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Dispatches
Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Michael Herr
15 books136 followersMichael David Herr was an American writer and war correspondent, known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called "the best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" by fellow author C.D.B. Bryan in his review for The New York Times Book Review. Novelist John Le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time."
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August 31, 2018
”Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.”
Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn.
Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar.
Sean Flynn and Dana Stone
The point I’m trying to make is that war correspondents were at as much risk as the combat soldiers they were there to write about. The soldiers were in awe of them because it was beyond comprehension to a drafted marine to think that anyone would want to be in this hell by choice. ”Two Marines that I hadn’t even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on…. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.”
General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans. He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven’s poem.
Anecdote of a Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens
The battle was considered a victory by both sides. With the American commanders claiming a x10 ratio for kills they could estimate 10,000 to 16,000 KIA off of 1,602 bodies actually found. The Americans lost 2,016 killed and 8,079 wounded. after the battle the American blew up the base and moved out. The NVA swarmed in to take over the area. You might ask yourself what was accomplished.
”We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. the smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the streeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence.”
There’s something happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there,
Tellin’ me I’ve got to beware.
I think it’s time we stopped, children,
What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down
The men who came back from Vietnam have minds filled with dark places, shards of pain, and trapped screams. Night sweats, twisted sheets, bruises from wrestling demons, and fear parched throats haunt their nights long after they return home.
”I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, “How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’”
…
“After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.”
Michael Herr’s dreams are a melted series of images, sounds, and smells.
”In the months after i got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny, and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.”
The writing in this book is superb. The words are dropped on you out of the bays of planes with bombs that explode around your ears and rattle your spinal cord. The dialogue is the crackle of gunfire coming at you through the elephant grass, zip, vip, zip. The stories will bring you so close to the action that spent ordinance will be hailing on your helmet as it falls through the canopy. Herr helped with the screenplays for the movies Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Whether he receives credit or not this book has influenced every Vietnam movie ever made or that will ever be made. This is best read from a foxhole with a shaker full of vodka and the smell of moist earth in your nostrils.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn.
Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar.
Sean Flynn and Dana Stone
The point I’m trying to make is that war correspondents were at as much risk as the combat soldiers they were there to write about. The soldiers were in awe of them because it was beyond comprehension to a drafted marine to think that anyone would want to be in this hell by choice. ”Two Marines that I hadn’t even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on…. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.”
General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans. He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven’s poem.
Anecdote of a Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens
The battle was considered a victory by both sides. With the American commanders claiming a x10 ratio for kills they could estimate 10,000 to 16,000 KIA off of 1,602 bodies actually found. The Americans lost 2,016 killed and 8,079 wounded. after the battle the American blew up the base and moved out. The NVA swarmed in to take over the area. You might ask yourself what was accomplished.
”We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. the smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the streeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence.”
There’s something happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there,
Tellin’ me I’ve got to beware.
I think it’s time we stopped, children,
What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down
The men who came back from Vietnam have minds filled with dark places, shards of pain, and trapped screams. Night sweats, twisted sheets, bruises from wrestling demons, and fear parched throats haunt their nights long after they return home.
”I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, “How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’”
…
“After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.”
Michael Herr’s dreams are a melted series of images, sounds, and smells.
”In the months after i got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny, and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.”
The writing in this book is superb. The words are dropped on you out of the bays of planes with bombs that explode around your ears and rattle your spinal cord. The dialogue is the crackle of gunfire coming at you through the elephant grass, zip, vip, zip. The stories will bring you so close to the action that spent ordinance will be hailing on your helmet as it falls through the canopy. Herr helped with the screenplays for the movies Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Whether he receives credit or not this book has influenced every Vietnam movie ever made or that will ever be made. This is best read from a foxhole with a shaker full of vodka and the smell of moist earth in your nostrils.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
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February 26, 2021
UN CARTONE ANIMATO NOIR: "TOPOLIN, TOPOLIN, VIVA TOPOLIN"
”Full Metal Jacket” di Stanley Kubrick: la scena finale , la cosiddetta marcia di Topolino.
Questo libro contiene tutti i film sul Vietnam che ho visto e che sono stati mai realizzati.
Eppure è stato scritto prima di qualsiasi film sul Vietnam.
Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine.
A cominciare da Coppola, che per “Apocalypse Now” lo volle cosceneggiatore (la voce off di Willard-Sheen è un parto di Herr), proseguendo con Kubrick, che lo coinvolse nella sceneggiatura di “Full Metal Jacket” (in un film senza protagonisti, il personaggio del protagonista Matthew Modine è modellato proprio su Herr).
Per la verità, contiene tutto il cinema di guerra mai prodotto:
Continuo a pensare a tutti i ragazzi che sono stati rovinati da 17 anni di film di guerra prima di venire in Vietnam a farsi rovinare per sempre… Tutti avevamo visto troppi film, avevamo abitato troppo a lungo nell’Impero della Tivù… Le prime volte che mi spararono addosso o che vidi dei morti in combattimento, non mi successe niente in realtà, ogni reazione restò sepolta nella mia testa. Era la stessa consueta violenza, solo trasferita in un altro mezzo di comunicazione; una specie di commedia ambientata nella giungla con elicotteri giganti e fantastici effetti speciali, con gli attori sdraiati per terra dentro sacchi di tela per cadaveri ad aspettare che la scena finisse per potersi rimettere in piedi e andarsene. Ma quella era una scena (si scopriva) che non c’era modo di stoppare.
In queste pagine c’è tutta la violenza, la paura, la crudeltà, la follia, la droga, l’orrore, il terrore, la tenebra, il frullo delle pale d’elicottero, il delirio, i colori, la musica, il caldo, gli odori, il sudore, la morte che i film di guerra, soprattutto quelli sul Vietnam, ci hanno fatto conoscere.
Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo.
Come non ritrovare nelle parole di Herr tante situazioni dell’invasione dell’Iraq e dell’Afghanistan?
A cominciare dall’assoluta consapevolezza che nessuno sa contro chi e per cosa sta combattendo, dalla completa coscienza che sia tutto inutile e folle.
All’inizio di “Apocalypse Now”, il capolavoro di Francis Ford Coppola, gli elicotteri appaiono sopra un bosco di palme, e il suono delle pale si mischia con quello delle note della canzone dei Doors, “The End”.
È un libro che descrive l’inferno in un posto piccolissimo.
