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.'
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
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
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