In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien

frustration and rage erupted over hapless aides... [He was] screaming and hollering, and throwing his arms... 32
—Robert A Caro (
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
)
    Â 
We knew it was coming, sure, but I guess John hoped he had one more miracle up his sleeve. Didn't pan out. That last night, when the returns started coming in, he had this blank expression on his face. I can't pin it down exactly. Just empty. Like a walking dead man. Defeat does things to people.
—Anthony L. (Tony) Carbo
    Â 
He drank some, that's true. Clobbered like that—who wouldn't? 33
—Ruth Rasmussen
    Â 
A candidate who has lost an election for the presidency, after all he has gone through in the campaign, is literally in a state of shock for at least a month after the election. 34
—Thomas E. Dewey
    Â 
John called me that night. He sounded almost asleep. I guess the emotion came later—a delayed shock or something. He was always the type to stew, just like his father.
—Eleanor K. Wade
    Â 
The cruel circumstances attending [Al Smith's] defeat caused the memory of it to rankle in him for a long time ... Like everyone else, he wanted to be loved. 35
—Matthew and Hannah Josephson (
Al Smith: Hero of the Cities
)
    Â 
Exhibit Nine: Primary Election Results, Democratic Farmer Labor Party, State of Minnesota, September 9, 1986
Durkee—73%
Wade—21%
Other—6% 36

13. The Nature of the Beast
    The war was aimless. No targets, no visible enemy. There was nothing to shoot back at. Men were hurt and then more men were hurt and nothing was ever gained by it. The ambushes never worked. The patrols turned up nothing but women and kids and old men.
    "Like that bullshit kid's game," Rusty Calley said one evening. "They hide, we seek, except we're chasin' a bunch of gookish fucking ghosts."
    In the dark someone did witch imitations. Someone else laughed. For Sorcerer, who sat listening at his foxhole, the war had become a state of mind. Not bedlam exactly, but the din was nearby.
    "Eyeballs for eyeballs," Calley said. "One of your famous Bible regulations."
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    All through February they worked an AO called Pinkville, a chain of dark, sullen hamlets tucked up against the South China Sea. The men hated the place, and feared it. On their maps the sector was shaded a bright shimmering pink to signify a "built-up area," with many hamlets and paddy dikes and fields of rice. But for Charlie Company there was nothing
bright about Pinkville. It was spook country. The geography of evil: tunnels and bamboo thickets and mud huts and graves.
    On February 25, 1968, they stumbled into a minefield near a village called Lac Son.
    "I'm killed," someone said, and he was.
    A steady gray rain was falling. Thunder advanced from the mountains to the west. After an hour a pair of dustoff choppers settled in. The casualties were piled aboard and the helicopters rose into the rain with three more dead, twelve more wounded.
    "Don't mean zip," Calley said. His face was childlike and flaccid. He turned to one of the medics. "What's up, doc?"
    Three weeks later, on March 14, a booby-trapped 155 round blew Sergeant George Cox into several large wet pieces. Dyson lost both legs. Hendrixson lost an arm and a leg.
    Two or three men were crying.
    Others couldn't remember how.
    "Kill Nam," said Lieutenant Calley. He pointed his weapon at the earth, burned twenty quick rounds. "Kill it," he said. He reloaded and shot the grass and a palm tree and then the earth again. "Grease the place," he said. "Kill it."
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    In the late afternoon of March 15 John Wade received a short letter from Kathy. It was composed on light blue stationery with a strip of embossed gold running along the top margin. Her handwriting was dark and confident.
    "What I hope," she wrote him, "is that someday you'll understand that I need things for myself. I need a productive future—a real life. When you get home, John, you'll have to treat me like the human being I am. I've