Un libro composto in apnea (il primo capitolo si chiama “Inspirare”, l’ultimo “Espirare”) con una scrittura che possiede il ritmo della musica rock, una cronaca a caldo e un’esperienza vissuta in prima persona, così vicino, ma così lontano, perché Michael Herr sebbene si trovi a ridosso dei fatti, riesce a conquistare una magnifica 'giusta distanza', a creare formidabili atmosfere e a farci vedere quello che c’è oltre la realtà: la macchina bellica americana arenata in Oriente, al pari di un gigante costretto a smaltire nel fango la sbornia del suo delirio di potenza.
Herr non si nasconde tra le righe, parteggia, si schiera in modo palese ed esplicito: sta dalla parte dell’uomo, di qualsiasi colore sia, perché la Guerra è fatta dagli uomini contro gli uomini.
Sono d’accordo con Graham Greene, questo è il più bel libro sulla guerra dopo l’Iliade.
This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes
Again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain...
Jim Morrison, the Lizard.
PS [29 marzo 2016]
Oggi la mia editor mi ha detto che ho sbagliato citazione, non si tratta di Graham Greene ma di John Le Carré. Non correggo, perché Greene è meglio di Le Carré, ma forse ha ragione lei.
PPSS [4 marzo 2018]
Con dieci anni di ritardo (2008) ho di recente visto la serie “Generation Kill”: magnifica, grandissima scrittura, superba regia, confezione di più che alto livello. Consigliatissima. Potrebbe mai esistere senza questo libro di Herr?
No, non penso.
”Full Metal Jacket” di Stanley Kubrick: la scena finale , la cosiddetta marcia di Topolino.
Questo libro contiene tutti i film sul Vietnam che ho visto e che sono stati mai realizzati.
Eppure è stato scritto prima di qualsiasi film sul Vietnam.
Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine.
A cominciare da Coppola, che per “Apocalypse Now” lo volle cosceneggiatore (la voce off di Willard-Sheen è un parto di Herr), proseguendo con Kubrick, che lo coinvolse nella sceneggiatura di “Full Metal Jacket” (in un film senza protagonisti, il personaggio del protagonista Matthew Modine è modellato proprio su Herr).
Per la verità, contiene tutto il cinema di guerra mai prodotto:
Continuo a pensare a tutti i ragazzi che sono stati rovinati da 17 anni di film di guerra prima di venire in Vietnam a farsi rovinare per sempre… Tutti avevamo visto troppi film, avevamo abitato troppo a lungo nell’Impero della Tivù… Le prime volte che mi spararono addosso o che vidi dei morti in combattimento, non mi successe niente in realtà, ogni reazione restò sepolta nella mia testa. Era la stessa consueta violenza, solo trasferita in un altro mezzo di comunicazione; una specie di commedia ambientata nella giungla con elicotteri giganti e fantastici effetti speciali, con gli attori sdraiati per terra dentro sacchi di tela per cadaveri ad aspettare che la scena finisse per potersi rimettere in piedi e andarsene. Ma quella era una scena (si scopriva) che non c’era modo di stoppare.
In queste pagine c’è tutta la violenza, la paura, la crudeltà, la follia, la droga, l’orrore, il terrore, la tenebra, il frullo delle pale d’elicottero, il delirio, i colori, la musica, il caldo, gli odori, il sudore, la morte che i film di guerra, soprattutto quelli sul Vietnam, ci hanno fatto conoscere.
Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo.
Come non ritrovare nelle parole di Herr tante situazioni dell’invasione dell’Iraq e dell’Afghanistan?
A cominciare dall’assoluta consapevolezza che nessuno sa contro chi e per cosa sta combattendo, dalla completa coscienza che sia tutto inutile e folle.
All’inizio di “Apocalypse Now”, il capolavoro di Francis Ford Coppola, gli elicotteri appaiono sopra un bosco di palme, e il suono delle pale si mischia con quello delle note della canzone dei Doors, “The End”.
È un libro che descrive l’inferno in un posto piccolissimo.
Un libro composto in apnea (il primo capitolo si chiama “Inspirare”, l’ultimo “Espirare”) con una scrittura che possiede il ritmo della musica rock, una cronaca a caldo e un’esperienza vissuta in prima persona, così vicino, ma così lontano, perché Michael Herr sebbene si trovi a ridosso dei fatti, riesce a conquistare una magnifica 'giusta distanza', a creare formidabili atmosfere e a farci vedere quello che c’è oltre la realtà: la macchina bellica americana arenata in Oriente, al pari di un gigante costretto a smaltire nel fango la sbornia del suo delirio di potenza.
Herr non si nasconde tra le righe, parteggia, si schiera in modo palese ed esplicito: sta dalla parte dell’uomo, di qualsiasi colore sia, perché la Guerra è fatta dagli uomini contro gli uomini.
Sono d’accordo con Graham Greene, questo è il più bel libro sulla guerra dopo l’Iliade.
This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes
Again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some stranger's hand
In a desperate land
Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain...
Jim Morrison, the Lizard.
PS [29 marzo 2016]
Oggi la mia editor mi ha detto che ho sbagliato citazione, non si tratta di Graham Greene ma di John Le Carré. Non correggo, perché Greene è meglio di Le Carré, ma forse ha ragione lei.
PPSS [4 marzo 2018]
Con dieci anni di ritardo (2008) ho di recente visto la serie “Generation Kill”: magnifica, grandissima scrittura, superba regia, confezione di più che alto livello. Consigliatissima. Potrebbe mai esistere senza questo libro di Herr?
No, non penso.
October 3, 2020
War is Forever
Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don’t kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.”
The opposite of war is not peace but justice, the access to judgments of equity that mitigate coercion. Essentially war is unfairness made the norm, “a psychotic vaudeville.” War is unfair because there is no human recourse to the random exercise of power. The unfairness of war affects everyone even those, especially those, exercising the power. The further out on the tendrils of power, as these tendrils encounter victims, the more unfairness, the more coercion, exists. At that zero-distance, coercion is unremittingly ugly:“Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that.” Is there any other word than de-humanization? “‘Well, you know what we do to animals . . . kill ’em and hurt ’em and beat on ’em so’s we can train ’em. Shit, we don’t treat the Dinks no different than that,’” says one young soldier with neither apparent irony nor shame.
Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion. Who can judge who is most defiled, the soldier coerced by his superiors or the soldier’s victim coerced by him? All suffer through either grief or memory. Herr knows this: “Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive... Every time there was combat you had a licence to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.”
