In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien

the crowds and carrying himself with appropriate modesty and decorum. And it was also true that uniforms got people elected. Even so, he felt abused.

      “I love you,” he wrote back, “and I hope someday you’ll believe in me.”

      

      John Wade was not much of a soldier, barely competent, but he managed to hang on without embarrassing himself. He kept his head down under fire, avoided trouble, trusted in luck to keep him alive. By and large he was well liked among the men in Charlie Company. In the evenings, after the foxholes were dug, he’d sometimes perform card tricks for his new buddies, simple stuff mostly, and he liked the grins and bunched eyebrows as he transformed the ace of spades into the queen of hearts, the queen of hearts into a snapshot of Ho Chi Minh. Or he’d swallow his jackknife. He’d open up the blade and put his head back and make the moves and then retrieve the knife from somebody’s pocket. The guys were impressed. Sorcerer, they called him: “Sorcerer’s our man.” And for John Wade, who had always considered himself a loner, the nickname was like a special badge, an emblem of belonging and brotherhood, something to take pride in. A nifty sound, too—Sorcerer—it had magic, it suggested certain powers, certain rare skills and aptitudes.

      The men in Charlie Company seemed to agree.

      One afternoon in Pinkville, when a kid named Weber got shot through the kidney, Sorcerer knelt down and pressed a towel against the hole and said the usual things: “Hang tight, easy now.” Weber nodded. For a while he was quiet, flickering in and out, then suddenly he giggled and tried to sit up.

      “Hey, no sweat,” he said, “I’m aces, I’m golden.” The kid kept rocking, he wouldn’t lie still. “Golden, golden. Don’t mean zip, man, I’m golden.”

      Weber’s eyes shut. He almost smiled. “Go on,” he said. “Do your magic.”

      

      In Vietnam, where superstition governed, there was the fundamental need to believe—believing just to believe—and over time the men came to trust in Sorcerer’s powers. Jokes, at first. Little bits of lingo. “Listen up,” somebody would say, “tonight we’re invisible,” and somebody else would say, “That’s affirmative, Sorcerer’s got this magic dust, gonna sprinkle us good, gonna make us into spooks.” It was a game they played—tongue-in-cheek, but also hopeful. At night, before heading out on ambush, the men would go through the ritual of lining up to touch Sorcerer’s helmet, filing by as if at Communion, the faces dark and young and solemn. They’d ask his advice on matters of fortune; they’d tell each other stories about his incredible good luck, how he never got a scratch, not once, not even that time back in January when the mortar round dropped right next to his foxhole. Amazing, they’d say. Man’s plugged into the spirit world.

      John Wade encouraged the mystique. It was useful, he discovered, to cultivate a reserved demeanor, to stay silent for long stretches of time. When pressed, he’d put on a quick display of his powers, doing a trick or two, using the everyday objects all around him.

      Much could be done, for example, with his jackknife and a corpse. Other times he’d do some fortune-telling, offering prophecies of things to come. “Wicked vibes,” he’d say, “wicked day ahead,” and then he’d gaze out across the paddies. He couldn’t go wrong. Wickedness was everywhere.

      “I’m the company witch doctor,” he wrote Kathy. “These guys listen to me. They actually believe in this shit.”

      Kathy did not write back for several weeks. And then she sent only a postcard: “A piece of advice. Be careful with the tricks. One of these days you’ll make me disappear.”

      It was signed, Kath. There were no endearments, no funny stories.

      Instantly, John felt the old terrors rise up again, all the ugly possibilities. He couldn’t shut them off. Even in bright daylight the pictures kept blowing through his head. Dark bedrooms, for instance. Kathy’s diaphragm. What he wanted was to spy on her again—it was like a craving—but all he could do was wait. At night his blood bubbled. He couldn’t stop wondering. In the third week of February, when a letter finally arrived, he detected a new coolness in her tone, a new distance and formality. She talked about a movie she’d seen, an art gallery she’d visited, a terrific Spanish beer she’d discovered. His imagination filled in the details.

      

      February was a wretched month. Kathy was one problem, the war another. Two men were lost to land mines. A third was shot through the neck. Weber died of an exploding kidney. Morale was low. As they plodded from ville to ville, the men talked in quiet voices about how the magic had worn off, how Sorcerer had lost contact with the spirit world. They seemed to blame him. Nothing direct, just a general standoffishness. There were no more requests for tricks. No banter, no jokes. As the days piled up, John Wade felt increasingly cut off from the men, cut off from Kathy and his own future. A stranded sensation—totally lost. At times he wondered about his mental health. The internal terrain had gone blurry; he couldn’t get his bearings.

      “Something’s wrong,” he wrote Kathy. “Don’t do this to me. I’m not blind—Sorcerer can see.”

      She wrote back fast: “You scare me.”

      And then for many days he received no letters at all, not even a postcard, and the war kept squeezing in on him. The notion of the finite took hold and would not let go.

      In the second week of February a sergeant named Reinhart was shot dead by sniper fire. He was eating a Mars bar. He took a bite and laughed and started to say something and then dropped in the grass under a straggly old palm tree, his lips dark with chocolate, his brains smooth and liquid. It was a fine tropical afternoon. Bright and balmy, very warm, but John Wade found himself shivering. The cold came from inside him. A deep freeze, he thought, and then he felt something he’d never felt before, a force so violent it seemed to pick him up by the shoulders. It was rage, in part, but it was also illness and sorrow and evil, all kinds of things.

      For a few seconds he hugged himself, feeling the cold, and then he was moving.

      There was no real decision. He’d lost touch with his own volition, his own arms and legs, and in the hours afterward he would remember how he seemed to glide toward the enemy position—not running, just a fast, winging, disconnected glide—circling in from behind, not thinking at all, slipping through a tangle of deep brush and keeping low and letting the glide take him up to a little man in black trousers and a black shirt.

      He would remember the man turning. He would remember their eyes colliding.

      Other things he would remember only dimly. How he was carried forward by the glide. How his lungs seemed full of ashes, and how at one point his rifle muzzle came up against the little man’s cheekbone. He would remember an immense pressure in his stomach. He would remember Kathy’s flat eyes reproaching him for the many things he had done and not done.

      There was no sound at all, none that Sorcerer would remember. The little man’s cheekbone was gone.

      Later, the men in Charlie Company couldn’t stop talking about Sorcerer’s new trick.

      They went on and on.

      “Poof,” somebody said. “No lie, just like that—poof!”

      At dusk they dragged the sniper’s body into a nearby hamlet. An audience of villagers was summoned at gunpoint. A rope was then secured to the dead man’s feet, another to his wrists, and just before nightfall Sorcerer and his assistants performed an act of levitation, hoisting the body high into the trees, into the dark, where it floated under a lovely red moon.

      

      John Wade returned home in November of 1969. At the airport in Seattle he put in a long-distance call to Kathy, but 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 gray skies over North Dakota he went back into the lavatory, where he took off his uniform and put on a sweater and slacks, then carefully appraised himself in the mirror. His eyes