The novel’s narrative is rooted in the Vietnam War era, incorporating real historical elements such as CIA covert operations, psychological warfare, and Cold War geopolitics. Psychological Operations or Psy Ops were used extensively during the Vietnam War, their aim being to confound the North Vietnamese forces by weaponizing local beliefs. In one instance, US troops broadcast recordings of sobbing, tortured sounds to make it seem that the souls of dead Vietcong (VC) operatives were in pain, urging their living fellows to surrender. The tapes manipulated the local belief that the souls of those not buried in their homeland would remain unhappy and restless. In the novel, the colonel plans to learn the folklore of the Vietnamese, apparently for similar purposes.

The colonel’s idea of using Trung as a double agent draws from real-life covert operations. Covert operations during the Vietnam War involved secretly training local groups or individuals to fight or infiltrate the North Vietnamese Army (PAVN) and the VC. What made Psy Ops and covert operations so crucial in the Vietnam War was the difficulty of defeating the North Vietnamese forces through conventional warfare. The PAVN and the VC had the advantage of territory, with the VC often moving through a network of tunnels under forests and jungles. Although the US government claimed it had the upper hand in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive of 1968 destroyed that illusion for the US people.

The Tet Offensive was undertaken by the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, who made surprise attacks on the South Vietnamese Army and US forces beginning on January 30th, 1968. Since the US forces were unprepared for the offensive, the Americans and the South Vietnamese suffered many casualties, with thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands displaced, as Nguyen Qui Duc writes for the Smithsonian (Qui Duc, Nguyen. “Revisiting Vietnam 50 Years After the Tet Offensive.” The Smithsonian Magazine, Jan. 2018). The North Vietnamese forces also killed close to 3,000 people in Hue in Central Vietnam, burying them in mass graves (Dror, Olga. “Learning From the Hue Massacre.” The New York Times, Feb. 2018). The US retaliated by nearly eliminating all VC outfits, reporting 40,000 enemy casualties (Qui Duc). Even though the US army’s retaliatory response was a decisive victory against the VC, it was seen as a loss of face back home for the army. The American public became convinced that the Vietnam War was pointless, and the US government was pressured to scale back military involvement in Vietnam.

While the Vietnam War ended in 1975 (US troops had withdrawn completely in 1973), the horrors for the Vietnamese people were far from over. The war precipitated a refugee crisis, with over 1 million people escaping Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by boat to seek asylum in the US and other countries. Further, the use of chemical warfare during the conflict led to widespread congenital conditions and genetic and epigenetic mutations, which continue to manifest in the descendants of survivors. Informed by this context, the Tree of Smoke is often regarded as an antiwar novel, for it is critical not just of the Vietnam conflict, but also of later American forays onto foreign soil (Jones, Thomas. “Rut After Rut After Rut.” London Review of Books, 29 Nov. 2007).