As for Skip's mentor, the colonel, he too loses his way or, rather, comes to believe that his superiors have lost their way. In a secret memo he suggests that the intelligence functions of the agency are being perverted, that they are being used to "provide rationalizations for policy," much the way flawed intelligence was used, in the walk-up to the Iraq war, to provide a rationale for invasion.
Eventually, he concocts an elaborate plan to test his hypotheses, a plan that will make him the target of some of his own colleagues. For that matter, the colonel and Skip both learn that they can trust no one, least of all those who are supposedly their comrades-in-arms in the cold war.
Johnson intercuts the stories of Skip and the colonel with those of half a dozen other people caught up in the war. There's James Houston, a young drifter who has followed his brother into the military and finds himself in the midst of a war with no rules, a war in which the heat and the jungle and the confusions of fighting a guerrilla enemy lead to acts of startling brutality and horror. There's Kathy Jones, a nurse who winds up in Vietnam after her husband, a missionary, is killed, and who has a brief, seemingly desultory, affair with Skip. And there's Hao, a Vietnamese functionary, who dreams of a better life in Singapore or the US, and uses his boyhood friendship with a member of the Vietcong to try to advance his interests with the Americans.
Johnson's orchestration of these characters' intersecting lives is often graceless - as his last couple of novels have demonstrated, plotting has never been one of his strengths - and he has an unfortunate tendency to embroider their adventures with lots of portentous philosophizing about good and evil and religious faith. His heat-seeking eye for detail and his ability to render those observations in hot, tactile prose, however, immerse us so thoroughly in the fetid world of the war and the even more noxious world of espionage that they effectively erase the book's occasional longueurs.
Johnson not only succeeds in conjuring the anomalous, hallucinatory aura of the Vietnam War as authoritatively as Stephen Wright or Francis Ford Coppola, but he also shows its fallout on his characters with harrowing emotional precision. He has written a flawed but deeply resonant novel that is bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war.
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