Life During Wartime

In talking about one war, can we talk about another? Isn't every war somehow unique in its violence and its destruction, at least in the specificity of its theater, its actors, and its purpose? Or does war simply endure, each conflict an instance, wrought from the template of the same basic themes - of violence and illogic and a struggle for power, definition, and ultimately, meaning?

Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is a novel about Vietnam, impressive in its scope, as it traces the entanglements of a diverse ensemble of characters, Americans and Vietnamese, soldiers, spooks, and civilians, over the course of twenty years before and after their involvement in the war twists each of their lives. As always, Johnson's scenes and characters are luminously portrayed, shining from the pages with a religious intensity, and his language is direct and insistent, without sacrificing the capacity for poetry, vulgarity, or spiritual convalescence. The novel's center is held by the rogue and charismatic CIA operative Colonel FX Sands and his nephew, the idealistic (about espionage) new agent Skip Sands, and entwines a whole cast of supporting characters in their efforts to engage in psychological warfare and double-crosses against the North Vietnamese regime (although, the novel reads less as a neatly constructed spy thriller, tending towards dropping the reader in an alternating rhythm of lulls, bureaucratic misdirection, and introspection).

Through the conversations between the Colonel and his protege, Johnson provides us an inquiry into the nature of war, both in Vietnam and writ broadly:

"Did you hear Nixon's inaugural address?'
"No," Skip said. "Parts of it.'
"He talked about keeping commitments, preserving our honor - not about winning. Not about the future of Vietnam or the future of the kids we see around here. Nixon. I don't care what he says, you can see it in his eyes: he's played the whole game out in his mind, play by play, and we lose. That's how he sees it. Who did you vote for? The Democrat?'
"Nobody. I forgot to get a ballot.'
"I've always voted with the Democrats, this time reluctantly. Humphrey would have pulled us out even quicker, I think. The big boys see the big picture. So we lose. In the big picture it doesn't matter. When it comes to geopolitical balance, just the fact we've fought the war is enough. For the United States, it'll all be fine in the end. But I'm not fighting for the United States. I'm fighting for Lucky and Hao and folks like your cook and your housekeeper. I'm fighting for the freedom of real individuals here on this ground in Vietnam, and I hate to lose. It breaks my heart, Skip.'
"You think we'll actually lose? Is that what you think, ultimately?'
"Ultimately?" His uncle seemed surprised by the word. "Ultimately I think... we'll be forgiven. I believe we'll wander in the darkness for a good long time, and some of what we do here will never be made right, but we will be forgiven. What about you? What do you think, Skip?'
"Uncle, we're in a mess. A mess."

Tree of Smoke is about Vietnam, and in addition to the central pairing of the Colonel and Skip, two well-educated CIA men who end up with their hands deeply bound to the failed military commitments in Southeast Asia, the novel also relays to us the lives of missionaries, administering to the needs of the less fortunate, ravaged by war, of the Houston brothers, enlisted as a sailor and and a private, respectively, who succumb to the psychological damage of the front-lines of the war quite directly, and who, in a haunting literary trick, have been introduced to us, eventual fate and all, in Johnson's debut novel Angels. Knowing what sins a man commits, how the needle of his compass has been bent, in full, beforehand, enriches the experience of watching the sapling boy of that man get twisted up and scarred in the jungles of Vietnam. Johnson's particular empathy for his Vietnamese characters, humble people with full lives, dreams, and histories, lend a much-needed dimension to this war story, as well, elevating it above the proving ground of men and nations, reminding us of the toll paid by those native sons and daughters of the countries over which the American military marauds.

At 600+ pages, the novel moves swiftly, with its only fault being that it is, in some respect, a spy story with an inconclusive ending, a lock without a key. That Johnson is confronting quite directly the legacy of Vietnam, a war that has perhaps been forgotten by the popular culture, but whose consequences have not yet passed us. Of course, it is also impossible to read the novel without it casting a long shadow over our current war in Iraq. And anchoring it all is a much deeper investigation, psychological, moral, and spiritual, of the ways in which war succeeds and fails in giving us meaning.

The colonel said, "I went to Alaska once, you know. I toured the Alaska-Canada road they build their during the war. Fantastic. Not the road, the landscape. The mighty road was just this insignificant little scratch across that landscape. 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, and I do mean right now, sir." He looked red-eyed around himself, as if he only halfway recognized his environment. Sands willed himself not to be too disconcerted. "I met a lady who'd lived there for quite some years -- later, that is, just last Christmas is when I had the pleasure. An elderly woman now, she spent her youth and most of middle age near the Yukon River. I got to talking about Alaska, and she had only one comment. She said: 'It is God-forsaken.'
"You poor, overly polite sonsabitches. I read your silence as respect. I appreciate it too. Would you like me to get to the point?
"The lady's remark set me to thinking. We'd both had the same experience of the same place: Here was something more than just an alien environment. We'd both sensed the administration of an alien God.
"Only a few days before that, couple of days before at the most, really, I'd been reading in my New Testament. My little girl gave it to me. I've got it right now in my kit." The colonel half rose, sat back down. "But I'll spare you. The point is -- aha! yes! the bastard has a point and isn't too damn drunk to bring it home -- this is the point, Will." Nobody else ever called him Will. "St. Paul says there is one God, he confirms that, but he says, 'There is one God, and may 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 understand it to be. And this utterly different universe is administered through the earth itself. Up through the dirt, goddamn it.
"So what's the point? The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam. The point is Vietnam."