by Tim O'Brien
A: Yes.
Q: You were ordered to do so?
A: Yes.
Q: Why did you carry out that order?
A: I was ordered to. And I was emotionally upset ... And we were supposed to get satisfaction from this village for the men we'd lost. They was all VC and VC sympathizers and I still believe they was all Viet Cong and Viet Cong sympathizers.102
—Paul Meadlo (Court-Martial Testimony)
On the road, in our route home, we found every house full of people, and the fences lined as before. Every house from which they fired was immediately forced, and EVERY SOUL IN THEM PUT TO DEATH. Horrible carnage! O Englishmen to what depth of brutal degeneracy are ye fallen!103
—Anonymous British officer, 1775 (After the battles at Lexington and Concord)
Q: This Sorcerer, you can't recall his name?
A: Not right at this exact minute.
Q: And he giggled?
A: That was afterward. He was upset.104
—Richard Thinbill (Court-Martial Testimony)
I have encouraged the troops to capture and root out the Apache by every means, and to hunt them as they would wild animals. This they have done with unrelenting vigor. Since my last report over two hundred have been killed.105
—General Edward O. Ord
Kathy was no angel. That dentist ... I shouldn't say his name. Anyway, I don't think there are any angels. I guess it hurt him pretty bad—John, I mean.
—Patricia S. Hood
[The British troops] committed every wanton wickedness that a brutal revenge could stimulate.106
—Anonymous observer, 1775 (After the battles at Lexington and Concord)
My conscience seems to become little by little sooted ... If I can soon get out of this war and back on the soil where the clean earth will wash away these stains!107
—J. Glenn Gray (The Warriors)
HOMELESS MY LAI VET KILLED IN BOOZE FIGHT Pittsburgh—A Vietnam veteran who participated in the My Lai massacre and later became a homeless alcoholic who lived under a bridge was shot to death in an argument over a bottle of vodka. Police have charged a female drinking companion with shooting Robert W. T'Souvas once in the head in the altercation earlier this month ... "He had problems with Vietnam over and over. He didn't talk about it much," said his father, William T'Souvas ... The Army charged T'Souvas with premeditated murder of two unidentified Vietnamese children with a machine gun, but he testified the children were bleeding, mutilated, and dying, and he killed them to put them out of their misery. [Lieutenant William] Calley was the only one convicted of the My Lai killings.108
—Boston Herald
Twenty years later, when you look back at things that happened, things that transpired, things you did, you say: Why? Why did I do that? That is not me. Something happened to me.109
—Fred Widmer (Member of Charlie Company)
Exhibit Eight: John Wade's Box of Tricks, Partial List
Invisible ink
Coin pull
Servante
The Floating Glass Vase
Book: A Magi's Gift
Book: The Peers Commission Report
After his father died, he spent a lot of time down here at the store ... I think probably he had a little crush on me. The way he called me Carrot Lady, like I was something special.
—Sandra Karra (Karra's Studio of Magic)
I guess you could say John ran out of magic. Once the media jumped on him, it was all over. He knew that. Those ugly headlines, they would've knocked Saint Peter out of politics. Minnesota isn't the kind of place where you say you're sorry and expect people to forget. Lots of Lutherans here.
—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo
Always John! You're driving me nuts! I mean, wake up. I get tired of saying it—Kathy had troubles, too, her own history, her own damn life!
—Patricia S. Hood
A lot [of political wives] are unhappy here [in Washington]. They have no life of their own and wonder, who am I? Am I just somebody's wife? Or is there something more?110
—Arvonne Fraser (Wife of former Don Fraser)
Pat [Nixon] fooled everybody who did not know her intimately, never letting on that most of the time she hated the whole thing ... [Politics was anathema to Pat ... she made this luminously clear to persons she knew and trusted.111
—Lester David (The Lonely Lady of San Clemente)
[After his resignation] Nixon was gripped by deep melancholia. He would sit for hours in his study, unable or unwilling to move, eating little. He suffered from severe insomnia ... There is reason to speculate that if it were not for Pat Nixon's constant attention and encouragement during the low points in his life from August until past Thanksgiving, Richard Nixon might have gone over the brink into total mental breakdown. He had come close. He admits that he had been in "the depths."112
—Lester David (The Lonely Lady of San Clemente)
Think about Waterloo. Think how Napoleon felt. Life's over, you're a dead man.
