THE SOLDIER.

I first met Benjamin K. in Zambia, one steamy midmorning in late December, 2001. I was drinking tea and reading at a picnic table on my parents' fish and banana farm, on the banks of the Zambezi River, near the Zimbabwe border, when the dogs suddenly scrambled, yelping, up the steps toward the top of the camp. I looked up and there, under an arch trailing with passion-fruit vines, stood the man who had been variously described to me by other local white people as "the new mazungu on the block," a "mad bastard," a "tough bugger," "one of the most efficient hunters in the Rhodesian Army," "a bloody Holy Roller," and "the bloke who doesn't drink"--the last of these observations being, at least in this part of Africa, newsworthy in and of itself.

Under the best of circumstances, the whites in the area where my parents live, some hundred miles south of Lusaka, tend to look sweat-drained, malarial, drunk, tragic, and displaced. A scrappy ex-soldier who had washed up here from Zimbabwe would, I thought, look like them, only more so. Instead, K. appeared fresh and well rested, like a warrior ready for battle. At forty-seven, he was a powerful six feet two--not gym-toned muscle but seasoned flesh. He had a wide, spade-shaped face, tanned an olive-brown, and wary eyes that were large and khaki-colored. His lips were full, and he had even, white teeth. He exuded an insistent aura of cleanliness and self-discipline--a difficult thing to pull off in this woolly climate.

I offered him tea and he settled down in the canvas chair opposite me as if he were preparing for a long siege. K., I quickly discovered, had a habit--born of loneliness, perhaps--of talking at length and tirelessly about everything around him. That morning, he held forth on the subjects of dogs, bananas, fish farming, tea, dental hygiene, the bad road to Lusaka, the rainy season, and the indisputable power of the Almighty. He didn't pause long enough for me to reply to anything he said, and the implication, in any case, was that whatever he said was the last word on any given subject. I didn't mind--I was entertained, and his chatter allowed me to scrutinize his body, which, in some ways, told more stories than his mouth ever could. He had tattoos on both arms: on the left, a cupid and a Viking; on the right, the sword-symbol of the Portuguese paratroopers, the para-quedistas. Above that, his arm was marked with the letters "A POS." The only men I know who have found it necessary to have their blood type scratched indelibly into their limbs in blue ink have been soldiers in African wars. So I waited for a pause in his soliloquy, then remarked, "You were in the war."

"Yes," he agreed. Which was about all I'd expected. Most white men who have fought on the losing side of an African civil war and then decided to stay in Africa are, for obvious reasons, reticent about their experiences. But, in the event, K. proved as talkative about his war as he was about everything else.

The Rhodesian War, which began, more or less, in 1966 and ended in 1979, was a sustained and violent struggle between a white minority, who had power and wanted to hold on to it, and a black majority, who had no power but were supported in their struggle to get it by newly independent African states, as well as by the Soviet Union and its allies. The war was fought on Rhodesian soil as well as in the neighboring countries of Mozambique and Zambia, but, unlike most wars for independence in Africa, both sides--white and black--considered themselves indigenous to the land. White Rhodesians did not view the movement toward black independence as a progressive or, at least, inevitable step; they saw it, rather, as an invasion of enemy forces. As the war dragged on, virtually all able-bodied men between the ages of seventeen and sixty, both white and "colored" (the Rhodesian term for people of mixed blood), were called up to fight the "Communist terrorist insurgents"; Rhodesia's Army Chief of Staff for Administration, Derry MacIntyre, even argued (unsuccessfully) in favor of the Israeli model--mobilizing both sexes for armed service. "Because we're all Rhodesian and we'll fight through thick and thin," the white Rhodesians sang, "we'll keep this land a free land, stop the enemy coming in."

K. told me that he'd served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. Unlike the other divisions of the Rhodesian Army--which were composed of both blacks and whites--the R.L.I. was an all-white professional commando unit. More than a quarter of its members were foreigners, covertly recruited from Britain, West Germany, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, New Zealand, and South Africa, and they had a reputation for being violent fighters in both military and civilian life. "Don't naai with the R.L.I.," kids in Rhodesia used to say. "Don't fuck with the R.L.I."

A silence stretched between K. and me, full of all the things that I thought I knew about him and all the things that he thought I thought I knew about him. And then he said, "Ja. Well, that's all old stories now. That's all the past. Dead and buried."