Skip believes this murder to be a grave error, but does not mention the Colonel's involvement in his report. Though Skip finds no such evidence, the priest is nevertheless assassinated by Dietrich Fest, a German assassin contracted by the CIA.

Skip is sent by his uncle to Mindanao, Philippines to gather intelligence on a priest suspected of gun running. Skip soon realizes that the information is outdated and useless, but he continues to work on the task. The Colonel believes these cards, which he calls the Tree of Smoke, represent vital intelligence that will help the Americans win the war. Colonel Sands assigns Skip the daunting task of copying and cross-referencing a huge set of index cards containing information about people, places, and events. He is following in the footsteps of his uncle, Colonel Francis Xavier Sands, a hard-drinking WWII war hero and legendary CIA operative. William 'Skip' Sands is a newly-minted member of the CIA Psy Ops team. The eponymous Tree of Smoke is a vast collection of index cards containing intelligence collected by Skip's uncle, the WWII war hero and CIA operative Colonel Francis Xavier Sands. The novel moves between 19, setting its epilogue in 1983, in the aftermath of the war. It also follows James Houston, an infantry private, his brother Bill, and a Canadian nurse named Kathy Jones. It primarily follows William 'Skip' Sands, a newly minted CIA agent operating in Vietnam during the American insurgency. Tree of Smoke is an American novel about the Vietnam War by Denis Johnson. There are several references in the novel to the title phrase, which has Biblical origins in three cited passages: Song of Solomon 3:6 Book of Joel 2:30, 31 and Exodus 33:9, 10. One of the protagonists of Tree of Smoke is Bill Houston, who was the main character in Johnson's 1983 debut novel Angels. The time frame of the novel is from 1963 to 1970, with a coda set in 1983. It is about a man named Skip Sands who joins the CIA in 1965, and begins working in Vietnam during the American involvement there. Tree of Smoke is a 2007 novel by American author Denis Johnson which won the National Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson