Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

though none of this were happening.

Above Echo Camp as the sun rose the mountain disgorged black smoke like a volcano. The paddies on the west side, untouched by two wars, were now a wasteland, destroyed by NVA artillery or VC mortars, whichever it was, and by U.S. incendiary ordnance and rockets. Echo Camp lay untouched. Mortar blasts had dug craters a hundred meters off, nothing closer. The ville of Cao Phuc too was safe. But it appeared many of the villagers had been warned—that the VC had warned them—that they’d been contacted, cultivated, turned. The place had been strangely quiet the afternoon preceding the onslaught. The Purple Bar had been inexplicably closed. Before dawn Tuesday came the attack; by midmorning Tuesday the population had crept back home, though some still came, without bags or bundles, as if they’d only been gone a few minutes.

At dawn the colonel had arrived by chopper and come down the mountain in a jeep and toured the area with Screwy Loot and two men from Psy Ops—Sergeant Storm and a civilian the little sergeant referred to as the Skipper.

“Boy, boy, boy,” Screwy Loot said, “those F-16s sure tore the shit out of our mountain.”

The colonel said, “This is just the start. From now on all hell is going to rain down from these skies. It’s a goddamned shame.” The colonel was beside himself. During the fighting these villagers had disappeared, but the farmers on the mountain’s other side had not—except in flames. He slapped at the heads of several local men who sat on their rumps in the dirt in a line, legs straight out with their ankles trussed together and their wrists bound behind their backs. The Kootchy Kooties had captured a man, a VC, they said, who’d come at them with an AK and blown the Indian’s rucksack to shreds, right on his back. The Indian took hold of their blindfolded prisoner’s bound wrists and dragged him backward over the earth into the brush where the Kooties had pitched their tents. The little man grimaced so hard he seemed to unhinge his jaw as his arms popped out of their sockets at the shoulders, but he didn’t make a sound as the Kooties hung him by the wrists from the lopped-off branch of a banyan tree, his toes six inches above the earth.

Echo was messed up over Sarge, who’d been taken to Hospital 12 with wounds in his neck and spine and belly and waited there in a state of paralysis, too critical to be moved stateside. Most of Echo sat in the Purple Bar saying nothing, drinking only a little, silly with grief and nauseated by the violent power of fate. The new black guy sat among them telling whopping lies about people he claimed to know personally back home. He was able to talk because his heart wasn’t broken. He’d never really known the sarge. He came from the boonies in Louisiana and seemed both shy around these men and excited to talk about his home. “I been rode on by a witch before. I know a witch rode me all night once because I woke up tired and dirty with bloody corners on my mouth where I bit on the bridle. You can hang a horseshoe over your bed to keep witches off. Before she can come in your house she got to walk down every single road where that horseshoe been walking. My uncle fetched a rock and broke the arm on a witch one night and next day I swear on Jesus it was Sunday and old neighbor lady singing hymns in church got bubbles outa her mouth and fell down rolling and preacher say Take up her shawl and they took up her shawl and there was her arm bust and bone sticking out right where my uncle broke that witch’s arm and preacher say Drag her to the pit and they dragged her to the pit and preacher say Burn the witch and they burned her up right there in the pit. I swear it’s true. Don’t nobody back home say it ain’t. My uncle told me and everybody knew about it.” He was a pie-faced black youth, very black, the color of charcoal. Nobody stopped him and he might have gone on talking forever, but Nash came in and interrupted, saying, “Hey, you gotta see this, the Kooties are messing with that Vietcong and he’s all fucked up, I am not shitting you, man, you really gotta see this.”

Outside, Black Man watched while eating a mango, peel and all, with his hands. There were always mangoes around—bananas too, sometimes papayas. He said, “Those Lurps all janged up on bennies and goofballs. Zippy zoodle.”

One of the Lurps, in fact the most randomly unhinged of the colonel’s Kootchy Kooties, the savagely dressed black guy, stood in a bloody puddle in front of the hanging prisoner, spitting in his face.

Screwy Loot stood watching too, along with Sergeant Storm from Psy Ops.

The colonel observed from the shade, from a seat on an old connex crate shot full of holes, with chickens living in it. He and the Skipper didn’t seem interested in making their presence known. The lieutenant went over to them and said, “Well, now, it’s like this, the thing about this kind of thing …” He didn’t finish. He frowned. He chewed his lips.

The black Kooty seemed to be lecturing them while he dug at the man’s belly with the blade of a multipurpose Swiss Army knife. “They are kicking our ass and we gonna find out what’s what. They attacking all over the South. The American Embassy compound even.”

Sergeant Storm from Psy Ops said, “Man, no, don’t,” but not very loudly. Cowboy says, “Give it to the motherfucker. Make him holler. Yeah,

motherfucker. That’s how Sarge hollered. Make him holler.” His face was purple with rage, and he wept. “There’s something I want this sonabitching muhfucker to see” Now the Kooty went at the man’s eyes with the spoon of his Swiss Army knife.

“Do it, do it,” Cowboy said.

“I want this muhfucker to get a real … good … look at something,” the Kooty said. “Oh, yeah. Sound like a baby girl,” he said in answer to the man’s screams. He dropped his knife in the gore at his feet and grabbed the man’s eyeballs hanging by their purple optic nerves and turned the red veiny side so that the pupils looked back at the empty sockets and the pulp in the cranium. “Take a good look at yourself, you piece of shit.”

“Jesus Christ,” the skinny little sergeant said.

The colonel hopped down off the connex crate and walked over to the scene unsnapping the flap on his holster and motioned Cowboy and the Kooty out of the way and shot the dangling prisoner in the temple.

Sergeant Storm said, “Goddamn fucking right.”

Cowboy put his face directly in the colonel’s. “You didn’t hear the sarge crying and bawling till he lost his voice,” he told him. “One or two things like that, and this shit ain’t funny no more.”

Th e corpse went limp instantaneously and a rag of brain flopped down the side of its face.

Young Captain Minh, as a Viet Nam Air Force pilot, had directed ordnance against countless targets and, from the cockpit of his F-5E fighter-bomber, must himself have finished the lives of hundreds, but these had ended in obscurity, beneath carpets of fire and smoke, and Minh had never seen anyone kill anyone before.

It was a sunny morning. Almost noon. Already uncomfortably hot. The colonel holstered his weapon and said, “There is a great deal I’ll do in the name of anti-Communism. A great deal. But by God, there’s a limit.”

Minh heard the colonel’s nephew laughing. Skip Sands could hardly stand up, he was laughing so hard. He put a hand against the tent and almost pulled it down. Nobody paid any attention to him.

The black Lurp stared at the colonel and cleaned the blood from his clasp knife ostentatiously with his tongue before tromping off toward the north hamlet and the Purple Bar.

Minh took the attitude that all this destruction wasn’t happening, that a foul wind of illusion blew through, dragging behind it an actuality of peace and order. The village of Cao Phuc, for instance, what had happened here?—the Echo camp a small base, now, with Quonset huts, latrines, two big MASH generators; the temple still dominating the south hamlet but resting now on a thick concrete slab with a tiled entryway; the north hamlet overrun by a compound of refugee housing resembling crates and coops—all these changes in the couple of years he’d been flying the colonel back and forth. The Purple Bar was the same oversized hooch, a loitering place for dull-faced prostitutes, waifs whose families had perished. No local girls entered there.