Highways to a War
Page 53
Mike walks away from the helicopter behind Colonel Chandara, his hair fluttering in the draft from the chopper blades. He looks different here: different from the way he appears in any other picture. He’s haggard, and for the first time seems less youthful: an appearance that’s emphasized by the shirt he’s wearing, which appears almost black. Perhaps the unit’s been through some difficult action; or perhaps he’s simply showing the strain of the past year. But certainly he looks older: another, interior face has emerged through the skin, and a trick of the draft gives the thick, lifted hair a nineteenth-century appearance, which his sideburns accentuate. The long, hollow white cheeks and far, washed-out eyes are a mid-Victorian gentleman’s: an image from the birth of photography. And suddenly I see his great-great-grandfather, whose portrait now hangs on my study wall at home. It’s Robert Devereux’s face.
In a region of Dis beyond the Thai border, a row of crosses rises from the paddy field’s red earth, in the motionless and terrible heat. I see flames reach up for him, like the heat’s choking essence. But then there are other upright poles about him; and now he’s somewhere else.
Orderly wires stretch away, and hidden voices murmur among bright leaves. Walled and roofed by green, by a green like light itself, he hangs in a blessed coolness: the underwater cool of the hop glades.
Home.
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