Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

The colonel viewed violence as inevitably human and warriors as peculiarly blessed. The peacetime military must have galled him. Not long after the war the promotions stopped. Another dark patch. For a career officer an end to steady advancement was a bad sign, tantamount to firing. The specific cause of his trouble with the military—the transgression or infraction, the misstep—never found its way into his record, but the general why of it was plain enough. The colonel knew how to lead, but he couldn’t follow.

As Skip understood it, the colonel had applied to the CIA as soon as Truman had formed it in 1947, but was passed over for several years, during which he’d served on many southern air force bases, an interim that had warped his Boston accent into something unique and hardened his drinking habits. The Agency took him on in the early fifties, a latecomer among that first generation, an outsider without any OSS background but with loads of experience in Southeast Asia, over which Red China was rising. On to the Philippines, Laos, Vietnam, and, sometimes, at the beginning, in Malaya with Anders Pitchfork and the Malay Scouts, just for fun—always in a quasi-military role, generally outside the scrutiny of Langley, focused as it was on Eastern Europe and the Soviets.

On Luzon he’d worked extensively with Edward G. Lansdale combating the Communist threat there, the Hukbalahap guerrillas. The prison camps had shaped his character: belief in himself, learning on the run, fighting without thought of surrender, the stuff of heroes. Lansdale had shaped his methods: trust the locals, learn their songs and stories, fight for their hearts and minds. Curiously, perhaps mysteriously, the colonel seemed to have had no contact with General Lansdale while in Vietnam.

Vietnam had been the colonel’s apex, and his undoing. Left to himself there he might have won the campaign single-handedly, but now the Asian threat was taken seriously, Langley paid attention, Congress took a hand. He was vocally bitter that the promised elections were canceled, the promised reunification postponed. As the U.S. Army arrived in stronger force, it found the colonel waiting. The Green Berets hadn’t succumbed to him—too broad in his focus, maybe, the sources of his authority too hazy. He made himself indispensable to certain helicopter assault groups, then, in 1965, to the Twenty-fifth Infantry. The King of Cao Phuc. Psy Ops. Labyrinth. And the Tree of Smoke.

More than anything else, the colonel’s time with Lansdale in the Philippines had determined his vision. Won over by the power of myth, he became one himself, somewhat in life but especially in his death. According to Nguyen Minh, the young pilot the colonel had called Lucky, the colonel kept a wife in or near Binh Dai, a ville on the Mekong Delta. After the colonel’s capture and death at the hands of the Vietcong, his body had been returned to the ville either as an example to others or in honor of the manner in which he’d withstood his final torments— delivered to his widow with its digits, eyes, and tongue torn away and all its bones broken. The people of this ville, which had once been a Catholic parish, buried the corpse in the earth of the chapel yard—the chapel itself had been mainly bamboo and nothing by then remained of it—in a casket of thick rough-cut mahogany sealed with tar. Immediately afterward, before the concrete slab could be poured to anchor it, the rains came, days on end, very rare this time of year. Under the downpours, with no roots to hold it together, the freshly churned red earth of the burial pit turned sufficiently liquid that three weeks after it was hidden in the ground the coffin heaved to the surface, and Colonel Sands came back from the underworld. The villagers pried the lid and found a beautiful black-haired American pilot with his fingers and toes intact, a naked young Colonel Francis unblemished, unmolested. They surrounded him with stones, pierced his vessel with holes to let the water in, and sank him again in his grave. Still it couldn’t hold him. More rain, the canal nearby had climbed its banks and delved away the barren churchyard and scooped up the colonel in his casket. It was witnessed on its way down the Hau River; they saw the coffin in An Hao, Cao Quan, Ca Goi, heading out the Dinh An mouth into the South China Sea.

Jimmy Storm, immediately as he’d heard the rumor, had traveled to this ville. He’d found a woman who seemed to have been the wife of an American, and the villagers escorted him to this American’s grave site. It lay apparently undisturbed. But as for who rested there, how long, and all the rest of it—Storm had gone alone, none of them spoke English, their French was bad, his French was worse—he left knowing nothing. And Skip had this account through veils upon veils, through Hao, from Minh, who’d directed Storm to the village with the grave.

Skip, however, had word from Aunt Grace, as well as the assurance of Newsweek, that the colonel had been buried in Massachusetts—without military honors, in accordance with his wife’s wishes. Skip preferred the myth. It told the truth. In this world his uncle had stood out grandly, even more so set against the landscape of his own imaginings. Skip regretted the role handed him at the end, that of traitor to the rebellion. At the end the colonel had sought reasons not just for an operation gone wrong, but for the breaking of his own heart, had looked for betrayal at the very center of things in the shape of some classical enormity, and what could have been more enormous, more darkly Roman, than betrayal by one’s own house, by his nephew, by his own blood? A soul too wide for the world. He’d refused to see his downfall as typical, refused all collaboration with the likes of Marcus Aurelius: “You may break your heart,” the old emperor had written, “but men will go on as before.” He’d written himself large-scale, followed raptly the saga of his own journey, chased his own myth down a maze of tunnels and into the fairyland of children’s stories and up a tree of smoke.

The summons came in a reusable interdepartmental envelope addressed to him care of Psy Ops, eight weeks after the colonel’s death. Lunch again, Voss again. Sands expected Crodelle too.

He asked Hao to leave him at the traffic circle near the river and walked several blocks to the Continental and entered perspiring heavily. In the lobby, Rick Voss sat in an elaborately carved and japanned chair. Unaccompanied.

Voss stood up and shook Skip’s hand with a certain weariness, as if he’d walked here himself over rivers and mountains. “I’m sorry about the colonel.”

“He was something.” “God, yes. And I’m sorry.” “So am I.” “We all are. Lately we are one sorry bunch.” It was only 11:00 a.m. Sands said, “Are you hungry yet?” “Let’s call this a prelunch. I wanted to get ahead of things here.” “Ahead of things? Why don’t I like the sound of that?” “I need to eat a little crow.” “No need. Should we sit down?” “Hang on. We’ve got about five minutes.” “Where are we going?” “Let me talk, will you?” “Sure. You bet.”

“Thanks. Thanks. Look,” Voss said, “here’s the speech. From the minute I heard the colonel was gone, I’ve been feeling like a royal piece of shit. Some folks think he was a swashbuckler, a Neanderthal. Not everybody shares that opinion of him. Some of the bunch think he was a pretty great man. I didn’t start out one of them, but that’s where I ended up. And this is an apology, for the little it’s worth. I was wrong to pass along that draft of his article. First of all, it wasn’t really his. I wrote ninety percent of it, and I didn’t mind making him look bad. And I think I passed it along just to curry favor with some people who didn’t like him, who I now believe to be absolute assholes. And I am fucking sorry, Skip.”