In the Lake of the Woods Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 13 Summary: Chapter 13, The Nature of the Beast

The platoon Charlie Company works in an area called Pinkville, but they never find enemy soldiers. Lieutenant Rusty Calley calls it a game of hide-and-seek. One night, three soldiers are killed and twelve more are wounded in a minefield, but Calley says it doesn’t mean anything. Three weeks later, another booby trap kills and injures additional soldiers. Calley shoots at the earth and wants to kill Vietnam.

John receives a letter from Kathy explaining that she has changed and he will have to treat her differently when he returns. She also is dating other men, but she still loves him. The next morning, helicopters gather in an assault formation. John feels dazed and senses wrongness all around him. The helicopters set down on the edge of the village of Thuan Yen and start shooting. The men in Charlie Company head to the village. Sorcerer hears gunfire everywhere. In the village, he sees dead animals and dead and dying girls and women, some with torn-off clothing, and dead babies. He finds body parts. Sorcerer sees PFC Weatherby shoot two children. He hears people dying. Sorcerer says “no” and “please.” He sees burning homes. Further up the trail, Sorcerer sees more company members, including Calley, spraying gunfire at a crowd of villagers, killing dozens. Calley urges him to join them, but Sorcerer runs away. Violence has taken over the village, and it is sin. Sorcerer wants it to stop, but the killing continues. The men take breaks to swap stories and eat candy.

After an hour, Sorcerer sees someone kill fifteen or twenty villagers and notices the flies, buzzing loudly. Sorcerer loses himself, closing his eyes and hoping the world will correct itself. He knows one day he will have to relieve himself of the burden of this day. Later still, Sorcerer starts to tell his memories to go away, making the village begin to vanish. In years to come, when back home, Sorcerer would do his best to erase these events from his memory.

When Sorcerer senses a person moving nearby, he shoots an old man carrying a hoe. In the future, he will feel little guilt about the murder. Later, he finds himself in an irrigation ditch filled with dozens of bodies. When PFC Weatherby finds him, Sorcerer shoots him.

Analysis: Chapter 13

Chapter 13 is one of the few narrative chapters in the novel that remain constant to one time and one place. The pages present the traumatic event that the narrator has been hinting at and referencing up until now, finally providing the most comprehensive overview of what John experienced in Vietnam that left him so haunted and broken.

The massacre that takes place at Thuan Yen on March 15, known more commonly as the My Lai Massacre, contains everything a person might consider to be among the horrors of war: murder, rape, cruelty, fire, and rampant destruction. John was the last soldier from his platoon to enter the village, and by then, the wickedness was already on display in the sights, sounds, and smells of the dead and the dying. John utters a few words, “No” and “Please!,” which seem to imply that John wants it all to stop. A little later, he thinks the word “stop,” but he does nothing to halt the massacre, although he doesn’t directly participate in the killings.

At first, Sorcerer tries to escape what’s happening by shutting down John’s brain, much as he does on the night in the cottage when he yells, “Kill Jesus!” and kills the houseplants. But then Sorcerer comes up with another trick to escape the massacre, and it’s the best one he’s come up with yet. Since what he is witnessing is so profoundly wrong and inhuman, it could not be happening. And if something can’t be happening, then that means it isn’t happening. And if it didn’t happen, a person does not need to remember it all. John will make himself forget, just as he made himself believe that his father was alive. Even amid the horror, John begins to erase the present.

Yet after this moment, when John is already beginning to feel better, the unthinkable happens. He shoots an old man with a hoe and, later, his platoon brother, PFC Weatherby. Readers may wonder if John causes himself to forget to the extent that he was unable to curb his reflexive instincts to shoot in a war situation. Or perhaps the insanity of the event, which Sorcerer and other men blame on the sunlight, has gotten to him too. John doesn’t know the answer because he suppresses all thoughts of killing the old man and Weatherby except for in the middle of the night, when the memories come back to him in his dreams. However, these actions end up defining the remainder of John’s life and ensuring that Sorcerer will be needed to continue to hide the truth even after John returns home.

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