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