The effects of the unfairness of war are cumulative and gestational. They ripen and metastasize : “And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years... it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes... They’d say (I’d ask) that they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R& R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear,”
Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: “...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.” This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: “A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before.” This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: “... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour.” And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: “They believed that God was going to thank them for it.”
There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’”
No ideal was left unmolested. No injustice was left un-trivialized. No confession of guilt was ever offered without rationalization. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: “It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene.” But injustice will not lie quiet. The effects of war are genetic; they are passed on as a dismal legacy of power and its unfairness. The country tried to forget and dug itself deeper, coerced itself, into violence that it now performs on itself at the armed hands of its children to the consternation of their parents. The country does seem to be screaming now. But no one is really listening. No one cares if they annihilate themselves in their undeclared civil war. If only they would tweet about it less.
Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don’t kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.”
The opposite of war is not peace but justice, the access to judgments of equity that mitigate coercion. Essentially war is unfairness made the norm, “a psychotic vaudeville.” War is unfair because there is no human recourse to the random exercise of power. The unfairness of war affects everyone even those, especially those, exercising the power. The further out on the tendrils of power, as these tendrils encounter victims, the more unfairness, the more coercion, exists. At that zero-distance, coercion is unremittingly ugly:“Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that.” Is there any other word than de-humanization? “‘Well, you know what we do to animals . . . kill ’em and hurt ’em and beat on ’em so’s we can train ’em. Shit, we don’t treat the Dinks no different than that,’” says one young soldier with neither apparent irony nor shame.
Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion. Who can judge who is most defiled, the soldier coerced by his superiors or the soldier’s victim coerced by him? All suffer through either grief or memory. Herr knows this: “Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive... Every time there was combat you had a licence to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.”
The effects of the unfairness of war are cumulative and gestational. They ripen and metastasize : “And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years... it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes... They’d say (I’d ask) that they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R& R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear,”
Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: “...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.” This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: “A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before.” This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: “... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour.” And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: “They believed that God was going to thank them for it.”
There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’”
No ideal was left unmolested. No injustice was left un-trivialized. No confession of guilt was ever offered without rationalization. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: “It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene.” But injustice will not lie quiet. The effects of war are genetic; they are passed on as a dismal legacy of power and its unfairness. The country tried to forget and dug itself deeper, coerced itself, into violence that it now performs on itself at the armed hands of its children to the consternation of their parents. The country does seem to be screaming now. But no one is really listening. No one cares if they annihilate themselves in their undeclared civil war. If only they would tweet about it less.
January 6, 2008
Having been in VietNam and having been in some of the Marine Units that Michael Herr writes about in "Dispatches" is the best depiction of war in general and VietNam in particular that I have ever read. It started me on the path to healing that I had kept hidden since I came back from Nam. Thank You Michael.
May 12, 2022
Have you ever used the word dispatch in a sentence before?
I haven't. I've called the local police before, and I've heard the employees who handle the communication between citizens and the police refer to themselves as “dispatch operators,” and I've heard them say “I'll dispatch an officer to your location,” but I can't think of any other use I've encountered in my own life.
For war correspondents, the plural noun “dispatches” is a well used one, meaning, basically: reports. Reports, typically brief in size, sent from the field to the people in power back home, to inform.
When I think of this word, I can't help but picture someone typing out a telegram to someone: “Heavy casualties. Need more young bodies. Stop.”
Whoa. That brings up two more words. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)?
And, one more: casualties. It has at the root of the word “casual,” but what could be less casual than asking young people to die for the sake of stupid wars?
And they're all stupid. Well, most of them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. War is so fucking stupid, I can't stand it.
I don't mean to insult anyone who has served in the military or is serving now. I mean to insult every leader who has ever flippantly involved their country, or their youth, in an unnecessary war. If you're reading this right now, you know: it's happening right now, again.
So.fucking.stupid. How's that for a telegram?
Do I seem angry, throwing around a couple of “F bombs” this morning in my reading response to this non-fiction account of the Vietnam “conflict?” I hope so. Do you want to know why? Because what happened in Vietnam didn't stay in Vietnam.
Michael Herr, the unlikely “war correspondent” brought home several souvenirs from Vietnam: insomnia, depression, anxiety, drug use, to name a few. And he was one of the lucky ones.
This book isn't an easy read (or a quick read). It's kind of a hot mess, to be honest. A hot mess that offers some brilliant, honest descriptions of what was happening in Vietnam. Mr. Herr is also unbelievably good at giving quick character sketches of the people around him: He was a small man with vague, watery eyes, slightly reminiscent of a rodent in a fable, with one striking feature: a full, scrupulously attended regimental mustache.
The most colorful dispatches I found here:
The players:
grunts
spades
Spooks
dinks
gooks
The details, the setting:
paved swamp
a scorched-earth policy
a John Wayne wetdream
war under water
the Flood had not lasted this long
The conclusion:
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there.
(War is hell, y'all, and we should never fucking forget it).
I haven't. I've called the local police before, and I've heard the employees who handle the communication between citizens and the police refer to themselves as “dispatch operators,” and I've heard them say “I'll dispatch an officer to your location,” but I can't think of any other use I've encountered in my own life.
For war correspondents, the plural noun “dispatches” is a well used one, meaning, basically: reports. Reports, typically brief in size, sent from the field to the people in power back home, to inform.
When I think of this word, I can't help but picture someone typing out a telegram to someone: “Heavy casualties. Need more young bodies. Stop.”
Whoa. That brings up two more words. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)?
And, one more: casualties. It has at the root of the word “casual,” but what could be less casual than asking young people to die for the sake of stupid wars?
And they're all stupid. Well, most of them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. War is so fucking stupid, I can't stand it.
I don't mean to insult anyone who has served in the military or is serving now. I mean to insult every leader who has ever flippantly involved their country, or their youth, in an unnecessary war. If you're reading this right now, you know: it's happening right now, again.
So.fucking.stupid. How's that for a telegram?
Do I seem angry, throwing around a couple of “F bombs” this morning in my reading response to this non-fiction account of the Vietnam “conflict?” I hope so. Do you want to know why? Because what happened in Vietnam didn't stay in Vietnam.
Michael Herr, the unlikely “war correspondent” brought home several souvenirs from Vietnam: insomnia, depression, anxiety, drug use, to name a few. And he was one of the lucky ones.
