodney returned from Vietnam converted into a broken-down shadow of the brilliant, hard-working and sensible young man he'd once been, his father was sure that time would eventually restore his lost nature, but eight years had gone by since his return and Rodney was still immersed in an impenetrable fog, transformed into a ghost or a zombie; in Rantoul he spent whole days lying in bed, reading novels and smoking marijuana and watching old movies on television, and when he went out it was only to drive for hours on highways that led nowhere or to drink alone in the bars around town. It was as if he was hermetically sealed inside a steel bubble, but the strange thing (or what his father found strange) is that he didn't seem to experience that situation of neglect and absolute solitude as an affliction, but rather as the triumphant fruit of a precise calculation, like the ideal antidote to his exorbitant suspicion of other people and his no less exorbitant suspicion of himself. And so at some point Rodney's parents ended up accepting, with a resignation not devoid of relief, that Vietnam had changed their son forever and that he would never go back to being who he used to be.