—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo
[M]uch of the shame that therapists treat is repressed, defended against, unfelt ... But the potential to feel the shame is nevertheless there, often so heightened that it has become like a deformed body part that we organize our lives to keep ourselves and others from seeing.113
—Robert Karen ("Shame")
It is a harsh question, yet is it possible that Nixon lied to his wife and to his family, as well as to the country, about the full scope of his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate affair?114
—Lester David (The Lonely Lady of San Clemente)
That Sorcerer crap. Anybody makes up names for himself, you have to wonder. Like he didn't even know who the hell he was.
—Vincent R. (Vinny) Pearson
John had all kinds of extra names. I remember his father used to call him Little Merlin, or Little Houdini, and that Jiggling John one. Maybe he got used to it. Maybe he felt—maybe it sort of helped to call himself Sorcerer. I hope so.
—Eleanor K. Wade
By taking a new name ... an unfinished person may hope to enter into more dynamic—but not necessarily more intimate—transactions, both with the world outside and with his or her "true soul," the naked self.115
—Justin Kaplan ("The Naked Self and Other Problems")
[B. Traven's] longing to vanish, in death, without a trace and to return to the elements from which he came echoes his lifelong hunger for anonymity, for disappearing without a name, or with a fictitious name, so that his true identity would be lost forever. The life of a pseudonym is the life of a dead man, of one who does not exist.116
—Karl S. Guthke (B. Traven)
Give it up. Totally hopeless. Nobody will ever know.
—Patricia S. Hood
I've said everything I can think of. Can't we just stop now? I'm an old lady. Why keep asking me these things?117
—Eleanor K. Wade
26. The Nature of the Dark
They were young, all of them. Calley was twenty-four, T'Souvas was nineteen, Thinbill was eighteen, Sorcerer was twenty-three, Conti was twenty-one—young and scared and almost always lost. The war was a maze. In the months after Thuan Yen they wandered here and there, no aim or direction, searching villes and setting up ambushes and taking casualties and doing what they had to do because nothing else could be done. The days were difficult, the nights were impossible. At dusk, after their holes were dug, they would sit in small groups and look out across the paddies and wait for darkness to settle in around them. The dark was their shame. It was also their future. They tried not to talk about it, but sometimes they couldn't help themselves. Thinbill talked about the flies. T'Souvas talked about the smell. Their voices would seem to flow away for a time and then return to them from somewhere beyond the swaying fields of rice. It was an echo, partly. But inside the echo were sounds not quite their own—a kind of threnody, a weeping, something melodic and sad. They would sometimes stop to listen, but the sound was never there when listened for. It mixed
with the night. There were stirrings all around them, things seen, things not seen, which was in the nature of the dark.
Charlie Company never returned to Thuan Yen. There were rumors of an investigation, nervous jokes and nervous laughter, but in the end nothing came of it. The war went on. More villages and patrols and random terror. On occasion, late at night, Sorcerer would find himself sliding back into wickedness, trapped at the bottom of a bubbling ditch, but over time the whole incident took on a dreamlike quality, only half remembered, half believed. He tried to lose himself in the war. He took uncommon risks, performed unlikely deeds. He was wounded twice, once badly, but in a peculiar way the pain was all that kept body and soul together.
In late November of 1968 he extended his tour for an extra year.
"It's a personal decision," he wrote Kathy. "Maybe someday I'll be able to explain it. Right now I can't leave this place."