This book isn't an easy read (or a quick read). It's kind of a hot mess, to be honest. A hot mess that offers some brilliant, honest descriptions of what was happening in Vietnam. Mr. Herr is also unbelievably good at giving quick character sketches of the people around him: He was a small man with vague, watery eyes, slightly reminiscent of a rodent in a fable, with one striking feature: a full, scrupulously attended regimental mustache.
The most colorful dispatches I found here:
The players:
grunts
spades
Spooks
dinks
gooks
The details, the setting:
paved swamp
a scorched-earth policy
a John Wayne wetdream
war under water
the Flood had not lasted this long
The conclusion:
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there.
(War is hell, y'all, and we should never fucking forget it).
June 21, 2022
“After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories...where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information."
Michael Herr's Dispatches was an incredible first-hand account of the Vietnam War. What he wrote felt compelling and authentic and in that respect reminded me of Tim O'Brien's work. There were some things that stuck out, including his account of the Tet Offensive, specifically waiting for it to happen and what passed as sleep for those who were doing the waiting. As a war correspondent, I felt Herr was able to provide both a big picture of the war and a much more intimate one of how individual soldiers coped. Also, the way Herr mixed the sometimes absurd with the horror of war made it easy to make the connection to his work on Apocalypse Now. Should have read this a long time ago. Fantastic!
Michael Herr's Dispatches was an incredible first-hand account of the Vietnam War. What he wrote felt compelling and authentic and in that respect reminded me of Tim O'Brien's work. There were some things that stuck out, including his account of the Tet Offensive, specifically waiting for it to happen and what passed as sleep for those who were doing the waiting. As a war correspondent, I felt Herr was able to provide both a big picture of the war and a much more intimate one of how individual soldiers coped. Also, the way Herr mixed the sometimes absurd with the horror of war made it easy to make the connection to his work on Apocalypse Now. Should have read this a long time ago. Fantastic!
February 7, 2017
"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
-Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971
Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. The Deer Hunter. First Blood. These are just some of the American movies which depict the war in Vietnam, which has served as inspiration for dozens of other films, novels and video games. The conflict in Vietnam has been written about extensively, and Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the first books to present an intimate, closeup picture of the war to the wider public. The first two movies owe a lot to Dispatches - Michael Herr co-wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is partially inspired by this book, and wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket together with Stanley Kubrick.
Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country.
The average age of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam was 22. These were young men, millions of miles away from home, stuck in a scorching and unforgiving climate, surrounded by jungles full of people they could not see. And for what? "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good", he writes in one chapter, while quoting one of the soldier he talks to in another: "All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period". Most of these soldiers - these who survive - will be forever robbed of their youth: the book is full of physical descriptions of young men looking incredibly old and tired, being incredibly old and tired at the age of 23. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror. 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam; thousand veterans suffering from PTSD took their own lives after returning home.
This is a book written in retrospection, though it loses none of its intensity; while reading it we see a man who acts as if he has just emerged from the war, like it was yesterday. "I went to cover the war and the war covered me", Herr writes near the end and admits that it is "an old story", though in his case very true. This explains the tone of his book - very chaotic and disorganized, full of personal interjections; Herr writes as much about himself as he does about the soldiers and the war. He rejects the role of an impartial observer, and is an active participant in the events that he writes about, focusing on personal emotions and moods - his own and that of the soldiers - rather than tactical and military aspects of the war. What is most prominent is the absolute lack of safety and certainty for anyone, in a country where the invisible enemy hid in the hostile, unwelcoming climate, and despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned and killed always ready to attack and strike back again and again and again:
"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement—the whole rotten deal—could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of those stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar-rocket attacks."
"Sean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.”
How do you defeat an enemy whom you can't see and sometimes even recognize, and whom you keep shooting and killing, and who keeps coming back to kill you from underground tunnels, from bushes, from caves? You don't. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, Herr writes near the end of his memoir; he was repeatedly asked by the press for interviews about Vietnam, and to write another book about it; aside from his work on two films he never returned to it, and published only a few other books throughout the years, none of which had the impact of Dispatches. He died last year, after a lengthy illness, in Upstate New York. According to his daughter, Claudia, he came to resent his celebrity and no longer wrote; converting to Buddhism in his last years. I hope that he finally found peace.
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
-Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971
Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. The Deer Hunter. First Blood. These are just some of the American movies which depict the war in Vietnam, which has served as inspiration for dozens of other films, novels and video games. The conflict in Vietnam has been written about extensively, and Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the first books to present an intimate, closeup picture of the war to the wider public. The first two movies owe a lot to Dispatches - Michael Herr co-wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is partially inspired by this book, and wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket together with Stanley Kubrick.
Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country.
The average age of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam was 22. These were young men, millions of miles away from home, stuck in a scorching and unforgiving climate, surrounded by jungles full of people they could not see. And for what? "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good", he writes in one chapter, while quoting one of the soldier he talks to in another: "All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period". Most of these soldiers - these who survive - will be forever robbed of their youth: the book is full of physical descriptions of young men looking incredibly old and tired, being incredibly old and tired at the age of 23. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror. 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam; thousand veterans suffering from PTSD took their own lives after returning home.
This is a book written in retrospection, though it loses none of its intensity; while reading it we see a man who acts as if he has just emerged from the war, like it was yesterday. "I went to cover the war and the war covered me", Herr writes near the end and admits that it is "an old story", though in his case very true. This explains the tone of his book - very chaotic and disorganized, full of personal interjections; Herr writes as much about himself as he does about the soldiers and the war. He rejects the role of an impartial observer, and is an active participant in the events that he writes about, focusing on personal emotions and moods - his own and that of the soldiers - rather than tactical and military aspects of the war. What is most prominent is the absolute lack of safety and certainty for anyone, in a country where the invisible enemy hid in the hostile, unwelcoming climate, and despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned and killed always ready to attack and strike back again and again and again:
"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement—the whole rotten deal—could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of those stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar-rocket attacks."
"Sean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.”
How do you defeat an enemy whom you can't see and sometimes even recognize, and whom you keep shooting and killing, and who keeps coming back to kill you from underground tunnels, from bushes, from caves? You don't. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, Herr writes near the end of his memoir; he was repeatedly asked by the press for interviews about Vietnam, and to write another book about it; aside from his work on two films he never returned to it, and published only a few other books throughout the years, none of which had the impact of Dispatches. He died last year, after a lengthy illness, in Upstate New York. According to his daughter, Claudia, he came to resent his celebrity and no longer wrote; converting to Buddhism in his last years. I hope that he finally found peace.
