Shadowfires

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
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…