Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

would, if drawn in deeply enough, expunge old stains from his soul.

Rachael said nothing, partly because she did not want to break the spell

before he told her everything. But she was also rendered speechless by

the discovery that he had been a professional soldier, for that

revelation forced her to reevaluate him completely.

She’d thought of him as a wonderfully uncomplicated man, as an ordinary

real-estate broker, his very plainness had been attractive. God knew,

she’d had more than enough color and flamboyance with Eric. The image

of simplicity which Benny projected was soothing, it implied equanimity,

reliability, dependability. He was like a deep, cool, and placid

stream, slow-moving, soothing. Until now, Benny’s interest in trains

and old novels and forties music had seemed merely to confirm that his

life had been free of serious trauma, for it did not seem possible that

a life-battered and complicated man could take such unalloyed pleasure

from those simple things. When he was occupied with those pastimes, he

was wrapped in childlike wonder and innocence of such purity that it was

hard to believe he’d ever known disillusionment or profound anguish.

“My buddies died,” he said. “Not all of them but too damn many, blown

away in firefights, cut down by snipers, hit by antipersonnel mines, and

some got sent home crippled and maimed, faces disfigured, bodies and

minds scarred forever. It was a high price to pay if we weren’t

fighting for a noble cause, if we were just fighting for the lesser of

two evils, a damn high price.

But it seemed to me the only alternative-just walking away-was an out

only if you shut your eyes to the fact that there are degrees of evil,

some worse than others.”

“So you volunteered for a third tour of duty,” Rachael said.

“Yes. Stayed, survived. Not happy, not proud. Just doing what had to

be done. A lot of us made that commitment, which wasn’t easy. And

then.. . that was the year we pulled our troops out, which I’ll never

forgive or forget, because it wasn’t just an abandonment of the

Vieinamese, it was an abandonment of me. I understood the terms, and

still I’d been willing to make the sacrifice.

Then my country, in which I’d believed so deeply, forced me to walk

away, to just let the greater evil win, as if I was supposed to find it

easy to deny the complexity of the moral issues after I’d finally

grasped the tangled nature of them, as if it had all been a fuckin’ game

or something!”

She had never before heard anger like this in his voice, anger as hard

as steel and ice-cold, never imagined he had the capacity for it.

1twas a fully controlled, quiet rage-but profound and a little

frightening.

He said, “It was a bad shock for a twenty-one-year-old kid to learn that

life wasn’t going to give him a chance to be a real pure hero, but it

was even worse to learn that his own country could force him to do the

wrong thing. After we left, the Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered three

or four million in Cambodia and Vietnam, and another half million died

trying to escape to the sea in pathetic, flimsy little boats.

And.. . and in a way I can’t quite convey, I feel those deaths are on

my hands, on all our hands, and I feel the weight of them, sometimes so

heavy I don’t think I can hold up under it.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No. Never too hard.”

“One man can’t carry the world on his shoulders,” she said.

But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not even a

fraction of it. “That’s why I’m past-focused, I guess. I’ve learned

that the worlds I have to live in-the present world and the world to

come-aren’t clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black

and white. But there’s always at least the illusion that things were a

lot different in the past.”

Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his

unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far deeper

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