June 27, 2007
This is war reportage as heartbreaking poetry. One of the roughest pieces of writing I have ever encountered. Beautiful, angular and harsh stylistically. There is a wonderfully (and terrifyingly) immersive quality to this book.
April 6, 2012
I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read. I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of war and the men who fight it.
August 31, 2023
Charlie.
V-C.
Gooks.
Grunts.
DMZ.
LZ.
R & R.
Pucker, motherfucker. (Alright, can't say I've ever heard of this one)
As I'd never read a single thing on the Vietnam War before - why it took me this long I've no idea, the last time I would have heard any of these mentioned was probably the last time I re-watched some of the classic Nam movies from the 80s. And that must have been almost 20 years ago.
Wow. This is simply one heck of a book. A bona fide masterpiece. I've heard others say it's arguably the greatest ever firsthand account from the front lines of the conflict, and I'm starting to wonder whether I even need to read another. I'll probably wake up in the night in a cold sweat thinking of blood and bone fragments and acid-rock whilst trying to slap imagery Mosquitos. It felt like being there, right in the heart of its horrors, more than any film. The sonic force of this book was just so immense.
It was also, probably more than anything else, genuinely sad. Sad to the point that it almost brought a tear to my eye. The fact that Herr lost friends not only in Vietnam - Sean Flynn, Errol Flynn's son being one of them, but also back home whilst he was still covering the war. On top of that, it may be the case that for a journalist the transition of re-entering the world can be more of a tough and lonely business when compared to those in battle. For a serving soldier or marine there are the medals and flag-waving parades. But what of the correspondent?
It's an easy 5/5 for me.
December 10, 2018
"Where had he been to get his language?" is a question Herr asks himself in passing about a soldier he meets, but I think it's the implication in the question that explains why this is one of my favorite books. There are more informative books about Vietnam, speaking in traditional historical terms, but it's the language in this book that has stayed with me- I can open it up, turn to just about any page, and the store of English, with its almost limitless possibility and nuance, feels (very temporarily) replenished in me. Perception becomes less stifling and habitual, and opens up...ever so briefly. Language might seem like a strange thing to praise in a book about the Vietnam War- after all, it would seem that the most important aspect of the book would be essence, the war itself, while language is 'mere' style. But this book reminds me that the two are not mutually exclusive. It may be that for a writer language and experience sit on opposite ends of a pendulum, and the farther you go in one direction, the farther you can swing back in the other. The war was unlike anything Herr had experienced before, and it forced him to develop a new vocabulary to describe it.
Music also has the power to alter perception. Throughout the book, Herr describes hearing Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones; in Vietnam, for the first time, The Doors and "their distant, icy sound. It seemed like such wintry music..."; and The Beatles:
And in my head, sounding over and over, were the incredibly sinister words of the song we'd all heard for the first time only days before. 'The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away', it promised, 'Coming to take you away, dy-ing to take you away...' That was a song about Khe Sanh; we knew it then, and it still seems so...But the emphasis on music isn't just idle description. Herr discovers that the desire for transcendence that music may have seemed like an answer to, that desire that he felt as a writer and human being, was also capable of being answered by Vietnam, and that pushed far enough it was the same answer. "On the street", he writes of being back in America, "I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock n' roll veterans...rock stars started falling like second lieutenants...what I'd thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don't know how to tell you how complicated that made my life."
------------
It all happened so fast, as they say, as everyone who has ever been through it has always said; we were sitting around listening to what we thought were Tet fireworks coming from the town, and then coming closer until we weren't stoned anymore, until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet...telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn't remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy."The first rule", Schopenhauer wrote, "indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say." Herr, as a young writer, naturally wanted to have something to say, and was smart enough to understand that he didn't; he was probably drawn to experience that would alter him, that would allow him to transcend himself and his writing...to break on through to the other side, even. And yet when we seek out experience we also give up control, and sometimes the experiences that might allow us to transcend ourselves are not clearly distinguishable from the experiences that can destroy us. Sometimes they might be the same thing. For someone like Hunter S. Thompson, that was the thrill of it. But for Herr, discovering that transcendence and violence were inextricable meant that life was never the same again, not only for himself but for the world.
...for the next six years I saw them all, the ones I'd really seen and the ones I'd imagined, theirs and ours, friends I'd loved and strangers, motionless figures in a dance, the old dance. Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterward you can't handle the experience. Until I felt that I was just a dancer too.
Maybe it was my twenties I was missing and not the Sixties, but I began missing them both before either had really been played out. The year had been so hot that I think it shorted out the decade, what followed was mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X. It wasn't just that I was growing older, I was leaking time...And yet one of the most striking and honest things about this book is the tone of nostalgia that runs through it. He realized that war satisfied something in him, that he was not so different from his friends who stayed in California and went to Doors concerts. As Herr puts it early in the book,
…somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of us there a true volunteer.Or, towards the end, "A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."
Maybe the lesson is that experience can't always be sought out, utilized, and then walked away from. But what choice did Herr have, and what choice do any of us have? Because maybe we are just dancers, too.
I've often wondered what the rest of Herr's life was like, and why he published almost nothing else. One night a few months ago, half-asleep, I heard his name, of all places, on the Bill Simmons podcast. Simmons was interviewing Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and asked him to name the best writer he'd ever pursued but couldn't get to write for him. Carter responded,
A writer I used to speak to, sometimes for almost three hours a day, for years and years, was Michael Herr. He'd written Dispatches, he was one of the great journalists of all time, and he...became a Buddhist after Vietnam...Michael was a wonderful, peaceful person...[but] in ten years of constant talking, I only got two pieces out of him. I would have liked more, but he said, 'I'm done writing.'
January 1, 2018
"I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did."
What a book. The first section, "Breathing In," is one of the most astounding things I've ever read. Relentless, harsh, lyrical, and filled with more insights than some writers achieve in an entire lifetime. I marveled over every line and dog-eared so many pages the book doubled in thickness. If the idea of reading an entire memoir about the Vietnam War doesn't appeal to you, maybe just try "Breathing In." I guarantee you've never read anything like it.
After you've read "Breathing In," take a little break and come back to the book later. The blessing and the curse of Dispatches is that the rest of it doesn't match the intensity of "Breathing In." This is a curse because the rest of the book is a little more ordinary, but a blessing because I'm not sure either the writer or the reader could keep up that pace for another 200 pages.
