Tree of Smoke

by Denis Johnson

he was relieved to be walking back to the club without having to look at what he’d done. Yet he understood, without much alarm or unease, that he wouldn’t be spared this sight forever.

Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But this was the loveliest country on the earth. Sorrow and war lay all over it, true, but the sickness of sorrow had never before penetrated the land itself.

The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and chaos.”

Americans were, in the end, just another horde of puppet-masters.

—Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside—it was a dream.

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.

he tended to speak in a kind of poetry—you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying.

You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible … God before he woke up and saw himself… God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge,

“St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, ‘There is one God, and many administrations.’ I understand that to mean you can wander out of one universe and into another just by pointing your feet and forward march. I mean you can come to a land where the fate of human beings is completely different from what you understood it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddamn it.

Of the inhabitants here nobody was left now but this old man with a bullet hole in his hand, which he’d wrapped in a poultice of leaves and flies’ eggs. “Even if they have a bad wound, they never cut off their limbs in this clan,” Robertson explained. “It isn’t necessary, their wounds never infect, because they allow the eggs to hatch and eat of the rot of their flesh.”

Each day’s end stole the light from her heart, then came the night’s sorrowing madness, waking, weeping, thinking, reading about Hell.

whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.

his old vexation had come awake, struggling upright and flailing in its dirty bandages—his soul and his soul’s diseases.

His mother was unable to be quiet. She read the Bible all the time. She was too old to be his mother, too worn out and stupid to be his mother.

Her gladness was a fist stuffing him deeper into the toilet.

She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

they’d be on patrol and he’d be too far ahead of the others in a line of guys in the jungle, he’d be in front and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss.

Whenever they saw a soldier with decorations, James and the others made a point of passing close to get a look. That was it, wasn’t it?—to be drinking a cup of coffee with this person inside of you hardened and blackened by heroic deeds, and kids walking by with a weak feeling in their stomachs, trying not to stare. But in order to enjoy it, you had to get home alive.

The trains go by with a different sound due to leaves turning on the trees, it’s a happy greeting now, pretty soon we’ll hear that lonely sound of a whistle in bare winter.

When I feel like I need entertainment I go to the shelves and take down The Old Curiosity Shop or Emma or Silas Marner and read just any old part and nine out of ten times I have to go back to the beginning and read it all. I just have to. Those are good old friends.

I know you joined the government to be of service to the world, but our leaders are sending good boys to wreck another country and maybe lose their lives without any sound explanation.

Sure: war, intrigue, the fates—certainly, he’d face them. Just, please, not Mom. Not her laundry flapping in the sorrows of autumn. Not Clements, Kansas, with its historical license to be tiny, low, and square.

Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game.

When it comes to the contrast between having a choice and no freedom to choose whatsoever—here’s where it gets as stark as it can get. You, America, your forces are here making war by choice. Your enemy doesn’t have a choice. They were born into a land at war.

The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.”

Morale in this theater is dismal. The land itself sends up a scent that drives you crazy. Skip, it’s not a different place. It’s a different world under a different God.” “This is getting to be a regular philosophical obsession,” Jimmy said. Skip said, “Philosophical obsessions win wars.”

In the large, frantic lobby they sat in rattan chairs under one of a multitude of whirling fans. Around them beggars and urchins crawled at the feet of exiles and campaigners—at last, a wartime capital, a posh lobby full of sagas, busy with spies and cheats, people cut loose and no longer accountable to their former selves. Deals struck in a half dozen languages, sinister rendezvous, false smiles, eyes measuring the chances. Psychos, wanderers, heroes. Lies, scars, masks, greedy schemes. This was what he wanted—not some villa in the bush.

In honor of his birthday, James bought several rounds. He was happy and high and laughing. Now that he’d come to where the humidity was awful and the beer cheap and infinite, he really understood beer’s meaning and its purpose.

