Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is a remembered conflict through which Art Keller interprets later violence in Mexico. Its significance lies not only in his service-era work, but in the way the war returns through sounds, landscapes, and tactical arrangements during Operation Condor. For Art, the resemblance is immediate and unsettling: a new campaign against opium in Sinaloa seems to repeat the old war’s machinery, even as its stated purpose and setting have changed.

The war returns in Sinaloa

During Operation Condor, Mexican campesinos flee a village set alight by soldiers, carrying food, blankets, clothes, and family photographs. Their smoke-stained white shirts and straw hats make them seem ghostlike to Art. The sight turns the poppy-growing valleys of Sinaloa into an echo of Vietnam: the country and crop are different, but the spectacle of displaced civilians and military destruction feels familiar. Art notices the blue denim sleeve of his own shirt where he expects army green, a small physical detail that marks the distance between his present assignment and his remembered war.

The helicopter sound makes that distance harder to maintain. The dull, repeated chop of the rotors evokes Vietnam for Art, though he questions what, exactly, the sound brings back and decides that some memories are better left buried. Aircraft circle above the fields like vultures. Fixed-wing planes spray the crops, while helicopters protect them from sporadic AK-47 fire by the remaining opium growers. Art knows that a burst can bring a helicopter down, whether it strikes the tail rotor or the pilot; so far, none has been hit. The scene places his technical knowledge beside an old bodily association: the aircraft are operational equipment, but their sound also opens a passage into the past.

The operation’s official Mexican identity sharpens the irony. It is described as a joint effort between the Ninth Army Corps and the State of Sinaloa, yet the planes were purchased by the Drug Enforcement Administration and flown by its contract pilots, many of them former Central Intelligence Agency employees from the Southeast Asia crew. Art recognizes a reversal in the work of the former Air America pilots: men who once flew heroin for Thai warlords now spray defoliants over Mexican opium. The war appears less like a closed chapter than a set of personnel, methods, and memories transferred into a new campaign.

From intelligence work to the drug war

Art’s Vietnam background helps explain why he distrusts the distinction between covert operations and law enforcement. He understands the resentment that law-enforcement officers direct toward former Central Intelligence Agency personnel, but sees intelligence gathering as a shared function: finding, cultivating, and running assets, then acting on what they report. To him, the decisive difference is what happens to the target. In his newer work, targets are arrested; in Operation Phoenix, the programmed assassination of the Vietcong infrastructure, the purpose was to kill them.

Art had not done much of the actual killing. In Vietnam, he collected raw information and analyzed it; other men, mostly Special Forces personnel loaned to the Central Intelligence Agency, acted on his intelligence. He remembers their night departures, their absences lasting days, and their returns to base in the small hours, wired on Dexedrine. They would sleep for days in their quarters before going out again. The recollection makes his former role specific: he was not simply a combatant remembering a battlefield, but an intelligence analyst whose work helped direct other people into dangerous operations.

The present-day campaign nevertheless puts him back into a posture he recognizes. The novel frames another Vietnam flashback through Art crouching in brush, shivering in damp mountain cold, and setting up ambushes. The remembered position and the current landscape overlap; the recurrence is not a claim that the wars are identical, but a sign that Art’s earlier experience persists inside his later work. Vietnam remains active as a way of seeing, even when he tries to keep its memories buried.

Departure, disillusionment, and renewed hope

Art’s move to the Drug Enforcement Administration follows the end of the Vietnam War. Like many veterans, he watches the last helicopters leave Saigon rooftops on television and gets drunk that night. When the offer to join the new agency comes, he accepts it. Before making the move, he discusses it with his wife, Althea Keller, and tells her that perhaps this is a war worth fighting, perhaps one they can actually win. That hope distinguishes the drug campaign, in his mind, from the war he has just watched end in defeat.

The hope does not erase what he has seen. The resemblance between Operation Condor and Vietnam—the aircraft, the intelligence networks, and the danger to people caught among armed forces—undercuts the promise that a change of campaign will mean a change of consequence. The contrast is central to Art’s recollections: he enters the Drug Enforcement Administration believing the new war may be winnable, yet encounters methods and sensations that recall the old one. His memories therefore complicate any clean separation between past service and present duty.

War, memory, and public mourning

The novel places Art’s private return to Vietnam alongside other forms of remembrance, without making those later losses part of his war experience. On the Day of the Dead in 1994, Adán spends a day visiting nine graves and building shrines for nine relatives killed by Güero Méndez’s men. At a family tomb in Culiacán, Güero brings offerings for his wife and children, lays out food and water, lights incense, and recalls picnics, swims, and family games. These acts show how the dead remain present through ritual, objects, and spoken memory; they offer a broader context for the novel’s repeated attention to what violence leaves behind.

That struggle over memory also becomes public after Cardinal Parada’s death. At his funeral in Guadalajara, thousands of mourners pass his coffin in a plaza otherwise associated with tourists, hawkers, and mariachi music. The crowd is unusually quiet, its prayers mixed with subdued talk of conspiracy because many do not believe the government’s claim that Parada was killed by mistake. Later, people chant for justice, and Art watches in amazement as they confront the country’s powerful leader. The episode differs from his Vietnam memories, but echoes their central question: whether naming violence and demanding accountability can alter what follows it.

Vietnam thus persists in the novel less as a detached historical backdrop than as a recurring measure of Art’s present. The sound of rotors, the contrast between analyst and operative, and the remembered posture of an ambush all make the past recur inside a new war. The memories explain why Art can recognize both the institutional continuity and the human cost of the campaign—and why his early belief that this might be a war they could win is shadowed by what he has already lived through.