That doesn't mean those other 200 pages aren't worth reading, though. A lengthy section on Khe Sahn provides an excellent sense of what it was like to be there, and given America's habit of invading small countries, the questions it raises are as relevant now as they were then. ("Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?" someone asks Herr, and he thinks but doesn't say: Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena.) A chapter on reporters in Vietnam is fascinating and instructive, the official "spin" contrasted with what really happened on the ground in a way that will sound very familiar to anyone who's been paying attention for the past 15 or so years. Herr was an "embedded" reporter before we called it "embedded," but there was no special treatment back then. You went in the field, you experienced what the soldiers experienced, no more or less. You went where you wanted and drew your own conclusions. Some soldiers hated the embedded reporters because they didn't have to be there and could leave whenever they wanted; some soldiers admired them for the same reason. We owe a debt to these reporters: Much of what we now know was true about the Vietnam War is due to their persistence and bravery. Better to see, says Herr. I didn't go through all of that not to see.
What a book. The first section, "Breathing In," is one of the most astounding things I've ever read. Relentless, harsh, lyrical, and filled with more insights than some writers achieve in an entire lifetime. I marveled over every line and dog-eared so many pages the book doubled in thickness. If the idea of reading an entire memoir about the Vietnam War doesn't appeal to you, maybe just try "Breathing In." I guarantee you've never read anything like it.
After you've read "Breathing In," take a little break and come back to the book later. The blessing and the curse of Dispatches is that the rest of it doesn't match the intensity of "Breathing In." This is a curse because the rest of the book is a little more ordinary, but a blessing because I'm not sure either the writer or the reader could keep up that pace for another 200 pages.
That doesn't mean those other 200 pages aren't worth reading, though. A lengthy section on Khe Sahn provides an excellent sense of what it was like to be there, and given America's habit of invading small countries, the questions it raises are as relevant now as they were then. ("Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?" someone asks Herr, and he thinks but doesn't say: Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena.) A chapter on reporters in Vietnam is fascinating and instructive, the official "spin" contrasted with what really happened on the ground in a way that will sound very familiar to anyone who's been paying attention for the past 15 or so years. Herr was an "embedded" reporter before we called it "embedded," but there was no special treatment back then. You went in the field, you experienced what the soldiers experienced, no more or less. You went where you wanted and drew your own conclusions. Some soldiers hated the embedded reporters because they didn't have to be there and could leave whenever they wanted; some soldiers admired them for the same reason. We owe a debt to these reporters: Much of what we now know was true about the Vietnam War is due to their persistence and bravery. Better to see, says Herr. I didn't go through all of that not to see.
March 27, 2008
Not only is this the most engrossing piece of journalism, the most touching memoir, and the most illuminating book on war I've ever read; it's also written as if Herr was on fire and being chased by literature-eating wolves. I read it twice in a row and would do it again.
October 7, 2024
‘’Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an administration that believed the command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space.’’
If you are a cinema enthusiast and particularly of war films, chances are you have Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in your ‘’All-time favourite war films’’ list. These two films, besides revolving around a common setting and being directed by two giants of the industry, credit the involvement of Michael Herr in their development. He was tasked with composing Martin Sheen’s rough-and-tumble narration in Apocalypse Now, and he also co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers. As in many of his films, Kubrick prefers developing his screenplays from a book. In 1985, after owning the rights to The Short-Timers, Kubrick contacted Herr to help him expand the story into a film script. So, what attracted Coppola and Kubrick to enlist the services of Michael Herr? The answer will be this book right here by the title of Dispatches.
Amongst the books written on the war, Dispatches stands out as the most consequential, unflinching and intimate. Michael Herr went to Vietnam for eighteen months between 1967 and 1969 as a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine. This period happened to coincide with the major escalation of the war, The Tet Offensive (30 January–23 September 1968). The focus of the book is mainly around The Battle of Huế and The Battle of Khe Sanh. However, instead of detailing the battles themselves, Herr narrates the lives of the soldiers and his fellow war correspondents in and around the war zone. He was beneficiary of the US government’s decision to grant correspondents unprecedented access to Vietnam. Moreover, he writes about life inside fortified Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as it relates to the dynamics between ARVN soldiers, US military personnel and the city’s residents. His writing is interceded by his introspective meditations on the war itself.
Many describe the writing style in this book as a stream of conciseness type. I tend to agree with that assessment. Concepts are disjointed and repetitive throughout the book. Especially, descriptions of harrowing experiences have a weighty feel to them. This perhaps relates to Herr’s own traumatic experience in Vietnam. In his 1990 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, he briefly talked about why it took him nine years to publish Dispatches, by saying;
‘’It just took a long time. It took what it took, you know? I was afraid to finish the book….. It was something obsessive retentive. I had some very private, intimate business to go through before I could let that book go….. It's still awkward for me to talk about it’’
This is a good indication that while the book might feel anecdotal at times, it has many imprints of the personal as well as the collective. This makes it hard to recommend unless one is really invested in the history of The Vietnam War. Having said that, if one is interested in the history of the war, this book is downright essential.
May 12, 2022
Rather than a chronological account of the Vietnam "Conflict," I see Michael Herr's book Dispatches as a series of vignettes showcasing his impressions of places and people, stories of the minutiae and daily lives of the soldiers, tales of the Command's statements (many in great contrast to what Herr actually saw on the frontlines), and retellings of the escapades of his fellow journalists (and photographers).
The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter:
"the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder."
Contrast this poetry with the simple and effective prose in the telling of this horror:
Trigger warning - graphic depiction of injury
"A little girl was lying on the table, looking with wide dry eyes at the wall. Her left leg was gone, and a sharp piece of bone about six inches long extended from the exposed stump. The leg itself was on the floor, half wrapped in a piece of paper. The doctor was a major, and he'd been working alone. He could not have looked worse if he'd lain all night in a trough of blood. His Hands were so slippery that I had to hold the can to his mouth for him and tip it up as his head went back. I couldn't look at the girl. . . . He placed his hand on the girl's forehead and said, 'Hello little darling.' "
Herr's descriptions of people and places and these sketches are brilliant. Where I struggle is with his detailing of situations. A lot of these are abtruse. There are passages and sections I had to read multiple times to wring some meaning from them; there were many pages where I felt I was slogging through mud.
Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. And I appreciate his oblique criticisms of the powers that be--juxtaposing quotations from the General Staff and the G.I.s on the ground to make his point.
A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary.
