grown up. I'm different now, and you are too, and we'll both have to make adjustments. We have to be looser with each other, not so wound up or somethingâyou can't
squeeze
me so muchâI need to feel like I'm not a puppet or something. Anyway, just so you know, I've been going out with a couple of guys. It's nothing serious. Repeat: nothing serious. I love you, and I think we can be wonderful together."
Sorcerer wrote back that evening: "What do you get when you breed VC with rats?"
He smiled to himself and jotted down the answer on a separate slip of paper.
"Midget rats," he wrote.
Â
At 7:22 on the morning of March 16, 1968, the lead elements of Charlie Company boarded a flight of helicopters that climbed into the thin, rosy sunlight, gathered into assault formation, then banked south and skimmed low and fast over scarred, mangled, bombed-out countryside toward a landing zone just west of Pinkville.
Something was wrong.
Maybe it was the sunlight.
Sorcerer felt dazed and half asleep, still dreaming wild dawn dreams. All night he'd been caught up in pink rivers and pink paddies; even now, squatting at the rear of the chopper, he couldn't flush away the pink. All that colorâit was wrong. The air was wrong. The smells were wrong, and the thin rosy sunlight, and how the men seemed wrapped inside themselves. Meadlo and Mitchell and Thinbill sat with their eyes closed. Sledge fiddled with his radio. Conti was off in some mental whorehouse. PFC Weatherby kept wiping his M-16 with a towel first the barrel and then his face and then the barrel again. Boyce and Maples and Lieutenant Calley sat side
by side in the chopper's open doorway, sharing a cigarette, quietly peering down at the cratered fields and paddies.
Pure wrongness, Sorcerer knew.
He could taste the sunlight. It had a rusty, metallic flavor, like nails on his tongue.
For a few seconds Sorcerer shut his eyes and retreated behind the mirrors in his head, pretending to be elsewhere, but even then the landscapes kept coming at him fast and lurid.
At 7:30 the choppers banked in a long arc and approached the hamlet of Thuan Yen from the southwest. Below, almost straight ahead, white puffs of smoke opened up in the paddies just outside the village. The artillery barrage swept across the fields and into the western fringes of Thuan Yen, cutting through underbrush and bamboo and banana trees, setting fires here and there, shifting northward as the helicopters skimmed in low over the drop zone. The door gunners were now laying down a steady suppressing fire. They leaned into their big guns, shoulders twitching. The noise made Sorcerer's eyelids go haywire.
"Down and dirty!" someone yelled, and the chopper settled into a wide dry paddy.
Mitchell was first off. Then Boyce and Conti and Meadlo, then Maples, then Sledge, then Thinbill and the stubby lieutenant.
Sorcerer went last.
He jumped into the sunlight, fell flat, found himself alone in the paddy. The others had vanished. There was gunfire all around, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He couldn't get his legs beneath him. For a time he lay pinned down by things unnatural, the wind and heat, the wicked sunlight. He would
not remember pushing to his feet. Directly ahead, a pair of stately old coconut trees burst into flame.
Just inside the village, Sorcerer found a pile of dead goats.
He found a pretty girl with her pants down. She was dead too. She looked at him cross-eyed. Her hair was gone.
He found dead dogs, dead chickens.
Farther along, he encountered someone's forehead. He found three dead water buffalo. He found a dead monkey. He found ducks pecking at a dead toddler. Events had been channeling this way for a long while, months of terror, months of slaughter, and now in the pale morning sunlight a kind of meltdown was in progress.
Pigs were squealing.
The morning air was flaming up toward purple.
He watched a young man hobbling up
squeeze
me so muchâI need to feel like I'm not a puppet or something. Anyway, just so you know, I've been going out with a couple of guys. It's nothing serious. Repeat: nothing serious. I love you, and I think we can be wonderful together."
Sorcerer wrote back that evening: "What do you get when you breed VC with rats?"
He smiled to himself and jotted down the answer on a separate slip of paper.
"Midget rats," he wrote.
Â
At 7:22 on the morning of March 16, 1968, the lead elements of Charlie Company boarded a flight of helicopters that climbed into the thin, rosy sunlight, gathered into assault formation, then banked south and skimmed low and fast over scarred, mangled, bombed-out countryside toward a landing zone just west of Pinkville.
Something was wrong.
Maybe it was the sunlight.
Sorcerer felt dazed and half asleep, still dreaming wild dawn dreams. All night he'd been caught up in pink rivers and pink paddies; even now, squatting at the rear of the chopper, he couldn't flush away the pink. All that colorâit was wrong. The air was wrong. The smells were wrong, and the thin rosy sunlight, and how the men seemed wrapped inside themselves. Meadlo and Mitchell and Thinbill sat with their eyes closed. Sledge fiddled with his radio. Conti was off in some mental whorehouse. PFC Weatherby kept wiping his M-16 with a towel first the barrel and then his face and then the barrel again. Boyce and Maples and Lieutenant Calley sat side
by side in the chopper's open doorway, sharing a cigarette, quietly peering down at the cratered fields and paddies.
Pure wrongness, Sorcerer knew.
He could taste the sunlight. It had a rusty, metallic flavor, like nails on his tongue.
For a few seconds Sorcerer shut his eyes and retreated behind the mirrors in his head, pretending to be elsewhere, but even then the landscapes kept coming at him fast and lurid.
At 7:30 the choppers banked in a long arc and approached the hamlet of Thuan Yen from the southwest. Below, almost straight ahead, white puffs of smoke opened up in the paddies just outside the village. The artillery barrage swept across the fields and into the western fringes of Thuan Yen, cutting through underbrush and bamboo and banana trees, setting fires here and there, shifting northward as the helicopters skimmed in low over the drop zone. The door gunners were now laying down a steady suppressing fire. They leaned into their big guns, shoulders twitching. The noise made Sorcerer's eyelids go haywire.
"Down and dirty!" someone yelled, and the chopper settled into a wide dry paddy.
Mitchell was first off. Then Boyce and Conti and Meadlo, then Maples, then Sledge, then Thinbill and the stubby lieutenant.
Sorcerer went last.
He jumped into the sunlight, fell flat, found himself alone in the paddy. The others had vanished. There was gunfire all around, a machine-gun wind, and the wind seemed to pick him up and blow him from place to place. He couldn't get his legs beneath him. For a time he lay pinned down by things unnatural, the wind and heat, the wicked sunlight. He would
not remember pushing to his feet. Directly ahead, a pair of stately old coconut trees burst into flame.
Just inside the village, Sorcerer found a pile of dead goats.
He found a pretty girl with her pants down. She was dead too. She looked at him cross-eyed. Her hair was gone.
He found dead dogs, dead chickens.
Farther along, he encountered someone's forehead. He found three dead water buffalo. He found a dead monkey. He found ducks pecking at a dead toddler. Events had been channeling this way for a long while, months of terror, months of slaughter, and now in the pale morning sunlight a kind of meltdown was in progress.
Pigs were squealing.
The morning air was flaming up toward purple.
He watched a young man hobbling up
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