A towering figure in the novel, the colonel is married to Grace and has a daughter named Anne and a son, who died in a drowning. The colonel is seen entirely through the eyes of other characters, a narrative trick that heightens the mystique around him. In his 40s in 1963, the colonel has a silver-haired flat-top and a bulky body. He is often red-faced, an effect of his seemingly unlimited appetite for alcohol. Naturally a showman, the colonel loves to hold an audience in thrall with his stories and lofty ideas, often using grandiose monologues.

The colonel embodies several paradoxes. For instance, he is known universally as “the colonel,” but Skip’s research reveals that Francis ostensibly retired from the US Army as early as 1941. After his resignation, the colonel joined the volunteer group called the Flying Tigers, manning the airspace above Burma Road in China against Japanese aircraft. It was during his Flying Tigers phase that the colonel’s aircraft was eventually shot down by the Japanese, and he became a prisoner of war, packed into a ship.

As the Japanese ship incident suggests, legends tend to stick to the colonel, including the story that his coffin refuses to remain underground after his death. In this sense, the colonel is a quasi-god-like figure, with people building myths around him and chasing his footsteps in the search for meaning. Although the colonel is a deeply intelligent man, he gets lost in his own convoluted theories, as symbolized by his ambitious Vietnam mission, the Tree of Smoke. The project is at once high-minded and doomed to fail, important-sounding yet incomprehensible. One of the greatest flaws of the colonel’s character is that he manipulates even those close to him, playing Psy Ops with them, as in the case of Skip. The colonel is also deeply contradictory, on the one hand grieving the proposed divorce by his wife, Grace, and on the other maintaining a common-law wife in the Mekong Delta.

However, the colonel is redeemed by his generous spirit. Unlike many other officers, he refuses to view other nationalities unsympathetically. He also applies his critical faculty to the American apparatus, displaying an informed, self-aware patriotism. Further, the colonel helps many people in a way that changes their lives, such as ensuring Minh is assigned to noncombat missions so his life is saved.

The only woman in the novel with a point-of-view narrative, Kathy serves as the book’s moral center. Kathy is around Skip’s age, and seen through Skip’s eyes, she is serious-looking. Skip describes Kathy as having “a round face, plump cheeks, a corona of thick curly hair almost like lamb’s wool, very soft and kind brown eyes” (102).

Kathy is a Seventh Day Adventist (a Protestant denomination) at the start of the novel, a trained nurse who follows her missionary husband Timothy to the Philippines. Even before news of Timothy’s death, Kathy begins to gravitate toward Calvinism, believing the sect’s views on predestination to be a form of fatalism (Calvinism is actually distinct from fatalism, since the suffering it talks about has an ultimate divine purpose). Fatalism suits Kathy because it confirms her altered, grieving view of life in light of Timothy’s senseless abduction and murder, and the profound suffering of orphans and impoverished people in Vietnam.

Embodying the theme of The Search for Faith and Meaning in an Arbitrary World, Kathy experiences a crisis of belief throughout the novel, unable to hold onto the hope of a kind god who intends salvation for all. Kathy is critical of America’s involvement in Vietnam, bringing up the subject with Skip. Kathy’s clear-eyed inquiry makes Skip shrink from her, as he is not yet ready to critically examine his ideals. While Kathy and Skip’s relationship is brief, with many questions left unaddressed between them, Kathy has a profound impact on Skip, as she represents truth and love for him, ultimately proving to be a catalyst for him to change.

Kathy also represents a different model of “being in the trenches” than the male main characters in the novel. While for the colonel, Skip, and James, warfare means combat, for Kathy, it means battling poverty and disease. It is Kathy who encounters the true horrors on the ground, the young girl burnt by napalm and the children living on garbage water in orphanages. Unlike the men who use grandiose pronouncements to define their ideals, Kathy believes in action, as is obvious through her tireless work.

At the end of the novel, Kathy tells a friend that she has lost her faith. The friend reminds her that faith gives the most difficult tests to those who are most faithful. The statement ignites something in Kathy, and she returns to her propensity for grace and hope. She stops judging others and believes everyone deserves to be saved. The changes in Kathy paint her as a three-dimensional, well-rounded character.

Hao is in his late 30s at the start of the novel. He is married to Kim and does not have biological children, though he and Kim have informally adopted Kim’s deceased sister’s boys, Minh and Thu. After Thu dies by self-immolation, Hao begins to grow disillusioned with his homeland. Having lost a young family member, Hao becomes overtly protective of Kim, wanting to ensure her survival at all costs. Further, as a small business owner, Hao is suspicious of the communist North Vietnamese forces, believing they will shut down his livelihood if they come into power. For these reasons, Hao makes the choice of first allying with the colonel and then betraying him.

