Shadowfires

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 was just 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 action-and 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 knee-deep 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 began 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 mountainside angled again. “By the time my tour of
duty ended, I'd answered none of those questions to my satisfaction… and so I volunteered for another tour.”
    “You stayed in Nam when you could have gone home?” she asked,
startled. “Even though you had such terrible doubts?”
    “I had to work it out,” he said. “I just had to. I mean,
I'd killed people, a lot of people, in what I thought was a just cause, and I had to know whether I'd
been right or wrong.