Tree of Smoke” is a huge story, careening wildly through the massive canvas of the Vietnam War. Denis Johnson’s characters are intense and larger than life, set against a backdrop of impossibility and pushed beyond all limits of humanity.
Central to the story is William “Skip” Sands, who arrives in the Philippines in 1965. He works for the CIA, though his actual assignment is unclear. He’s following in the steps of his uncle, the larger-than-life Col. Francis Sands.
The Colonel, with his silver flattop haircut, has a powerful history: “football for Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, missions for the Flying Tigers in Burma, anti-guerilla operations here in this jungle with Edward Landsale, and, more lately, in South Vietnam. In Burma in ’41 he’d spent months as a POW, and escaped. And he’d fought the Malay Tigers, and the Pathet Lao; he’d faced enemies on many Asian fronts.”
The Colonel is now involved in Psychological Operations, Psy Ops, and he’s indoctrinating his nephew in the basics of the business.
It doesn’t seem a natural path for Skip, raised in Kansas and a graduate of Indiana University. A Midwestern wholesomeness surrounds him as he listens to his uncle lecture on how the use of local myth and legend lies at the heart of Psy Ops.
The Colonel explains, “War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be involving the other fellow’s gods too. And his devils, his aswang (a Filipino ghoul). He’s more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.”
A kind of naive patriotism fuels Skip’s desire to be in Vietnam to see the fall of communism. He asks his uncle to see that he’s assigned to Saigon. His uncle agrees, provided Skip do him a favor and check in on a priest suspected of running guns. Skip agrees, and finds the accusations groundless. But it’s not enough to stop the priest’s assassination, and the event serves as a turning point down a road of bitterness.
There is much going on in this swirling story, which spans 1963 to 1970 and is followed by a 1983 coda. It is rooted in the heart of the Vietnam conflict, in many ways, a losing proposition from the start.
One of the supporting characters, Trung Than, is in the south recruiting for the Vietminh in 1964. He tells his potential recruits that, “We are centralized. We have an iron structure. We are closed into a single fist that disappears up a sleeve when it has to. Our will is unshakable. Our will is our weapon. The greatest colonialist armies can’t stand against it. We drove out the French, and we’ll drive out the Americans, and we’ll slaughter and bury their puppets. Do they claim victories? Let them. The invaders are fighting the ocean. No matter how many waves they beat down, the ocean of our resolve is always there.”
It is onto this backdrop that the Colonel projects his Psy Ops project, his Tree of Smoke, “the guiding light of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government.”
He pulls in two brothers from Phoenix, William and James Houston, in support of his project. Their stories are hopeless; they are young men who had few choices outside the military and fewer once discharged. James in particular is dehumanized by his war experiences, and the reader lives his battlefield experiences by his side.
But in the end, this is Skip’s story. His loyalty to his uncle and ultimately to himself is increasingly called into question, and he slips without effort down a questionable moral slope. He alternates between The Quiet American and The Ugly American in a rudderless attempt to serve all his masters while his essential decency is pulled at and warped. His war and his journey have obvious present-day parallels. The reader’s hindsight picks up the hints of an unwinnable war, and the Colonel’s fear that intelligence will be used to rationalize policy decisions is one that’s hardly been put to rest.
But a good novel cannot ultimately be about failed foreign policy, it has to be about people. And the people in Johnson’s book are haunting. Sad and brave and driven and lonely and courageous and cowardly, the whole human mix. “Tree of Smoke” is not a happy novel and neither is it, ultimately, a cautionary tale. It is a complex and hypnotic vision, apocalyptic in its power and in its ability to move the reader.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
FICTION
Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson
$27
