might be pursuing him, but he knew he was in danger. He pushed away
from the wall, moved past the car, and went to the workbench and tool
rack at the front of the garage.
He wished that he’d had the foresight to keep a gun at the cabin. Now
he had to settle for a wood ax, which he took down from the clips by
which it was mounted on the wall, breaking a spider’s web anchored to
the handle.
He had used the ax to split logs for the fireplace and to chop kindling.
It was quite sharp, an excellent weapon.
Though he was incapable of cold-blooded murder, he knew he could kill in
self-defense if necessary. No fault in protecting himself.
Self-defense was far different from murder. It was justifiable.
He hefted the ax, testing its weight. Justifiable.
He took a practice swing with the weapon. It cut through the air with a
whoosh. Justifiable.
Approximately nine miles from Running Springs and sixteen miles from
Lake Arrowhead, Benny pulled off the road and parked on a scenic lay-by,
which featured two picnic tables, a trash barrel, and lots of shade from
several huge bristlecone pines. He switched off the engine and rolled
down his window. The mountain air was forty degrees cooler than the air
in the desert from which they had come, it was still warm but not
stifling, and Rachael found the mild breeze refreshing as it washed
through the car, scented by wildflowers and pine sap.
She did not ask why he was pulling off the road, for his reasons were
obvious, It was vitally important to him that she understand the
conclusions he had reached in Vietnam and that she have no illusions
about the kind of man that the war had made of him, and he did not trust
himself to convey all of those things adequately while also negotiating
the twisty mountain lane.
He told her about his second year of combat. It had begun in confusion
and despair, with the awful realization that he was not involved in a
clean war the way World War II had been clean, with well-delineated
moral choices. Month by month, his recon unit’s missions took him
deeper into the war zone. Frequently they crossed the line of battle,
striking into enemy territory on clandestine missions. Their purpose
was not only to engage and destroy the enemy, but also to engage
civilians in a peaceful capacity in hope of winning hearts and minds.
Through those varied contacts, he saw the special savagery of the enemy,
and he finally reached the conclusion that this unclean war forced
participants to choose between degrees of immorality, On one hand, it
was immoral to stay and fight, to be a part of death dealing and
destruction, on the other hand, it was an even greater moral wrong to
walk away, for the political mass murder that would follow a collapse of
South Vietnam and Cambodia was certain to be many times worse than the
casualties of continued warfare.
In a voice that made Rachael think of the dark confessionals in which
she had knelt as a youth, Benny said, “In a sense, I realized that, bad
as we were for Vietnam, after us there would be only worse. After us, a
bloodbath. Millions executed or worked to death in slave-labor camps.
After us . . . the deluge.”
He did not look at her but stared through the windshield at the forested
slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.
She waited.
At last he said, “No heroes. I wasn’t yet even quite twenty-one years
old, so it was a tough realization for me-that I was no hero, that I was
essentially just the lesser of two evils. You’re supposed to be an
idealist at twenty-one, an optimist and an idealist, but I saw that
maybe a lot of life was shaped by those kinds of choices, by choosing
between evils and hoping always to choose the least of them.”
Benny took a deep breath of the mountain air coming through the open
window, expelled it forcefully, as though he felt sullied just by
talking about the war and as though the clean air of the mountains