Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Trung stood by watching, waving the flies away from his face. The boys gathered around the mound in silence for about a minute. Finally one spoke up. “It’s bad,” he said. “There goes one more.”

They were all young, many still in their teens. Their group had never been part of the Vietminh. They were ignorant mountain people from Ba Den who didn’t know how to bury their dead.

When they’d finished he stood with them out back of their barracks to address them, but he could only repeat what others had already said.

“We can get you medicine against malaria. It’s possible we can relocate you north, to a collective farm we call a kolkhoz, where you’ll live in peace and order. But if you want to go on fighting, we can put you to better use.

“We are centralized. We have an iron structure. We are closed into a single fist that disappears up a sleeve when it has to. Our will is unshakable. Our will is our weapon. The greatest colonialist armies can’t stand against it. We drove out the French, and we’ll drive out the Americans, and we’ll slaughter and bury their puppets. Do they claim victories? Let them. The invaders are fighting the ocean. No matter how many waves they beat down, the ocean of our resolve is always there.

“Do you want to be free? Personal liberation is national liberation. The men who led you in the beginning understood this, they learned it with the Hoa-hao, and they took you this far. Now you must come with us and go through to the end—which is the beginning we have all hoped for, the first day of our national freedom.”

It had been long enough since he’d stopped attending classes that he didn’t know anymore what he was saying.

Trung had been sent here because of the time he’d spent serving at the New Star Temple in the nearby village. It was assumed he probably knew these people. A slight mix-up. As little children, orphan boys, they’d been recruited—kidnapped—far upriver by Hoa-hao guerrillas, originally from the Mekong Delta, who’d been driven into the hills by the Vietminh. The boys’ leaders had abandoned the young recruits, or been killed. Meanwhile the village of their ancestors had vanished, dispersed by the fighting. Over a period of years the boys had worked their way farther and farther down the Van Co Dong, finding no welcome anywhere and finally stopping along this stretch well-known in the region for its particularly virulent strain of malaria, called “piss-blood.” Nobody bothered them while one by one they died.

Trung explained that his own people came from Ben Tre, but he’d spent years and years in the North. Right now, until reunification, the heart of Vietnam lay in the North. “After reunification, all of Vietnam will be our home. Millions of square kilometers of Vietnam with no partition, no relocation, no disruption of the national fabric. We will lie down at night in peace and wake up to another day of peace. And those of us who die on the way, like your friend, will find peace in the grave.”

Look at you, he thought, from your births to your deaths only exile, wandering, war.

“What will it be like on the kolkhoz farm?”

“Do you want work? There you’ll have work and freedom.”

“But we’ve been on our own a long time. We’re already free.”

“On the farm it’s a different kind of freedom.”

Yes, yes, yes, nothing but crap, what a monstrosity, he cursed himself for participating. Die here, die there, he wanted to say. Just stay away from the kolkhoz. “It’s time to take you to a group forming to head north. There’s a camp near Bau Don. It’s a long hike. We can make it in a day if we start very early tomorrow.”

“We’ve already talked about it,” one of the men told him. “There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll go north. But tonight the moon is empty. We can’t travel tomorrow. Right after the empty moon, it’s bad luck to start a journey. We just lost another one, thanks to bad luck.”

“The malaria doesn’t come from bad luck or spiteful gods. It’s caused by living creatures too small to see, as venomous as a snake, but smaller than a speck of dust. We call these creatures microbes.

“Young brothers, let this sink into your ears. We all die. Do you want to die at the hands of a microbe? The ultimate victory will be composed of many defeats. Do you want to be defeated by a microbe? The sooner we go, the better.”

They only looked at him as if they couldn’t understand him. Probably many of them couldn’t, coming from so far upriver, a region of different dialects. “We’ll think about it,” the man said.

While they talked among themselves, Trung stood aside and looked away. The same man came and touched his arm. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“If that’s your decision,” Trung said, “then good.”

The whole group had stayed up all the previous night with their sick comrade. Everyone was tired. There was nothing to do, so they dispatched a few sentries and the rest hung around the barracks. Trung sat down against the wall. He noticed flattened cigarette packs covering leaks all over the thatched ceiling. Several gaunt cats skulked around eating bits of garbage from the floor.

One of the guerrillas, a one-eyed youngster, brought in an armload of green coconuts. He pointed to his chest. “My Mosa,” he told Trung in some sort of mountain tongue. “My name” another corrected him. “My name Mosa,” he said, turning his head sideways to center Trung in his one functioning eye. He smiled: his teeth, in the way of these mountain tribes, had been filed down flat. With a machete half as large as his own leg he scalped the tops of the coconuts. They drank the milk and scraped at the floppy translucent meat with shards from the shell.

The men offered him a cot and even gave him a small pillow. They arranged themselves in a bivouac tableau: Outside a man stood sentry; inside five men played cards while one kibitzed and another snored nearby. Trung tried to nap, but he couldn’t sleep. He imagined they spent many days like this. The wind died off outside. He could hear the swollen river rubbing along the banks. The day grew dark. The sentries abandoned their outposts upriver and came in for the evening meal. Altogether there didn’t seem to be more than fifteen of these quiet, emaciated men strung along this part of the Van Co Dong, protecting themselves from all who might come, they didn’t care who, and they didn’t seem to realize no one was coming.

They kept the cook-fire smoldering all night to drive away the mosquitoes. Trung slept with his bandanna over his nose and mouth. The others didn’t seem to mind the fumes.

The rain came long after dark. The men started stowing their gear in leak-free spots, and they all rearranged themselves, repeating, “Move it! Move it!” They lay back in their new positions while the rain strung itself down all around them through the roof. Nobody talked because of the watery noise. By the light of candles Trung saw their faces staring out at nothing. But their spirits rose. There was singing and laughter. They were good boys. They were only doing whatever came along to be done.

As the rain got harder, they stuck more flattened cigarette packs here and there in the ceiling.

At midnight four dogs snuck in. Trung was the only one awake. He aimed his flashlight around as they prowled silently. When its beam hit them, they bolted out the open doorway. The light cut through the cook-smoke and played over the men and boys sleeping in groups of two or three. They lay side by side, their arms draped around one another, or touching in a casual, familial way.

At dawn he crept outside, sat cross-legged on the damp ground, and cleared his mind by focusing on the progress of the breath in and out of his nostrils, as during his boyhood he’d done every morning and evening at the New Star. And he’d been doing it again now, daily, for nearly a year, and had no notion why. The practice was making a lousy Communist of him. In fact he was no longer persuaded that blood and revolution made useful tools for altering the concepts in a person’s mind. Who said it?—probably Confucius—”I can’t beat a sculpture from a stone with a sledgehammer; I can’t free the soul of a man by violence.” Peace was here, peace was now. Peace promised in any other time or place was a lie.