On ambush sometimes, in the paddies outside a sleeping village, Sorcerer would crouch low and watch the moon and listen to the many voices of the dark, the ghosts and gremlins, his father, all the late-night visitors. The trees talked. The bamboo, and the rocks. He heard people pleading for their lives. He heard things breathing, things not breathing. It was entirely in his head, like midnight telepathy, but now and then he'd look up to see a procession of corpses bearing lighted candles through the dark—women and children, PFC Weatherby, an old man with bony shins and a small wooden hoe.
"Go away," he'd murmur, and sometimes they would.
Other times, though, he would have to call in artillery. He would fire up the jungles. He would make the rivers burn.
Two months before his tour was up, Sorcerer found a desk job in the battalion adjutant's office. It was easy duty: all paperwork, no humping, a tin roof over his head. The real war had ended. The trick now was to devise a future for himself.
He thought about it for several weeks, weighing the possibilities. Late one evening he locked himself in the office, took out the battalion muster roll, hesitated briefly and then slipped it into his typewriter. After ten minutes he smiled. Not foolproof, but it could be done. He went to the files and dug out a thick folder of morning reports for Charlie Company. Over the next two hours he made the necessary changes, mostly retyping, some scissors work, removing his name from each document and carefully tidying up the numbers. In a way it helped ease the guilt. A nice buoyant feeling. At higher levels, he reasoned, other such documents were being redrafted, other such facts neatly doctored. Around midnight he began the more difficult task of reassigning himself to Alpha Company. He went back to the day of his arrival in-country, doing the math in reverse, adding his name to the muster rolls, promoting himself, awarding the appropriate medals on the appropriate dates. The illusion, he realized, would not be perfect. None ever was. But still it seemed a nifty piece of work. Logical and smooth. Among the men in Charlie Company he was known only as Sorcerer. Very few had ever heard his real name; fewer still would recall it. And over time, he trusted, memory itself would be erased.
He completed his paperwork just before dawn on November 6, 1969. A week later he rotated back to the States.
At the airport in Seattle he put in a long-distance call to Kathy, then chuckled and hung up on the second ring. The flight to Minneapolis was lost time. Jet lag, maybe, but something else too. He felt dangerous. In the skies over North Dakota he went back into the lavatory, where he took off his uniform and put on a sweater and slacks, quietly appraising himself in the mirror. After a moment he winked. "Hey, Sorcerer," he said. "How's tricks?"
27. Hypothesis
Maybe twice that night John Wade woke up sweating. The first time, near midnight, he would've turned and coiled up against Kathy, brain-sick, a little feverish, his thoughts wired to the nighttime hum of lake and woods.
Later he kicked back the sheets and whispered, "Kill Jesus."
Quietly then, he swung out of bed and moved down the hallway to the kitchen and ran water into an old iron teakettle and put it on the stove to boil. As he waited—naked, maybe, watching the ceiling—he would've felt the full crush of defeat, the horror and humiliation, the end of everything he'd ever wanted for himself. It was more than a lost election. It was disgrace. The secret was out and he was pinwheeling freestyle through the void. No pity in the world. All arithmetic—a clean, tidy sweep. St. Paul had been lost early. Duluth was lost four to one. The unions were lost, and the German Catholics, and the rank-and-file nobodies. A winner, he thought, until he became a loser. That quick.
The teakettle made a brisk whistling sound, but he could not bring himself to move.
Ambush politics. He could see it happening exactly as it happened. Front-page photographs of dead human beings in awkward poses. Names and dates. Eyewitness testimony. He could still see Kathy's face turning toward him on the morning when it all came undone. Now she knew. She would always know. The horror was partly Thuan Yen, partly secrecy itself, the silence and betrayal. Her expression was empty. Not shocked, just dark and vacant, twenty years of love dissolving into the certainty that nothing at all was certain.
"Kill Jesus," he said.
He felt the electricity in his blood.
Maybe then, when the water was at full boil, he pushed himself up and went to the stove.
Maybe he used a towel to pick up the iron teakettle.
