"Tree of Smoke" a wrenching epic of the Vietnam War

In the more hopeful days of the Iraq war, some newly arrived U.S. soldier probably looked up to a desert sky guarded by American Blackhawk helicopters and jets and had the same reassuring thoughts as Skip Sands, on the CIA trainee's first night of duty in Vietnam in Denis Johnson's epic, wrenching new novel, "Tree of Smoke." With so much shock-and-awe firepower at America's disposal, "How could they fail to triumph in this war?" Sands thinks to himself.

But in fiction, as in our current pursuits halfway around the world, gung-ho pride lives only a short distance from disillusionment. It is the front-line soldiers, the grunts, the pawns in these harrowing political chess matches, who often bear most vivid witness to this reality and who pay heavy emotional tolls for this knowledge.

The immensely talented Johnson ("Jesus' Son," "Resuscitation of a Dead Man") delivers a beautifully layered, insightful and visceral montage of stories that examines the Vietnam War experience from multiple points of view.

The most engaging character is the smart, dedicated Skip, a kind of Jason Bourne for the Vietnam era who comes under the tutelage of his mysterious, hard-drinking, increasingly cynical uncle, "Colonel" Sands, a psychological warfare guru.

The young American pays his dues in the hothouse of intrigue that is the Philippines — where nothing and no one are what they seem — before being granted his wish to join the campaign in Vietnam.

For Skip's first night in-country, Johnson sets a foreboding scene:

"Here among the quieter lanes he breathed the fumes of blossoms and rot, smoldering charcoal, frying food, and heard the distant roar of jets and the drumming of helicopter gunships, and even the thousand-pound bombs exploding thirty kilometers away, not so much a sound as an intestinal fact — it was there, he felt it, it thudded in his soul. What must it be like under those bombs — or above them, letting them loose? He'd come for this. To be shoved into the forge ... where theories burned to cinders, where questions of morality became matters of fact."

But the war forces the good guys to wage their own, personal psychological battles.

As Colonel Sands pointedly observes: "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."

The colonel's outburst reflects a pattern in "Tree of Smoke" of well-meaning, at-one-time enthusiastic people losing faith in their missions, and even in God. Take Skip's love interest in the novel, the Canadian Kathy Jones, a Christian nurse in the Philippines whose husband is killed in the jungle and whose devotion is waning. Skip is one of the people who winds up bringing her the bad news. Kathy's sense of religious devotion was already waning, but the murder of her husband in a country she was trying to help makes matters worse.

Skip and Kathy connect, but these two lost souls can't quite save each other.

Running parallel to this plot line is the story of Bill and James Houston, two brothers from Arizona who both get beaten down by their Vietnam-era military service. A passage in which Bill, the older of the pair, repeatedly calls home to chat with James while on a drinking binge in Honolulu, but without letting on how seriously he's screwing up in the military, is heartbreaking. You know that James won't fare much better in the military when he decides to follow in his big-bro's footsteps.

One gets the sense that everyone in the long, colorful cast of characters in "Tree of Smoke" is on a Danteesque excursion through a hell of misguided intentions. They have "worshipped their own lies, spat on their own dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs," Kathy says years later.

War is hell, yes. But sometimes, finding closure, and forging an inner peace, are harder.

Tyrone Beason is a writer for Pacific Northwest magazine.