There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell themwhat had happened to the President.

Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. The very distinctive language of the American soldier in Vietnam - part battlefield stress, part drug addlement, part military slang, and all insubordination - is wonderfully, distractingly, on display here. I thought this was a sort of summation, a highly appropriate treatment for our master BS-er.This is masterful, vivid, and powerful. Ultimately, they both fall from a hole six or eight feet to the ground, emerging from the cave into the light, having been 'shat' to the ground. They get briefly lost, and thoroughly covered in bat guano. Storm to this remote location, the man and the sergeant have to go through a maze-like cave system. forces a shady local man to help him determine some piece of intelligence or other - this is very late in the game, after the Colonel is dead (I think - it's been well over a year since I read this). At the end, besides being a man wanted by the authorities, Skip feels he must assert the truth of Frank's demise, against all those who want to believe he's alive.I have to congratulate Denis Johnson on the effort throughout, but there is one episode that seals this novel's greatness for me. Storm, we have a distillation of one of the main thrusts of this novel.

His real name, it turns out is B.S., and in this B.S. Other characters also bob and eddy in Frank's wake, in particular a sergeant named Jimmy Storm. Skip is the nephew of the near-mythic, and definitely delusional Frank Sands, a colonel in (presumably) military intelligence, and one major driving force behind American intervention. This is gigantic, heroic stuff.The narrative fosuces on a young CIA officer assigned to Vietnam in 1961, Skip Sands. involvement in Vietnam, 'Tree of Smoke' is an epic, a quick read, and really centers around the power of lies. Perhaps the ultimate novelistic treatment of the origins of U.S.

Book tree of smoke