Moving and Killing

“He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.”

Okay, so here’s the thing, and I’m kind of going to ramble here which doesn’t matter because I don’t have many followers and I haven’t even logged on in a year. I read this book, Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, over the summer. And I loved it, but it haunted me. And I became addicted to it. And then I wrote about it a few days ago for my final essay in one of my classes. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m having dreams about it.

There’s lots of reasons why and I won’t go into it because the book just has to be read to mean anything. But there’s one character in particular, James Houston, who won’t leave me. He’s only in about half the book, and he’s a young, little fucker that the reader isn’t supposed to like much.

When the novel opens, James is a 17-year-old boy from a working-class family in Arizona. He feels trapped in his life, especially with his girlfriend, so he enlists in the army—lying about his age—and ships off to the Vietnam War. While over there, he begins his descent into disillusionment. It’s not the war itself that changes him. In fact, the war gives him freedom and a sense of self-control. What’s really tragic about his character is that, as the novel progresses, he comes face-to-face with the so-called “powers” of the war, the characters in command positions who use the war to fuel their own idealisms. For them, the war is about democracy, capitalism, and pro-America propaganda. But James has to watch his friends die, lives in the reality—not the myth—of the war: “He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.”

He becomes bipolar, schizophrenic, hallucinatory, paranoid, and the rest. Partly because of drugs, mostly because of the war. But he’s okay in the war; he’s okay when he’s with his buddies in the field, when he’s in control. But when he returns to base, and especially when he returns home, he is unable to cope. Everything is so meaningless. And it’s tragic. And I love him for it. Because he doesn’t create any bullshit meaning to justify his actions. He just is. He just does. He moves, and he kills.