Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

This paper will leave open the question of how we shall apply the lessons of this improved model to our contemporary wartime situation, i.e., in South Vietnam. However, some thoughts assert themselves for consideration:

Groups wage war either with the goal of achieving political aims, as in the case of revolution, or with the goal of ensuring survival, as in the case of counter-revolution. (A long parentheses: We leave aside the instances in which the two goals become blurred, for instance when nation-states engage in empire-building, in market-building, or in defense against these two aggressions. And we deliberately forgo the elaborations and subtleties that would result from bringing Clausewitz and Machiavelli to the table. We reiterate: our focus is on using an improved model to consider the role of intelligence in our contemporary wartime situation, and thus we

simplify.)

Here an arrow in the margin led the reader to a handwritten note at the bottom of the page:

V—So far so good. The end part is just to say we’re inviting further thoughts from all comers. Main thought to end on is that Vietcong-NVA goal is political revolution cross-fertilized by national survival. Inviting thoughts as to where USA stands as far as goals—what are we doing? And what is role of intelligence in that? And how do we get back a sense of wartime objectives and wrestle a whole Agency around to reviving the original role of an intelligence service?

The Necessity of Insulated Activity

The United States, on the other hand, even in this wartime situation, does not enjoy the clarity of warlike goals. Ours is, in effect, a pawn’s game played out with the not-quite-expressed priority that the back ranks, the powerful pieces, the world powers, should never be brought into play. For entities in the intelligence community this circumstance suggests that insularity must be established in order to create an arena of activity in which the true and original purposes of intelligence are recovered and re-engaged. We use the term “arena,” but let us say, instead, that a length of the communications chain must be insulated against the pressures from above and below—the pressures of “subordinate prudence” from below and the pressures of “command influence” from above. Such insulation is hardly likely to result from an order from command itself, and must instead come as a result of the initiative of this Agency or members of it.

In the margins—

V, please fix this to be less uppity, more vague—’He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.’—FXS. But V—time is of the essence. MOBILIZATION-LOSS DICHOTOMY my man.

Who had helped? Who was “V”?—Voss, he had to presume. On the last page, another note in the colonel’s hand:

Tree of Smoke—(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the “guiding light” of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence—restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don’t, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government. ALSO—”Tree of Smoke”—note similarity to mushroom cloud. HAH!

Then the typewriter again, Voss:

One might hypothesize a step beyond the final one. Consider the possibility that a coterie or insulated group might elect to create fictions independent of the leadership’s intuition of its own needs. And might serve these fictions to the enemy in order to influence choices.

— HAH! He could hear his uncle laughing. As on the terrace of the Continental he’d laughed at Jimmy’s crude insinuations. While Jimmy slurped at his fingers, the colonel said to Skip, “Do you remember J. P. Dimmer’s piece on the double agent?”

“I read it a thousand times.” “Suppose you have a double.” “Have we got a double?” “Suppose.” “Okay.” “And suppose you want to give him some bogus product.” Skip said, “Bogus product? I don’t remember any discussion of it in

the Dimmer.” “Get him a copy, please, Sergeant.” “Get him a copy of what?” “It’s an article called ‘Observations on the Double Agent.’ In my stack

of Studies in Intelligence. Winter issue, ‘62.”

“What a memory.”

“Suppose Hanoi believed that an insubordinate element in the U.S. command had decided to blow up a nuke in Haiphong Harbor.” “Are you kidding?” “Wouldn’t that mess with Ho’s thinking just a little? If he thought a

few lunatic bastards had decided to finish this thing without asking permission?”

“We’re speaking hypothetically, I hope.”

“Skip. Have you got a nuke in your pocket?”

“No.”

“Know where to get one?”

“No.”

“No. This is Psy Ops. We’re talking about unbalancing the enemy’s judgment.” “We have no borders to the thinking process/’ Sergeant Storm announced. “It’s almost like yogic or spiritual work.”

He remembered another of the pronouncements of Sergeant Storm: “We’re on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream.”

After his first time at the Purple Bar, James just wanted to go back the next possible minute and drink beer and get laid, and go back again after that, and he couldn’t imagine any higher aim.

He didn’t forget his mother. His first few paychecks, he sent her half. After that he had nothing to send. He’d spent it all on riot.

April wasn’t springlike, just hot. All summer came a torrent of rain. October and November felt cooler and drier. James couldn’t eat the Thanksgiving turkey they served up at the LZ base. Other messes had real turkey, but this stuff came bleached and waterlogged out of a can. “Christmas,” Fisher said, “is gonna break everybody’s heart.”

At first James sent Stevie numerous short, tortured messages, mailed her trinkets he picked up in Saigon, cherished her letters to him, tried to imagine her face and voice when he read her words. Then one day he couldn’t seem to remember her. For the other guys this wasn’t true. As their tours stretched out they only grew more obsessed with their girls back home, and as their time grew short they counted the days and rhapsodized about getting white meat, white meat, white meat. But James only wanted more of what he got at the Purple Bar, whatever color of meat it was.

Communications from Stevie came relentlessly, usually brief notes she jotted in typing class, exactly the kind she might pass surreptitiously to anybody else in school, as if James were sitting two aisles over from her, dozing, and not opening his pants in a bunker, shining a flashlight onto his bared crotch and staring at a horrendous purple-red region of jock rot—in the quivering beam a volatile, almost green color. “You don’t get it from whores, you don’t get it from whores,” said the other men, the men he asked over and over, “it’s just a thing, a sweaty jungle horrible thing, and the shit they give you makes it go away eventually. And you don’t have to shave your balls. So don’t worry. And don’t shave your balls.” Stevie’s letters, their fs dotted with little circles, terrified him as much as jock rot. He hardly ever answered.

I could only lead you halfway to love, he wrote her once, quoting one of Evans’s poems to his own girlfriend.

I will wait for you always, she wrote in return, I am loyal to the end.

He wanted to write back saying, Don’t be loyal, because I’m not loyal. Instead he simply didn’t answer.

At Christmas he got a card from his mother and felt sick about opening it—suppose she sobbed about money? But she’d only written, “Love, Mom” at the end of a Hallmark verse about the Savior and the manger and the shepherds and the wondrous star-filled first Christmas Eve.