I struggled with rating this book and finally settled on 3.5 stars rounded up because of the thought it stimulated and my feeling that this is an important work in the cannon of Vietnam war literature.
Buddy read with Julie.
The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter:
"the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder."
Contrast this poetry with the simple and effective prose in the telling of this horror:
Trigger warning - graphic depiction of injury
"A little girl was lying on the table, looking with wide dry eyes at the wall. Her left leg was gone, and a sharp piece of bone about six inches long extended from the exposed stump. The leg itself was on the floor, half wrapped in a piece of paper. The doctor was a major, and he'd been working alone. He could not have looked worse if he'd lain all night in a trough of blood. His Hands were so slippery that I had to hold the can to his mouth for him and tip it up as his head went back. I couldn't look at the girl. . . . He placed his hand on the girl's forehead and said, 'Hello little darling.' "
Herr's descriptions of people and places and these sketches are brilliant. Where I struggle is with his detailing of situations. A lot of these are abtruse. There are passages and sections I had to read multiple times to wring some meaning from them; there were many pages where I felt I was slogging through mud.
Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. And I appreciate his oblique criticisms of the powers that be--juxtaposing quotations from the General Staff and the G.I.s on the ground to make his point.
A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary.
I struggled with rating this book and finally settled on 3.5 stars rounded up because of the thought it stimulated and my feeling that this is an important work in the cannon of Vietnam war literature.
Buddy read with Julie.
September 30, 2015
In two weeks I'll be flying to Hong Kong, setting sail for Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia to deliver a series of lectures on a luxury cruise ship. The topic I chose, "Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes," has exposed me to some wonderful films, a number of which I've reviewed on my blog or written about in my column for 3 Quarks Daily. And I've immersed myself in bios of Pearl Buck, Anna Leonowns (the real-life Anna of The King and I), Anna May Wong, Pierre Boulle, Somerset Maugham, along with books about classic films set in Asian locales: Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Lost Horizon, Apocalypse Now -- many of which I've reviewed here. On top of that, I've been working diligently to get my bridge game up to snuff . . .
Mostly, I'm aiming for a light touch with the material. This is a cruise, after all. Bob Hope's and Bing Crosby's good-natured racism in The Road to Singapore is entertaining in its way, as is Charlie Chan's fortune-cookie wisdom. I can share Yunte Huang's insightful discussion of Yellowface from his marvelous book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History without driving my audience into the bar for an early drink, explore stereotypes of "Chinamen" through Disney cartoons and extravagant musical numbers featuring Rin Tin Tin, even! Work in a little commentary on The Good Earth's Depression-era message about the virtue of hard work on the land, illustrated with stills from the movie and comparing them to iconic photographs from the period.
Luise Rainer and babies during the Chinese famine
Dorothea Lange's portrait of Migrant Mother in the dust bowl drought
Sure, the Dust Bowl and the Chinese famine were tough times, but they're pretty remote. Not so the Vietnam war. My cousin Alan was a U.S. Army sharpshooter in Vietnam. He was ten years older than me, and I didn't really get to know him until long after his tour of duty. I do remember him dropping by the house in the early 1980s to visit when our uncle was recuperating from a hit-and-run accident -- this uncle was a bachelor and the rest of the family took turns caring for him (it was a terrible accident). Alan was always reading about the Vietnam war, and he'd talk about it to anyone who was willing to listen, but I had the impression that he was still trying to figure it out. Why were we there? Why was he asked to do the things he did? Was it worth it, in the end?
Vietnam damaged my cousin irreparably. He had a failed marriage behind him, troubled relationships with family members. He made a decent living, working for the Post Office, but never seemed to have enough money, was seriously in debt. In 2002, not long after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Alan shot himself. He had many problems, had cut himself from nearly everyone, but I can't help seeing a correlation.
Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years. But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review.
Tim O'Brien writes exquisitely about his experience in The Things They Carried. I recommend his book, and count it as a high point in my life as a reader, that I was able to hear him read from it and answer questions from an audience of students (my son among them) who were of draft age during the height of our involvement in Iraq. He reconstructs the shattered lives of his dead companions with poignancy and restraint. O'Brien writes from a distance of years, however. Herr writes from the thick of things and is unrestrained, angry, self-hating and self-pitying, filled with disgust and compassion, his reactions still raw, it felt to me in places:
When our cruise ship docks in Vietnam and I disembark in Danang, or Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I'll be seeing those places through my cousin Alan's eyes, thanks to Michael Herr.
Mostly, I'm aiming for a light touch with the material. This is a cruise, after all. Bob Hope's and Bing Crosby's good-natured racism in The Road to Singapore is entertaining in its way, as is Charlie Chan's fortune-cookie wisdom. I can share Yunte Huang's insightful discussion of Yellowface from his marvelous book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History without driving my audience into the bar for an early drink, explore stereotypes of "Chinamen" through Disney cartoons and extravagant musical numbers featuring Rin Tin Tin, even! Work in a little commentary on The Good Earth's Depression-era message about the virtue of hard work on the land, illustrated with stills from the movie and comparing them to iconic photographs from the period.
Luise Rainer and babies during the Chinese famine
Dorothea Lange's portrait of Migrant Mother in the dust bowl drought
Sure, the Dust Bowl and the Chinese famine were tough times, but they're pretty remote. Not so the Vietnam war. My cousin Alan was a U.S. Army sharpshooter in Vietnam. He was ten years older than me, and I didn't really get to know him until long after his tour of duty. I do remember him dropping by the house in the early 1980s to visit when our uncle was recuperating from a hit-and-run accident -- this uncle was a bachelor and the rest of the family took turns caring for him (it was a terrible accident). Alan was always reading about the Vietnam war, and he'd talk about it to anyone who was willing to listen, but I had the impression that he was still trying to figure it out. Why were we there? Why was he asked to do the things he did? Was it worth it, in the end?
Vietnam damaged my cousin irreparably. He had a failed marriage behind him, troubled relationships with family members. He made a decent living, working for the Post Office, but never seemed to have enough money, was seriously in debt. In 2002, not long after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Alan shot himself. He had many problems, had cut himself from nearly everyone, but I can't help seeing a correlation.
Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years. But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review.
Tim O'Brien writes exquisitely about his experience in The Things They Carried. I recommend his book, and count it as a high point in my life as a reader, that I was able to hear him read from it and answer questions from an audience of students (my son among them) who were of draft age during the height of our involvement in Iraq. He reconstructs the shattered lives of his dead companions with poignancy and restraint. O'Brien writes from a distance of years, however. Herr writes from the thick of things and is unrestrained, angry, self-hating and self-pitying, filled with disgust and compassion, his reactions still raw, it felt to me in places:
I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn't squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.
