2007 National Book Award–winning novel, Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, the son of a U.S. Information Agency officer who spent part of his childhood living in Manila. One of the book’s characters, the former Air Force colonel-turned-CIA officer Francis X. Sands, cites the vampire story as evidence that it’s important to wage war “at the level of myth,” because the enemy is “more scared of his gods and his devils and his aswang than he’ll ever be of us.”31 What such celebratory accounts left out was that this operation constituted, even in the early 1950s, a war crime because the Philippine
...more
