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"When he was fourteen, John Wade lost his father... In the weeks that followed, because he was young and filled of grief, he tried to pretend that his father was not truly dead. He would talk to him in his imagination, carrying on whole conversations about baseball and school and girls" (14).

Losing his father was very tough for John to deal with. In order to cope with the pain, John would pretend his dad was still right next to him and they would talk for hours. The power of a child's mind is demonstrated here by the way they can believe something is real that really is not. The death of his father is what made John so attached to Kathy and scared to lose her.

"By and large he was well liked among the men in Charlie Company. In the evenings... 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" (36-37).

During the small amounts of free time the soldiers had in Vietnam, John would stand up in front of the other soldiers and perform magic tricks. Because he was not much of a soldier, he had to be able to do something to make the other soldiers like him. He would do anything to gain the favor of others. The magic made him so popular that he gained the nickname of "Sorcerer." For John, who had always considered himself  loner, the name was like a special badge or an emblem of belonging to a brotherhood.

"Outside the boathouse, Wade paused to collect himself... He pulled the doors back, stepped inside, swung the flashlight across the dirt floor. There was no surprise. The boat was gone, as it had to be. The outboard was gone, too, and the gas can and the orange life vest and the two fiberglass oars" (83).

John spent the later hours of the day that Kathy left him searching for her. She had been gone since morning and he had searched everywhere around since. There was only one possibility left: Kathy took the boat. He opened the boathouse door with little hope of the boat being there, and it wasn't. Kathy had left with the boat with no intentions of ever returning. The emptiness of the boathouse is like the emptiness that has drained everything out of John's heart.

"There was a shiver at the bottom of the boat--a snapping sound-- and for an instant she was free of everything, she was light and high, she was soaring through the glassy roof of the world and breaking out into another, and then the lake was all around her, and soon inside her, and maybe in that way Kathy drowned and was gone" (117).

Tim O'Brien offers many different possibilities of what could have happened to Kathy Wade. This one, however, seems the most viable. This theory is also symbolically probable because Kathy wanted a new life in a new world and to be free of all of her stress. Here, as she sails heavenward out of the boat, she "breaks into another world" and she is free of all her pains.