Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Nobody bothered Hanson about it. They realized the enemy were killers, they themselves were just boys, and they were dead. They were glad to hear Hanson’s voice talking about this very moment as if it could be understood and maybe even survived.

“Where’s my Echo people at?”

Sergeant Harmon came up behind them, walking upright in the sudden glory of another rocketing down below, and they knew they were saved. “How many of us here?”

Black Man’s voice came: “Five Echo and one loose screw.”

Sarge said, “We have activity right down this slope about two hundred meters. We gonna close that to fifty meters and lay down fire. Come behind me. When it’s bright you flop down and look, and when it’s dark you move where you looked.” He bent and touched James’s shoulder. “You’re breathing too deep. Make it quick breaths through your nose, and that’s all you need. Just don’t start hyperventilating in these situations, or you’ll cramp up in your hands and fingers.”

“Okay,” James said, although he wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

” ‘S’go!” Sarge said, and moved out. Over the valley flares hung by their flickering tails of smoke, detached from them, and drifted down, and as James moved forward he could see his feet in a smoky half-light. As long as he moved forward nothing could kill him. Each moment came like the panel of a comic book, and he fit perfectly inside each panel. Air strikes lighting up the night, flares swaying in the heavens, and black shadows dodging all around him. “Black Man!” James yelled. “Black Man!” He heard the big gun ahead and scrambled on elbows and knees toward it. Rounds ticked through the leaves on all sides of him. Somebody was hurt, bawling, howling without letup. Just ahead, a guy kneeling with his helmet shot off, scalped by a head wound—no, it was the hippie doc with his kerchief tied around his head, a couple morphine syrettes clamped between his lips like cigarettes while he knelt over the screamer, who was the sarge. “Sarge, Sarge, Sarge!” James said. “Good, good, talk to him, don’t let him go,” the doc said, and bit a syrette and drove the point right into Sarge’s neck. But the sarge kept bawling like an infant, emptying and filling his lungs over and over. “Lay some down, will you?” the doc said. James crouched and duckwalked toward Black Man’s position, firing down the hill at muzzle-flash. He knew he was killing people. Moving, that was the trick. Moving and killing he felt wonderful.

Sinc e three that afternoon Kathy had attended a difficult birth. By five, only the crown had breached. Atop the crown, a face, eyeless, earless. The tiny mother had labored since then to bring forth her deformed child, but nothing yet. The family couldn’t afford a midwife. A British doctor was on the way from the Biomedical Centre, where he studied monkeys. Kathy would assist him, perhaps in a Caesarian. She had morphine and she had Xylocaine. She hoped the doctor had something better.

The French doctors were saying the defoliants caused these monstrous births. The people themselves explained it otherwise, called on gods offended by misconduct to stop punishing the innocent babes. What misconduct? Thoughts of the heart. A woman bearing young like this must have succumbed to horrible images inside. Dreams or yearnings or unclean thoughts. On her pallet in the low hooch the youngster appeared free of any thoughts at all, legs akimbo, her hands white and cramped. The effort, the breathing, the body—was it in Colossians? — something about the body knit together and having nourishment ministered by joints and bands. This one seemed nothing more than that. The war had stricken many of the children she worked with, one or both legs amputated, one or both arms—faces burned, sightless. And orphaned. But now this big-headed, half-faced tragic miracle stuck in the breach, coming out already ravaged by the strife.

By ten or so it was clear the doctor wouldn’t get there. Soon the infant’s heart stopped. She sent the family out and dismembered the stillbirth and delivered it in bloody pieces, cleaned up as best she could, and shortly after midnight called the family back in. She lay down among them, beside the girl. Out in the night firecrackers banged for Tet, and the hands of celebrants waved gunpowder sparklers. She fell asleep.

Then much, much larger blasts. A storm, she thought. God with his big white thoughts. But it was fighting, some to the east and some to the south, like nothing she’d heard before in her time here, explosions like firecrackers in a trash can, only of a size to rival natural thunder, at a bone-ringing depth. She counted the seconds between flash and boom and judged some of them to be falling about a kilometer away. The household was awake, but no one lit a lamp. Far out over the paddies a helicopter sent out its white search beam amid a rising swarm of orange tracers and loosed a terrible downpour from its glittering port guns. The battles went on for hours, the torn spirits flailing in the storm. It stopped. Occasional eruptions followed. By dawn things had settled down. The cicadas started, and a slow sweet light saturated the atmosphere. A gibbon called over the treetops. You’d think there wasn’t a gun in the world. A small rooster came and stood in the doorway, raised its beak, and crowed with its eyes closed. You’d think it was Peace on Earth.

Next she was called to a nearby village struck by incendiaries, whether from South Vietnamese fliers or American wasn’t clear, but in either case by mistake. Kathy had seen burns, but never a place of burning. She arrived in late afternoon. A black splash the size of a tennis court took in, at one edge, about half of the ville. Ashes where a few huts had been, and a paddy with its marsh boiled away, its shoots dematerialized. The smell of burnt straw, everything tainted with an odor of sulfur. It likely hadn’t been napalm, she saw, but rather a white-phosphorous bomb. At the sound of low aircraft the villagers had raced for the cover of the jungle. Several had been killed. One, a young girl, still survived, deep in shock, extensively charred, naked. Nothing could be done. Kathy didn’t touch her. The villagers sat surrounding her in the dusk. The pallid green shimmering of her burns competed with the last light. She looked magical, and in Kathy’s exhaustion and in this atmosphere of aftermath and silence the scene felt dreamed. The girl was like some idol powered by moonlight. After all signs of life had ceased, her flesh went on glowing in the dark.

She stayed in the ville until morning and then headed on her bicycle for the Biomedical Centre. Word had come last night that the facilities there had been struck. Destroyed, came the word. The boy who’d brought the news, who couldn’t have been more than ten and yet traveled by dark shouldering a machete like a lumberman’s axe, led her in the dawn light to a shortcut through paddies and fields, and Kathy drove her pedals hard along the path, in a hurry to get to the monkey couple right away. The shortcut led her alongside a narrow channel lined with homes and along the dikes through a wide flatland of delta paddies. In the distance a U.S. helicopter, lit up pink on one side by the sunrise, hunted over the river. Here and there peasants worked the paddies even at this hour, even on such a day, bent over with their hands among the shoots, straight-legged, straight-backed, hinged at the hips, while around them loitered ducks and chickens, huge water buffalo, fawn-colored, starved-looking Brahman cattle, bag-of-bones ponies, all behaving as if war were impossible.

Not long before noon she climbed a low rise and found desolation on the other side. She stopped at the top of the burned hill with smoke still stringing from its soil and looked down at the Biomedical Centre. The wing housing the monkeys had been razed, but not the living quarters. She walked her bike over the black ground and down to the building. Shrapnel had gouged at its walls but had missed the windowpanes. A boy squatted flat-footed by the doorway with one hand around an upright rifle, spitting between his feet. He looked up at her and smiled brilliantly as she passed inside.