The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do. That gave rise to strange forms of magical thinking. One morning after four days of continuous fighting I said that things seemed “quiet,” and I might as well have rolled a live hand grenade through the outpost; every man there yelled at me to shut the fuck up. And then there were Charms: small fruit-flavored candies that often came in the prepackaged meals called MREs. The superstition was that eating Charms would bring on a firefight, so if you found a pack in your MRE, you were
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