The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Portuguese Vietnam

While the USA was engaged during the 1960's and 70's in its insane war in Vietnam, Portugal was digging proportionately even deeper graves in its African colony of Angola (one and one half million men went to Africa, from a population of ten million; almost 80,000 died on all sides). Somewhat lower-tech than the American effort, the Portuguese troops went out not by jet plane but by ship. This was hardly a morale-building experience - they travelled in the same cargo holds that carried the coffins which would bring many of them home. Lobo Antunes was a doctor conscripted to help reduce the number of coffins needed.

Military discipline doesn't mitigate the emotional immaturity, frustration and fear of young soldiers, it condenses extreme emotions for periodic explosive release. The explosions, as we know, may continue for a life-time. Alcohol and prescription drug abuse seem to be popular longer-term dysfunctions; but the more immediate effect of putting lethal weapons in the hands of half-cooked, troubled adults is a casual, unpredictable inhumanity and the occasional massacre... and, of course, a chronic inability to talk coherently about the experience, even if that's all they do talk about. It's called post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lobo Antunes's voice (it can hardly be called a protagonist since it doesn't even have a name) has PTSD. He can't shut up about what he's gone through except to comment on what he's going through at the moment as a consequence. Guilt alternates with the effects of military irrationality, "...is it the guerrillas who are murdering us or is it Lisbon, or is it the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, or the whole fucking lot of them determined to screw us good and proper in the name of certain interests that escape me now...? ...Is there anyone who can explain this absurdity?" He understandably avoids mention of the secret police, the PIDE, which had more power than the army, and was more dangerous than the enemy.

They return unfit for normal life, as they always do, because war makes everything - relationships, possessions, personal history - cheap, disposable, and temporary. The young soldiers, "shipwreck victims", are shunted into "islands of despair", military hospitals of a quality and capability of the 19th century. However, for the Portuguese returning from Angola, as undoubtedly for those Americans returning from Vietnam, those French from Algeria, those Dutch from Indonesia and those Russians from Afghanistan, among so many others, it is the malign indifference of one's fellow citizens that is the final crushing blow. The shock of loss is far more profound than the relief of safety:

"We spent twenty-seven months together in the asshole of the world, twenty-seven months of anguish and death in the sands of Eastern Angola...we ate the same homesickness, the same shit, the same fear, and yet it took us just five minutes to say goodbye, a handshake, a pat on the back, a vague embrace, and then, bent under the weight of our baggage, we were gone, out through the main gate and off into the civilian whirlwind of the city."

Would that young men realise that this is inevitable and refuse the commands of the old men who hide it from them. Only then might the old men stop.

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