Rainfall

villagers complied. We were fascinated, wondering what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then
ka-pop! ka-pop
! he starts shooting them. It was weird; no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our clips into these people, just blowing them apart. Clip runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new clip and fire some more.”

    My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”

    There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking,
I slept with a monster
.

    “I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

    I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better that you know.”

    She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so . . . personal.”

    “Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA — North Vietnamese Army soldiers — who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten thousand piastres — several months’ pay.”

    She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”

    I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a V.C. stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”

    “Sonna, sonna koto. . . ,”
she said. “You mean . . . but, John, you didn’t know.”

    I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, c’mon, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”

    “But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”

    I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.

    “Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”

    I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”

    She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers per hour, the speed limit, and the little girl drove her bicycle out right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”

    On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych evaluation they made me take at one point to see how I was handling the special stress of SOG. The shrink they made me talk to had said the same thing: “How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?”

    I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out. I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.

    “Do you still work with these people?” she asked.

    “There are connections,” I responded.

    “Why?” she asked after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”

    I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I