This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

Buy on Amazon: Tree of Smoke: A Novel

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: Pages 182 – 197

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(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Skip has lunch with his uncle the colonel at the Club Nautique beside the Saigon river.  Skip presses his uncle hard to admit to the assassination of Father Carignan back on Mindanao in 1965. After all, Skip saw a blowgun dart in the priest's neck, and he's only ever seen a blowgun of that type in the hands of the German who was the colonel's guest at San Marcos.

But the colonel insists vaguely that Major Aguinaldo had picked off the priest on the orders of the Philippine Army. Skip almost starts fighting with the colonel because he feels that he was used then, and still being lied to now. But uncle and nephew manage to put aside their tensions. The colonel goes to the buffet to get some cracked crab. Returning, he asks if Skip has met Rick Voss whom he seems to regard as a nuisance.

Jimmy Storm shows up and they both mention Voss's name with dislike. Skip starts interrogating Jimmy as he's trying to eat, finding out that Jimmy is part of Psy-Ops.  Jimmy raves about the Vietcong tunnels of Cu Chi and how the Psy-Ops should turn the tunnels into "a zone of psychological mental torture" by filling them with some kind of LSD vapor. Jimmy adds that Voss is not Psy-Ops, and then asks about the files (the colonel's card catalogue in the footlockers), referring to them as "the whole Tree of Smoke."

The colonel confirms that the parameters of his particular Psy-Ops work at Cu Chi are "elastic" and adds that he has his very own Recon platoon. Skip gets excited only to feel crushed a second later when the colonel says he wants Skip to stay in the boonies at a villa for awhile and not get involved.

The three of them return to the colonel's hotel so that he can put on a Peter, Paul, and Mary record and change his outfit. The colonel and Jimmy gossip about the mental state of the lieutenant assigned to their Recon platoon, and refer to him as "Screwy Louie."

Skip tries to question the colonel about "the significance of the phrase Tree of Smoke" but of course doesn't get a straight answer. The three of them go out for cocktails where they're joined by the lieutenant who looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  They all jaw aimlessly and crazily as they get more and more drunk.  They go from tavern to tavern.  Finally Skip wanders away and takes a cab home to the villa on Chi Lang street where he's staying.  There he runs into Voss who mixes him a martini and then claims to have a task for him.
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