Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Storm walked beside Skip and said, “I can tell by the way you move, you like it here. You walk very softly and you don’t get your body hot for no good reason. You use the air around you.” Making this remark he seemed strangely shy, not at all the tough little lunatic. “You know what

mean?”

“Sort of.”

“You blend with the air like a native,” Storm assured him.

After Colonel Sands had shaken hands with Major Keng and invited him out for supper and drinks and been politely refused, the colonel sat in the Chevy’s front seat maintaining a zealous poise and told Hao, “Out Highway One. Let’s get a drink.”

Hao executed a lurching U-turn and they left the corpses behind.

“Goddamn it,” the colonel said, “we are in business with a double.”

They were somewhere out on Highway One at a restaurant-tavern in an unpaved cul-de-sac, the Bar Jolly Blue, a place mainly, it seemed to Skip, for whores and gangsters. But it was the Saigon watering hole of Echo Platoon and of many serving the Cao Phuc landing zone, none of them present now, as today no soldier in the country took leave, not in the northern army or the southern, not the Vietcong or the U.S. forces. Skip, Storm, and the colonel sat in deck chairs under an awning in the cooling dusk, and they kept the Chevy’s radio tuned to AFVN and stayed on top of things. Skip hadn’t slept since he’d left Cao Quyen almost forty-eight hours earlier. He assumed the colonel and Storm were equally exhausted, but none of them wanted to go down before they knew what had happened, what might happen next, how things stood with this unprecedented monster push, which seemed, at this point, to have been a disaster for the enemy.

Between hourly radio news dispatches the colonel made phone calls from a pimp’s room to the U.S. Embassy and got a wealth of confusing and contradictory reports.

“Coordinated attacks all over Quang Tri Province. At least that far north.”

“How far south?”

“They hit Con Mau down there.”

“On the peninsula? Jesus.”

“They’re all over. And being slaughtered in swarms.”

Combined NVA and Vietcong forces had assaulted nearly every sizable population center and military installation in the South. “Bold and crazy,” the colonel said at first, and then as reports accumulated he said, “Bold and crazy and stupid.” While the overall offensive was stunning in its orchestration and its suddenness, its fierceness and grandeur, the individual attacks seemed to have been mounted without clear planning or adequate support.

The colonel poured drinks from a fifth of Bushmills—out of a case of it that rode with him everywhere in his Chevy’s trunk. “We’re bombing Cu Chi nonstop already. Any square inch where a GI isn’t standing is going to be a crater. I told you all hell would rain down. I consider this hasty. We had plans for those tunnels.”

“Just to get down to the actual facts,” Jimmy Storm said, “I don’t care about the tunnels.” “We’re casting about for some other approach to combating this enemy. Anything but what we’ve got,” the colonel insisted. “I started out with a red-hot desire to fry their minds. Now I spend my day trying to keep my own mind from exploding.”

Skip had spent half a year in exile, missing this, longing for it, and it seemed he hadn’t missed a minute, had taken up exactly in midconversation with the red-eyed colonel and the quivering bird-dog sergeant. It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity. Skip’s esophagus burned. He drank 7Up. In his mind the day’s truest fact was that the bleeding, gouge-eyed man his uncle had dispatched so readily was a human soul in a family of others who had known him by name and held him in love, and he, Skip, a spy for history’s greatest nation, was troubled that this should trouble him.

“What did I tell you,” the colonel said, “about centralization? The VC and the NVA are controlled from a single source.”

“Most elegant.”

“Probably unbeatable. We can’t win like this. Our young foot soldier this morning phrased it correctly. This shit ain’t funny no more. This shit is a mess. This shit has got to stop.”

Skip had never heard from the colonel any statement even remotely like this one. It was all wrong. It was completely false because it offered entrance to far too much that was true.

“If we can’t be centralized, if we’re going to flounder around like ants in molasses, then we as individual floundering ants can’t wait for orders

from above.” Storm said, “What’s the skin, daddy-o?” “The skinny is we’ve got ourselves a double, and we’ll work him very

carefully. But we have a lot of planning and thinking to do, and none of that begins today. Let’s just be happy we don’t have to sit on our asses while Uncle Ho executes one grand strategy after another until something works. This time it didn’t work. This time they tossed themselves into battle and just pointlessly expended themselves.”

Jimmy Storm laughed with a kind of exhausted abandon while Skip and the colonel watched. He got control of himself. “Jesus, how can you go forty-eight hours without sleep and then come up with this eloquent moonshine? KEEP THESE HARLOTS AWAY FROM ME,” he shouted at the mamasan waiting tables. “All right—you,” he said, “you can come here,” and he snapped his lighter open for the cigarette of a petite woman with fat thighs encased in a black miniskirt, explaining, “This one’s a lying psychotic whore. Good people. My kind of people.”

The colonel took a light off the same flame. He was smoking Players cigarettes in the flat pack—the brand, if Skip remembered, of James Bond.

“What’s this, now—no cigars?” “Some days they taste a little scummy. You still don’t smoke.” “No.” “Don’t start.” He smoked. “It’s a war, Skip.” “I understand.” Skip got up and wandered around the place. He looked into the

vague interior of the Bar Jolly Blue. Standing in the doorway he could feel it was ten degrees hotter inside. It was empty except for three girls and the mamasan behind the plywood bar, who called, “Yes, sir, you want beer?”

“I’m hungry.” “You want soup?” “Soup and a baguette, thanks.” “I bring you. You sit down.” “Let me introduce you myself,” one of the girls said, but he turned

away without answering. He went around to the concrete trough looking out on a dark plain of elephant grass behind the sex rooms. He pissed, washed his face from the spigot at the cistern, retucked his sweaty shirt, told himself: It’s a war, Skip. Vanquish fear.

He made his way back to his comrades.

At their table the colonel was telling Storm, “Eggs were hard to come by. We pooled things like that, eggs and any meat we’d trapped, and the docs, the medical people, such as we had, the docs decided who ate what from the food store. We caught dogs, monkeys, rats, birds. We had a few chickens cooped up.” He said to Skip, “I’m telling him what Anders Pitchfork did for me in the prison camp. I was sick, and Anders fed me a hard-boiled egg. Anders was allowed an egg every day because he was on a hard detail and needed the protein. And he gave one to me because I was laid out sick. And I didn’t say pish posh, no thanks—I gobbled that egg down quick before he changed his mind. If Anders Pitchfork walked in here and asked me to cut off my hand for him right now, I wouldn’t hesitate. My severed hand would lie here on this table. That’s what war gives you. A family deeper than blood. Then you go back to peacetime, and what do you get?—backstabbing enemies in the office down the hall. Guys like Johnny Brewster. Brewster is a thoroughgoing asshole, and he’s permanently pissed off at me. Do you know him, Skip?”