This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

Buy on Amazon: Tree of Smoke: A Novel

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson National Book Award

Note: This is an ongoing synopsis as I read it on a daily basis (but not on the weekends!).

Summary (from the book jacket): This is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA -- engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong -- and the disasters that befall him. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

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Characters:

• Aguinaldo, Eduardo "Eddie" – Filipino major, friend of Colonel Sands.
• Carignan, Father Thomas – American-born priest living in Mindanao
• Colonel, the – see Sands, Francis X.
• Eddie - see Aguinaldo
• German, the – an assassin for the CIA
• Houston, James – younger brother of Bill, an Army enlisted man
• Houston, William "Bill" – older brother of James, a Navy recruit
• Jones, Kathy – Canadian nurse and recent widow of an American missionary
• Nguyen, Hao – uncle of Minh, a South Vietnamese businessman
• Nguyen, Kim - wife of Hao
• Nguyen, Minh "Lucky" – a South Vietnam Air Force captain, nephew to Hao
• Pitchfork, Anders - English entomologist and friend of the colonel
• Sands, Francis X. "the colonel" – a CIA bigwig in charge of PsyOps, uncle to Skip.
• Sands, William "Skip" – a CIA agent and nephew to Colonel Sands
• Skip - see Sands, William
• Storm, Jimmy - one of the colonel's PsyOps minions
• Trung Than "the Monk" – a North Vietnam Communist, former friend to Hao

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: The beginning to Page 12

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  It's 3am in the Philippines in 1963 and President Kennedy has just been assassinated.  Some Marines who run a nightclub wake up 18 year-old Seaman Apprentice William "Bill" Houston Jr. along with the other recruits to give them the news.  The next morning Houston goes hunting in the jungle with a borrowed .22 rifle, and kills a tiny monkey.  Shaken, he starts crying.

He walks back towards the club and hears a couple having sex in one of the nearby cabins.  A fortyish white guy with a crewcut emerges with a native prostitute; he is obviously an officer though he wears only a towel. (In fact, he's Colonel Francis X. Sands.) 

From the adjacent cabin sidles the colonel's 22 year-old Vietnamese friend Lucky, fully dressed in military fatigues.  (Lucky, also known as Minh Nguyen, is a captain in the South Vietnam Air Force.)  Lucky's prostitute follows him, complaining to the colonel that Lucky isn't interested in having sex. The colonel gets snotty with Houston for standing there gawking at them, and Houston hurries off to the nightclub.

The colonel and Lucky come in a moment later.  The Marines don't want to serve Lucky because they think he's Filipino and with the Philippine military. They are mystified when the colonel says he's Vietnamese and in the Philippines for helicopter training; they ask Lucky if a war is going to happen in Vietnam. He says he doesn't know but many people are dead.  The colonel cries openly over President Kennedy's death.

The narrative then compresses the next two years in Seaman Bill Houston's life:  he is promoted once, and then demoted. He signs on for another tour.  In 1967, he takes the train from the naval base in Yokosuka, Japan to the city of Yokohama to meet his younger brother James at the Peanut Bar. Seventeen year-old James has lied about his age and enlisted in the infantry, and is headed for Vietnam.

The two brothers get very drunk. James confesses that he enlisted because (p.10): "I want to see it, the real deal …" Bill tells James that he once saw a fellow sailor murder a guy in Hawaii, shooting the guy through the window screen in his apartment over a debt. Bill confesses that he went AWOL in order not to ship out with the killer who might have decided to off him as a witness.  Bill accidentally spills a pitcher of beer on a Japanese girl, and then fumbles uselessly to give her money in apology.  He and his brother drunkenly say that they hate each other.
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