the bird, broken-winged and bleeding, among the brush. He composes a lamentation while his mother cries quietly. “You could go to Canada,” she whispers. He considers the tragic romance of war and the shame of cowardice, and shakes his head. The only thing worse than going to Vietnam is not going. The only thing worse than dying for a pointless cause is surviving without any cause. The only thing worse than war is the relentless tedium of peace. He kills four more birds before darkness drives them home. Each shot leaves him breathless, full of musings on vitality and flight. He delights in the failure of dead wings. He thinks that he will write a book someday. He will call it “Via Dolorosa” or “Fractured Minds” or “An Erudite Monster,” and it will begin “I am gravity.” The New York Times will dub it the best war story since Gone with the Wind. That night, he dreams not of leaving but of coming home. He departs for Vietnam on an April Tuesday, and regrets the banality of the date. The boys in his platoon call him “Shakespeare” and “Dickens.” He writes long letters to Jara in a carefully slanted scrawl, meditating on the charged air and the profound and mercurial bonds between soldiers. He fills a journal with his musings and reads a dog-eared volume of Whitman’s poetry by flashlight in the early hours of the morning. The first time he kills a Viet Cong, he swears he sees God in the curve of the boy’s spine. For the first time he feels the heft of the weapon in his hands, the unrelenting ache of his knees, the sparseness of the air that makes his lungs burn with the very effort of breathing. He drapes his flak jacket over the corpse, too weary to bear its weight any lon-
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