Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

The immediate area was quiet, though they still heard artillery or

mortars from up the hill somewhere. “Gimme a M&M,” Black Man said. “Hell, yes.” James gave him the whole pack. Black Man upended it

into his mouth and chewed fast. A chittering came from vegetation that only minutes before had

jerked and flown apart under gunfire. “What’s that? A Vietcong squirrel?” “A monkey.” “A gibbon,” James said. Black Man smiled with chocolate-smeared teeth and said, “There’s

the flare. Here we go.” “Where we go?” “We’re moving up.” “Moving ‘up’? Ain’t no ‘up.’ ” “We moving soon as my gun cools off. Can’t touch it now.”

“What’s happening around here?”

“Touch it. Fry your finger right off your hand.”

“I ain’t touching shit.”

“Put you another clip in, both of you,” Black Man said. “We got to go up that hill.” “Those were mortars, man.” “Got to go. Let’s get our feet under us.” Black Man headed uphill with his gigantic machine gun balanced

on his shoulder like a miner’s pickaxe, cushioned by an olive towel and gripped by its bipod. Houston followed Black Man, and Nash followed Houston.

Above them paddies terraced the hillside. They moved along the dikes and trudged generally upward. From nowhere came the racket of gunfire, bullets jerking the small shoots and chirping in the water.

They raced without speaking over the dikes and flopped on the dry side and crawled along until they found a gulley and dropped into it and scrambled away from whoever was trying to kill them.

“You don’t understand,” Nash said. “I’m not ready for this at all. I only been here three days!” “I just took a second tour,” James said. “I don’t know which one of us is the stupider shit.”

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.

The three soldiers climbed on toward the peak.

By sundown they’d traversed seven kilometers of mountain full of people trying to murder them. To James the ascent seemed to have taken no time at all. The sky was pink and purple as they climbed the last half kilometer to the LZ. Coming into the perimeter they saw a prone figure in a U.S. uniform, half of it torn away down the side, and hardly any head left. James wasn’t sure it was a body, because no one was even looking at it.

By the bull’s-eye some medical corpsmen waited for the return of a chopper, which they said had turned around and left due to reported missile fire. “It might’ve been just flares,” a corporal explained to Black Man. “One got in through the port and had to be kicked out.” Still no one mentioned the corpse. James stayed with Black Man and Nash. They sat on a sandbag wall and looked down the mountain they’d just spent five hours climbing in a crazy zigzag. The east valley lay in a cool shadow.

“What was that all about?” “I have no idea.” “They attacked us. We are their enemy.” “I’m not anybody’s enemy.” “I don’t want to be friends, or enemies, or anything.” “Where’s the sarge?” “Where’s Echo?” A captain James couldn’t remember having seen before came up to

them, red from head to toe with rotor dust, chewing on a cigar stub, and blinking at the sweat in his eyes. “This is an established base camp.” A bug flew into his forehead —”I want this whole area secure.”—swooped around, recovered, was gone.

“Captain, we’re looking for Sergeant Harmon.” “Where’s Echo Platoon?” The captain pointed at Black Man and his big gun. “Find a place

ment for that 60.” He left. The three didn’t move.

A hippie-looking corpsman with a long mustache and a blue bandanna tied around his head brought them three hot meals stacked on top of one another, and they thanked him sincerely, though Nash said, “You got one of them crawly-caterpillar mustaches.”

Toward all these men around him James felt goodwill at an unprecedented depth. The corpsman said they’d had one KIA in a mortar attack. James said, “I seen that guy! I seen a dead corpse. But I thought it was something else.”

“Something else? What else could it be, man?” “Right, yeah,” Black Man said, “we seen him.” “I’m not figuring this out,” James said. He still couldn’t determine

whether he’d just fought a battle. “Was this whole mountain under attack or not?”

He ordered his memory to produce some sort of history of the afternoon. It was all very vivid and disordered. He knew one thing. He’d never moved so fast or felt so certain of what he was doing. All the bullshit had been burned away.

It seemed to be over. There was no explanation. No guerrilla activity had ever troubled this mountain. Suddenly the west-side people had dematerialized, and then these VC, and now the VC too had gone up in smoke. James hunkered down and ate his franks and beans. His fatigues still dripped with sweat. Nash, he noticed, was also completely sopped. James said, “How you doing?”

Nash said, “I’m doing fine, man. Why? Don’t you believe me?”

James was nonplussed and could only say, “Yeah. I believe you. Sure. Yeah.”

Nash said, “My balls are sweating, that’s all. It ain’t piss.”

In the dusk the medic took them along a zigzag path to a glen where shirtless youngsters bathed themselves above the waist. Somebody squatted on the bank, squeezing out his socks over the muddy creek. They were all pumped up, laughing, whooping. Boots off, shirts off—a legitimate swim call meant it had to be over, they were definitely safe. In the dying light James felt jazzed and happy and every blurred young face he looked at gave him back a message of brotherly love.

“You boys from Recon travel light.”

The speaker was new, perhaps; he didn’t realize Echo was a joke. They did travel light. James himself no longer carried a rucksack, just a Boy Scout knapsack holding a poncho and entrenching tool, seven twenty-round magazines, a few sentimental talismans —rubbers, poker chips, and candy—and dosers of insect repellent and bandannas soaked with the stuff. He’d concluded that wanting something was generally less painful than hauling it.

Somebody said, “Well, the war’s over. I’m going down to the ville and get laid. The whores give it away free on Tet.”

“WhatYTet?”

“It’s the Hooky-Gooky new year, asshole. Today is Tet.”

“Tomorrow is Tet. It’s January the thirtieth, man.”

“When?”

“To-c/czy. Jesus.”

One of the grunts from the LZ came into the clearing and said, “Goddamn! Goddamn!” James realized he himself probably looked like that—sweaty, dirty, wild in the eyes. “Shit! Shit!” the boy said. He ran to the clearing’s edge and faced the purple distance, the shadows of other mountains. “SHIT.”

One of his friends said, “Shit what?”

The boy came back and sat down shaking his head. He took both his friend’s hands in his own as if in some foreign style of heartfelt greeting. “Shit. I killed a guy.”

“I guess. Shit.” The boy said, “It ain’t no different than shooting a deer.” “When did you ever shoot a deer?” “I guess I had it mixed up with the movies. But this was just—bing.

And now it’s over.” “It don’t sound like it’s over, Tommy.” “Hey. Half his skull flew up in the air. Is that over enough for you?” “Lay it down. You’re losing control of yourself.” “Yeah, okay,” Tommy said. “I gotta lay it down.” “Hey, let go of my hands, you fruit.” James had killed someone too. He’d seen a muzzle flash, tossed a