War lost its glory in American literature with the carnage of the Civil War. Stephen Crane, without any battle experience himself, captured that sense of disillusionment until World War I turned disillusion into revulsion.

Most novels of war written in the 20th century completed what Crane began with "The Red Badge of Courage."

Hemingway, for one, even as he exulted in the masculinity of fighting, understood that personal lives mattered more than bloody sacrifice.

		"TREE OF SMOKE" By Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($27)

Then Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, showed us that war was insanity waged by the stupid, but the men who gave us Vietnam weren't readers.

Their gift was a war unlike any other America had fought, a guerrilla war that magnified the futility and senselessness of fighting because there was no real "enemy," just shadows.

Our culture, with a few exceptions, reflected that conclusion, and while the present government missed the point, many would agree that the Vietnam War damaged not only countless lives but the national psyche as well.

Now Denis Johnson follows this well-beaten path with his long exegesis of the consequences of America's most contentious and symbolic conflict.

Johnson, 58, reportedly has been working on this dense novel for 20 years or so, publishing in the meantime a mix of short fiction, journalism and poetry.

His territory has usually been the trailer courts and dive bars of America's dropouts -- addicts, drunks, the pathologically angry and depressed, those "between jobs" or relationships -- the world of the underclass.

So, what can Johnson add to the Vietnam literature that hasn't been said before, going back as far as Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" of 1955?

Nothing really original, but instead a redefinition of the issues done in a poetic style that captures the beauty of the landscape of Southeast Asia, as well as the moral confusion of the Westerners trapped in the war's spell.

The book opens with President Kennedy's assassination followed by the careless shooting of a monkey by American sailor Bill Houston in the Philippines:

Houston "realized the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs and tears welled out of its eyes. ... As he held the animal in his hands, its heart stopped beating. ... He knew it was useless. He felt as if everything was his fault and ... he let himself cry like a child. He was eighteen years old."

Later, a Catholic priest ministering to natives deep in the Mindanao jungle is assassinated by an American agent, a symbolic act as unnecessary as the monkey's killing.

These deaths quickly set the book's theme -- that lives are wasted indiscriminately by unthinking people who have no other response to the world's sadness than violence.

Houston's habitual carelessness destroys his life. His half-brother, James, destroys his by joining the Army in time for the infamous Tet Offensive of 1968.

Like Bill, his life devolves into one without purpose or sense. These are the familiar Johnson characters from his short stories, the losers. We can understand their helplessness and surrender because they have no hope to begin with.

It's the figure of Skip Sands that's harder to capture. A life ruined early by war -- his father was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor and he's raised amid the enduring mourning of his depressed mother -- he seems still unformed as a young man.

His uncle, "the Colonel," is a World War II legend, a kind of Kurtz character out of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" who enlists Skip in a vague "Special Ops" action in Vietnam.

It's labeled "Tree of Smoke," a biblical reference that could mean the wisp of deception or the fires of war. The plan uses Vietnamese in a double-agent approach, a story line that allows Johnson to bring that dimension to the book.

There's got to be a woman in the picture, right? There is. Kathy Jones, widow of a Seventh Day Adventist missionary killed (or assassinated by the Colonel) in the Philippines, where she first meets Skip.

It's an affair not to remember. Neither are emotionally open or perhaps incomplete as literary creations to evoke much concern.

Later, Kathy works in South Vietnam, experiencing the personal tragedies of this strange war while Skip, grounded in the Colonel's jungle compound, begins to fall apart.

"This isn't a war. It's a disease. A plague," he announces.

The book ends in 1983, 20 years of confusion, murder, betrayal and a deadening of the souls of many.

"Tree of Smoke" can't be fully explored here in its many layered shape of symbols and images, but as a piece of pure writing it is one of year's best in fiction.

Johnson's powers of observation and care for creating scenes of beauty and horror are at their peak.

It's his twists in thematic direction that make it a challenge to understand without frequent re-reading and careful parsing of the language. If that's the kind of challenge you want in your fiction, then "Tree of Smoke" is your book.

If you're looking for a more focused take on war, read Robert Stone's "A Flag for Sunrise" or "Dog Soldiers," novels this one echoes, but with more complexity and ambition.

Perhaps too complex, too ambitious and ultimately too blurry in focus.