Stupidly, he was smiling, but the smile was meaningless. He would not remember it. He would remember only the steam and the heat and the electricity in his fists and forearms. He carried the teakettle out to the living room and switched on a lamp and poured the boiling water over a big flowering geranium near the fireplace. "Jesus, Jesus," he was saying. There was a tropical stink. "Well now," he said, and nodded pleasantly.
He heard himself chuckle.
"Oh, my," he said.
He moved to the far end of the living room and boiled a small young spider plant. It wasn't rage. It was necessity. He emptied the teakettle on a dwarf cactus and a philodendron and a caladium and several others. Then he returned to the kitchen. He refilled the teakettle, watched the water come to a boil, smiled and squared his shoulders and moved down the hallway to their bedroom. A prickly heat pressed against his face; the teakettle made hissing sounds in the night. He felt himself glide away. Some time went by, which he would not remember, then later he found himself crouched at the side of the bed. He was rocking on his heels, watching Kathy sleep. Amazing, he thought. Because he loved her. Because he couldn't stop the teakettle from tipping itself forward. Kathy's face shifted on the pillow. Her eyelids snapped open. She looked up at him, puzzled, almost smiling, as if some magnificent new question were forming. Puffs of steam rose from the sockets of her eyes. The veins at her throat stiffened. She jerked sideways. There were noises in the night—screechings—his own name, perhaps—but then the steam was in her throat. She coiled and uncoiled and coiled up again. Unreal, John decided. A dank odor filled the room, % fleshy scalding smell, and Kathy's knuckles were doing a strange trick on the headboard—a quick rapping, then clenching up, then rapping again like a transmission in code. Bits of fat bubbled at her cheeks. He would remember thinking how impossible it was. He would remember the heat, the voltage in his arms and wrists. Why? he thought, but he didn't know. All he knew was fury. The blankets were wet. Her teeth were clicking. She twisted pushing with her elbows, sliding off toward the foot of the bed. A purply stain spilled out across her neck and shoulders. Her face seemed to fold up. Why? he kept thinking, except there were no answers and never would be. Maybe sunlight. Maybe the absence of sunlight. Maybe electricity. Maybe a vanishing act. Maybe a pair of snakes swallowing each other along a trail in Pinkville. Maybe his father. Maybe secrecy. Maybe humiliation and loss. Maybe madness. Maybe evil. He was aware of voices in the dark_women and children, slaughterhouse sounds_but the voices were not part of what he would remember. He would remember darkness. The skin at her forehead blistered up peeling off in long ragged strips. Her lips were purplish blue. She jerked once and sh
uddered and curled up and hugged herself and lay still. She looked cold. There was a faint trembling at her fingers.
Maybe he kissed her.
Maybe he wrapped her in a sheet.
Maybe some black time went by before he carried her down the slope to the dock, gliding, full of love, laying her down and then moving to the boathouse and opening up the double doors.
"Kath, my Kath," he would've whispered.
He would've dragged the boat out into shallow water, letting it fishtail there while he went back for the engine. The fog had lifted. There was a moon and many stars. For a few seconds he was aware of certain sounds in the dark, the nighttime murmur of lake and woods, his own breathing as he locked in the engine and waded back to the boathouse for the oars and gas can and life vest. He was Sorcerer now. He was inside the mirrors. He would've used the oars to pull over to the dock, tying up there, feeling the waves beneath him and lifting her up and thinking Kath, my Kath, placing her in the boat and then returning to the cottage for her sneakers and jeans and white cotton sweater. Maybe he whispered magic words. Maybe he felt something beyond the glide. Remorse, perhaps, or grief. But there were no certainties now, no facts, and like a sleepwalker he would've made his way back to the boat and started the engine and turned out into the big silent lake. He did not go far. Maybe two hundred yards. In the dark, the boat shifting beneath him, he caused her sneakers to vanish in deep water. Then her jeans and sweater. He weighted her with polished gray rocks from the slope below the cottage. "Kath, Kath," he must've said, and maybe other things, and then dispatched her to the bottom. Later, he would've eased himself into the lake. He would've tipped the boat and held it firm against the waves and let it fill and sink away from him.