Free Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler Page B

most of all the millions of their killers. Why? Because Robert did not go to Vietnam to do this. Because he had a graduate school deferment and he let it go and so the army gave him a choice: to enter into officers’ training and risk a combat assignment or enter as an enlisted man and select his own army occupation. So he chose not to kill. He went to Vietnam to slide away to the side, to land and work and fly home as one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills, who never experiences any actual battle, who never fires a weapon. Who goes to war to cook or repair or fuel or type or drive or warehouse or launder or telegraph; orgoes to study and analyze, like doing the research he loves; who goes to war and sleeps and eats and drinks and writes letters and listens to music and falls safely in love in another country with an exotic girl and writes a resume and plans a future life and goes home; who goes to war to please your dad, to receive your dad’s approval, to make your dad proud, to win your dad’s love.
    You didn’t have to kill to do that.
    Robert has never told his father about the banyan tree. About the man he shot in the dark.
    You are a killer.
    Still. Still. So many men had it figured out that way, thinking they would be one of the eight in ten who never engaged in actual combat, but ended up having the fight come to them, having an army—not just men, not just a solitary man but an army—having an enemy army come at them and their pals, and then everyone did this thing together, so many men ended up killing, ended up killing other men, ended up turning into killers, many times over. But somehow so many of those men—surely so many; just look at all the veterans who apparently are leading routine lives, more or less happy lives, lives full of all those values we putatively fought for—so many were able to figure out how their killings were outliers, were acts apart from who they really are, so many somehow figured out how to live the rest of their lives as men who are not, in fact, killers, are anything but killers.
    But when Robert emerged from his tree, this was not an enemy army before him. This was one man. A solitary man. A few paces away in the dark. A man who simply was there.A man who simply moved. A man who could have been anyone. Maybe a frightened boy. The Viet Cong recruited boys. Maybe he was solitary because he was running away, ready in that moment to make some sort of separate peace, one man to another. Worse: maybe not a Viet Cong at all. Maybe no enemy at all. Maybe a man who minutes ago had been hiding in his home in the alleyway. Or hiding in another tree.
    Robert had not seen a weapon.
    Though that proved nothing. It was too dark. And the North’s soldiers who had only recently passed through would certainly have killed Robert. What the hell was that man doing there? The great likelihood was that he was a soldier like all the rest, and for Robert to have hesitated would have been for Robert to die. Nearly a decade ago, Robert’s own Florida passed the first stand-your-ground law: If you find yourself in a situation where you reasonably fear that someone is about to kill you or seriously injure you—no matter where you are—you have no obligation to retreat. You can kill. You can kill and you are innocent. You are innocent.
    Robert and Darla have spoken several times about how they despise this law.
    Robert has not spoken with Darla about how he has quietly invoked this law over and over to try to make that voice inside him fall silent.
    He has never told Darla about the killing.
    Five miles of urban-sprawl businesses have passed like white noise and now Robert crosses over the interstate. The faint quaver of the overpass, the rush of traffic beneath him,snap him back to the car, to his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
    “It was a fucking war,” he says aloud. And to himself:
What’s wrong with you? What kind of man are you? It was the Tet Offensive. I