Hao’s character is intricately linked with the theme of The Impossibility of Simple Ethical Choices During Armed Conflict, since he is often faced with grave dilemmas. For instance, Hao feels he must betray Trung because Crodelle is armed with a polygraph machine that can sense when Hao is lying. Therefore, he presumably reveals Trung’s involvement in the Tree of Smoke mission to Crodelle, setting Trung up to be murdered. However, Hao possibly leaves Trung a path to escape by revealing the assassination bid on him to Jimmy. Although Hao’s survivalism may seem almost self-centered at times, the truth is that he is plagued by the weight of his choices. For instance, he is tortured by the cruel trick he played on Trung. Thus, Hao is a complex character who represents the average civilian caught between opposing larger forces.

Trung is in his late 30s at the novel’s beginning. Skip describes Trung as having “thick eyebrows (that) came together sparsely over the bridge of his nose […] large ears, a weak chin. An ugly face, but friendly” (379). His time with the Vietcong has taken a toll on Trung, with his skin burnt and his body aged, much like her field work has cost Kathy.

Trung starts the narrative as a reluctant revolutionary, throwing a grenade at the colonel and trying to extort money from Hao. However, Trung is increasingly conflicted about his chosen path. One of the most problematic aspects of Trung’s experience of communism has been that communism seems to alienate him from his religion and village. The deracinated state makes Hao feel incomplete. In an important passage, he tells Skip that the “real” community is not strangers united by a doctrine, but “the life of the family, the life of the village” (393).

As Hao refashions his views on communism, he feels conflicted about recruiting young men from the south for the VC, thinking that this will uproot the men from their geographical and social context. Thus, he makes the painful choice of betraying his VC comrades, for whom he spilled blood and suffered in prison. Trung’s evolution marks him as a dynamic character. One of the few characters in the novel to have a happy resolution, Trung ends up regarded as a hero in Vietnam, for after he is imprisoned by the Americans, he is later liberated and sought out by historians. Thus, in the grand scheme of things, his suffering is rewarded.

Jimmy’s initials, B.S.—colloquially signifying “bullshit”—mark him as an absurd, comic character on an aimless search for meaning. As implied by his initials, Jimmy talks a lot of “nonsense” very fast, making Skip suspect that he uses Benzedrine, a potent nervous system stimulant that is highly likely to cause substance dependency. Jimmy is described by Skip as mostly dressed in civilian clothes and having a sun-browned face and small, bright eyes, which, like Skip’s, are hazel. Jimmy’s colorful, grandiose words are often bleakly comic, such as when he tells Skip with unintentional irony that Skip shouldn’t ever try acid (LSD, a hallucinogenic), as he’s “too flaky.”

While Jimmy seems a minor character for much of the novel, with others often tuning out his monologues, he takes an unexpected turn after the colonel’s death. After Skip is given a death sentence, Jimmy is outright cruel to Skip, visiting him in jail and threatening to hurt his wife and children unless Skip reveals the colonel’s location. A scared Skip directs Jimmy to another man to save his family, even though it is clear the colonel is dead. Jimmy’s rambling, fruitless journey to find the colonel has the quality of a hallucination, suggesting that he is under the influence of drugs throughout. The farcical quality of the quasi-spiritual journey emphasizes the absurdity of the novel’s universe, and also paints Jimmy as a clueless character. Jimmy desperately wants to seek meaning, but in the absence of self-examination, his quest fizzles out like the titular “tree of smoke.” Jimmy’s refusal to believe that the colonel is dead shows that the colonel’s Psy Ops has had an unintended effect on Jimmy, blurring for him the line between dream and reality.

James is 17 at the start of his arc, and 21 by the time he is asked to leave the infantry. A more serious character than his brother Bill, James is restless for meaning and action. James’s choice of enrolling in the army is deliberate since he is aware that, in the ordinary course of things, the system offers him few choices. When James refers to his last day in school as “graduation night,” his friends joke that the phrase is meaningless, as none of them will actually graduate from school or go on to college. Stuck in this desultory, aimless life, James seizes on the military as a structure that provides him with a vocabulary, a role, and a mode of being.

While James is an intelligent man, he is marked from the beginning by a lack of empathy and a deep misogyny that foreshadow his subsequent hardening. These dynamics can be seen in both his cruel treatment of Stevie and the women in Vietnam, and in his treatment of his mother, May, as is evident in his phone call home after he visits Harmon. In this scene, James is dismissive of his mother’s concerns about Burris, and when she tells him to pray, he snaps at her, saying, “Woman, let me tell you about the Holy Spirit. He’s crazy” (325).

After James commits the reprehensible crimes of rape and murder, he is back in the US, but it is clear that the war has transformed him. James struggles to reintegrate with society, ending up in jail for his first felony. At the end of his narrative, it is implied that James is out of prison and living with an ex-veteran called Fred. When James accidentally falls with Fred’s bike, Fred beats him severely, but James enjoys the oblivion that the beating affords him, reflecting that he “enjoyed lying with his face in his own blood” (514). James’s dissociated response is a vivid example of what war and violence have done to a man who is barely in his early 20s.