nature than hers and that he had spent a long time building barriers
around them, barriers that could not easily be torn down. She knew he
would tell her everything when he felt the time was right.
They traveled only a mile on Route 330 and were still twenty miles from
Running Springs when he apparently decided that, in fact, the time had
come. As the road wound higher into the sharply angled mountains, more
trees rose up on all sides-birches and gnarled oaks at first, then pines
of many varieties, tamarack, even a few spruce-and soon the pavement was
more often than not cloaked in the velvety shadows of those overhanging
boughs. Even in the air-conditioned car, you could feel that the desert
heat was being left behind, and it was as if the escape from those
oppressive temperatures buoyed Benny and encouraged him to talk. In a
darkish tunnel of pine shadows, he began to speak in a soft yet distinct
voice.
“When I was eighteen, I joined the Marines, volunteered to fight in
Vietnam. I wasn’t antiwar like so many were, but I wasn’t prowar
either. I wasjust for my country, right or wrong. As it turned out, I
had certain aptitudes, natural abilities, that made me a candidate for
the Corps elite cadre, Marine Reconnaissance, which is sort of the
equivalent of the Army Rangers or Navy Seals. I was spotted early,
approached about recon training, volunteered, and eventually they honed
me into as deadly a soldier as any in the world. Put any weapon in my
hands, I knew how to use it. Leave me empty-handed, and I could still
kill you so quick and easy you wouldn’t know I was coming at you until
you felt your own neck snap.
I went to Nam in a recon unit, guaranteed to see plenty of action, which
is what I wanted-plenty of actionand for a few months I was totally gung
ho, delighted to be in the thick of it.”
Benny still drove the car with consummate skill, but Rachael noticed
that the speed began to drop slowly as his story took him deeper into
the jungles of Southeast Asia.
He squinted as the sun found its way through holes in the tree shadows
and as spangles of light cascaded across the windshield. “But if you
spend several months kneedeep in blood, watching your buddies die,
sidestepping death yourself again and again, seeing civilians caught
repeatedly in the cross fire, villages burned, little children maimed…
well, you’re bound to start doubting. And I be?an to doubt.”
Benny, my God, I’m sorry. I never suspected you’d been through anything
like that, such horror-” “No point feeling sorry for me. I came back
alive and got on with my life. That’s better than what happened to a
lot of others.”
Oh, God, Rachael thought, what if you hadn’t come back? I would have
never met you, never loved you, never known what I’d missed “Anyway,” he
said softly, “doubts set in, and for the rest of that year, I was in
turmoil. I was fighting to preserve the elected government of South
Vietnam, yet that government seemed hopelessly corrupt. I was fighting
to preserve the Vietnamese culture from obliteration under communism,
yet that very same culture was being obliterated by the tens of
thousands of U.S. troops who were diligently Americanizing it.”
“We wanted freedom and peace for the Vietnamese,” Rachael said. “At
least that’s how I understood it.” She was not yet thirty, seven years
younger than Benny, but those were seven crucial years, and it had not
been her war. “There’s nothing so wrong with fighting for freedom and
peace.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice haunted now, “But we seemed to be intent on
creating that peace by killing everyone and leveling the whole damn
country, leaving no one to enjoy whatever freedom might follow. I had
to wonder… Was my country misguided? Downright wrong? Even possibly.
.. evil? Or was I just too young and too naive, in spite of my Marine
training, to understand?” He was silent for a moment, pulling the car
through a sharp right-hand turn, then left just as sharply when the