Free The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas Page A

given up trying to explain it to myself: I've thought he entrusted his sons' letters to me because he knew he didn't have much time left and he didn't want them ending up in the hands of someone who was unaware of their significance and who might just get rid of them; I've thought he entrusted the letters to me because doing so amounted to a symbolic and hopeless attempt to forever free himself of the story of the disaster they contained and that transferring them to me would make me the repository of the tale or even responsible for it, or because in doing so he wanted to compel me to share with him the burden of his guilt. I've thought all these things and many more besides, but of course I still don't know for certain why he entrusted me with those letters and now I'll never know; perhaps he didn't even know himself. It doesn't matter: the fact is he entrusted them to me and now I have them before me, while I write. During these sixteen years I've read them many times. Bob's are few and brief, absent-mindedly kind, as if the war entirely absorbed his energy and his intelligence and made everything alien to it seem banal or illusory; Rodney's, the other hand, are frequent and voluminous, and in their craftsmanship one notices an evolution that is undoubtedly a mirror of the evolution that Rodney himself experienced during the years he spent in Vietnam: at the beginning they are careful and nuanced, careful not to let reality show through more than by way of a sophisticated rhetoric of reticence, made of silences, allusions, metaphors and implications, and at the end torrential and unbridled, often verging on delirium, just as if the uncontainable whirlwind of the war had burst a dam through the cracks of which had spilled a senseless avalanche of clear-sightedness.
    What follows is Rodney's story, or, at least, his story as his father told me that afternoon and as I remember it, and as it appears in his letters and in Bob's letters. There are no fundamental discrepancies between those two sources, and although I've checked some names, some places and some dates, I don't know which parts of this story correspond to the truth of the story and which parts to attribute to the imagination, bad memory or bad conscience of the narrators: what I'm telling is just what they told (and what I deduced or imagined from what they told), not what really happened. I should add that, at twenty-five, when I heard Rodney's story that afternoon from his father, I knew nothing or almost nothing about the Vietnam War, which was then (I suspect) no more than a confusing background noise on the television news of my adolescence and an annoying obsession of certain Hollywood film makers, and also that, despite having been living in the United States for almost a year, I couldn't even imagine that although it had officially ended over a decade earlier, in the minds of many Americans it was still as vivid as on 29 March 1973, the day on which, after the deaths of almost sixty thousand of their compatriots — the vast majority of them boys around twenty years of age — and having completely devastated the invaded country, dropping more than eight times as many bombs on it as on all of Europe during the entire Second World War, the United States Army finally left Vietnam.
    Rodney had been born forty-one years before in Rantoul. His father came from Houlton, in the state of Maine, in the northeast of the country, way up near the Canadian border. He'd studied in Augusta, where his family had moved after his grandfather was ruined in the economic crisis of 1929, and then in New York. After graduating from medical school at Columbia in 1943, he enlisted in the army as a private, and during the next two years fought in North Africa, France and Germany. He was not a religious man (or he wasn't until very late in life), but he'd been raised with that strict sense of justice and ethical probity that seems to be the patrimony of Protestant families, and he