“The Filipinos have a lot of pride, but they’re not stoic.” “They’re never ashamed of their agonies.” “Believe it or not, I like it better here. In this country there’s nothing left but the truth.”

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.

With his thick fingers the brother detached and examined each part—the outer ear with its Pavillon and Lobe, then the Conduit and Tympan and then the Labyrinthe Osseux with its Vestibule and Fenêtres, its Canaux semi-circulaire and the Nerf auditif, the Limaçon, the long tube of the Trompe d’eustache heading into the skull. Even the minute inner bones had been fashioned and labeled—the Marteau, Enclume, and Étrier—and the spongy-looking Cellules mastoïdiennes.

“I’m a coward, Père Patrice.” “Good. You’ll live longer.”

Houston walked a mile to the bus stop and there he waited, covered with dirt and made sentimental by the vision of high school punks and their happy, whorish girlfriends walking to class, heading for their own daily torment, sharing cigarettes back and forth. Houston remembered doing that, and later in the boy’s bathroom … nothing ever as sweet as those mouthfuls from rushed, overhot smokes … stolen from the whole world … In his heart—as with high school—he’d quit this job on the first day but saw nowhere else to go.

He’d had basic training, weapons training, jungle training, night training, survival training, evasion and escape; but he now appreciated that no one could train for this in any way that counted, and that he was dead.

They passed burning hooches and empty hamlets and never saw any people. By their complete absence they seemed to suggest themselves vividly. But there was activity ahead. They heard shooting. At one point they heard a voice crying in a foreign language. They came on a hamlet whose dwellers had just cleared out minutes ago. They’d even left an animal picketed in a garden, a goat with his neck stuck out as if offering it to the axe, but he was only shitting. Right in the middle of a war.

They realized the enemy were killers, they themselves were just boys, and they were dead.

At the sound of low aircraft the villagers had raced for the cover of the jungle. Several had been killed. One, a young girl, still survived, deep in shock, extensively charred, naked. Nothing could be done. Kathy didn’t touch her. The villagers sat surrounding her in the dusk. The pallid green shimmering of her burns competed with the last light. She looked magical, and in Kathy’s exhaustion and in this atmosphere of aftermath and silence the scene felt dreamed. The girl was like some idol powered by moonlight. After all signs of life had ceased, her flesh went on glowing in the dark.

Kathy said, “It’s horrible.” “We’re in a horrible place.” “It’s a fallen world.” “I can’t contradict you. That would be stupid.”

The colonel’s nephew sat next to the sergeant, staring out the open portal at the jungle and the paddies, the flicker of fires, man-destroyed badlands from which smoke ascended like steam through rents in a cauldron’s lid.

Minh often felt of the Americans that behind their actions lay no thoughts anyway, only passions.

Time was running out. That’s what he remembered when he woke on the mat in his saturated civvies, though the dream had held a million peripherals, avenues of twisted events and unspoken complications. He dreamed a great deal each night. It felt like work. Sleeping made him tired.

It’s love of country that sends us forth, but sooner or later vengeance is the core motive.”

Clements, Kansas, remained as it had been, of that he could be confident; to Clements, Kansas, only one summer could come, with its noisy locusts and blackbirds, and the drifting fragrances of baking and soap suds and mown alfalfa, and the brilliant actuality of childhood.

for the bureaucrat nothing’s trash until he affronts his soul by throwing it out.

Doubt collapses onto us like a disaster; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to pull out of it, to trick it away, it never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that it collapses onto us—doubt was in us, and we were predestined to it.

He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now.

With all that had come along to disillusion him, the dismal realities of his work, it lit up his heart to be called a “spy.”

She wasn’t, herself, beautiful. Her moments were beautiful.

“You think this place is an adventure?” “Sure.” “It isn’t fun, though. It’s an adventure, but an adventure isn’t fun till it’s over. If then.”

A lot of friends? Not a lot. Perhaps the wrong ones. He’d clung to the colonel as to a mighty tree, expecting it to carry him from the tempest. But a tree isn’t going anywhere.