When our cruise ship docks in Vietnam and I disembark in Danang, or Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I'll be seeing those places through my cousin Alan's eyes, thanks to Michael Herr.
February 20, 2012
I'd never heard Dispatches mentioned in speech or in print until I got a copy of it in a package sent to me from my uncle, who'd died three or four days earlier. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the basis for not only Full Metal Jacket but also, to some degree, Apocalypse Now.
It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers and anybody else who's willing. So you get to see all sorts of coping mechanisms and rationalizations and characters, including several who'd go on, slightly modified, to be characters in Full Metal Jacket. But the book brings up, mostly obliquely, two ideas that are very interesting to me.
The first is that the grunts consistently call the correspondents crazy. This makes sense at first; the grunts are forced to be there, and, given the chance, most of them would leave instantly. So it's a mystery to them why the correspondents don't feel roughly the same way. And it's unclear whether Herr is conscious of the main difference between him and them, w/r/t leaving. He can, which automatically makes it unnecessary. Just the idea of being able to peace out when things get really nasty would have to be a pretty significant sleep aid. And Herr makes himself look a little foolish every time he mentions how badass he feels, staying there, because he may know what it's like to be in Vietnam, but he has no idea what it might feel like to be stuck in Vietnam.
The second is the question of what exactly it is that makes Vietnam so much more relentlessly horrifying to our soldiers than any other war we'd fought up to that point (and possibly any war since). There are all the obvious answers: they lacked widespread homefront support; the Vietcong were indistinguishable from their allies; success couldn't be measured because there was no clear "front" to show advances and retreats; the climate and weather were hellish; et cetera. But Herr has made me think of it in terms of broader trends in American culture (I'm sure these answers are obvious to some, but I really don't know much of anything about the Vietnam War, or American history, for that matter): mainly alienation of battle, and iconoclasm.
Alienation of battle makes sense. Before guns existed, you pretty much had to either kill your enemy face to face, or maybe shoot him with an arrow, but at any rate you had to be able to see him to kill him. Even in World War II, you were pretty likely to be able to see the people you were trying to kill. And the key thing there is that your enemy had to be able to see you in order to kill you. So if you weren't at the front, you could be reasonably sure of not being suddenly murdered. Vietnam was different. You'd fire into the jungle almost at random, wasting thousands of rounds of "suppressive fire," and you'd never even see who you were shooting at, until they were dead. So if that's the M.O., you'd have to admit to yourself that you could easily be killed without ever seeing your own killer. Add that to the possibility (read: probability) of ambushes, and the realities of guerrilla fighting, and you can see how American soldiers tended to be a wreck. Not that soldiers from other wars came home perfectly well-adjusted, but I think we can agree that the Vietnam War was a bit different.
Then there's iconoclasm. Anybody can defend his or her homeland; defense is a cause in and of itself. That's where the home team advantage comes from. But if you're going to fight an offensive war, you've got to have a cause. Religion is a common one, as is acquisition of wealth. Ours in Vietnam was a little shakier: democracy, or anti-communism. That worked well for the Cold War, but not as well for its proxy wars. If you have to come with something like the "domino effect" to explain your war, you're not going to get the kind of fanatical support that you need to win. From the troops or the home front, I mean. If you don't have a really compelling cause, you've got to have some faith. And, not that I know a lot about the 1960's and 1970's, but it seems to me that America's religious fervor was somewhat lacking compared to what it was during World War II and earlier. Actually, I don't know why I've been carrying on. Herr puts it way better than I could:
"...you couldn't blame anybody for believing anything...Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they'd killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends' underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pairs of socks. He took a lot of shit about it ("When you go to sleep we're gonna eat your fucking cookie"), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn't kidding."
Something has to replace religion, and in this case it's superstition. Come on, an oatmeal cookie? People went crazy because they had nothing to fall back on, nothing to believe would save them. Herr makes this abundantly clear, I think. Recommended for anyone interested in the Vietnam War.
It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers and anybody else who's willing. So you get to see all sorts of coping mechanisms and rationalizations and characters, including several who'd go on, slightly modified, to be characters in Full Metal Jacket. But the book brings up, mostly obliquely, two ideas that are very interesting to me.
The first is that the grunts consistently call the correspondents crazy. This makes sense at first; the grunts are forced to be there, and, given the chance, most of them would leave instantly. So it's a mystery to them why the correspondents don't feel roughly the same way. And it's unclear whether Herr is conscious of the main difference between him and them, w/r/t leaving. He can, which automatically makes it unnecessary. Just the idea of being able to peace out when things get really nasty would have to be a pretty significant sleep aid. And Herr makes himself look a little foolish every time he mentions how badass he feels, staying there, because he may know what it's like to be in Vietnam, but he has no idea what it might feel like to be stuck in Vietnam.
The second is the question of what exactly it is that makes Vietnam so much more relentlessly horrifying to our soldiers than any other war we'd fought up to that point (and possibly any war since). There are all the obvious answers: they lacked widespread homefront support; the Vietcong were indistinguishable from their allies; success couldn't be measured because there was no clear "front" to show advances and retreats; the climate and weather were hellish; et cetera. But Herr has made me think of it in terms of broader trends in American culture (I'm sure these answers are obvious to some, but I really don't know much of anything about the Vietnam War, or American history, for that matter): mainly alienation of battle, and iconoclasm.
Alienation of battle makes sense. Before guns existed, you pretty much had to either kill your enemy face to face, or maybe shoot him with an arrow, but at any rate you had to be able to see him to kill him. Even in World War II, you were pretty likely to be able to see the people you were trying to kill. And the key thing there is that your enemy had to be able to see you in order to kill you. So if you weren't at the front, you could be reasonably sure of not being suddenly murdered. Vietnam was different. You'd fire into the jungle almost at random, wasting thousands of rounds of "suppressive fire," and you'd never even see who you were shooting at, until they were dead. So if that's the M.O., you'd have to admit to yourself that you could easily be killed without ever seeing your own killer. Add that to the possibility (read: probability) of ambushes, and the realities of guerrilla fighting, and you can see how American soldiers tended to be a wreck. Not that soldiers from other wars came home perfectly well-adjusted, but I think we can agree that the Vietnam War was a bit different.
Then there's iconoclasm. Anybody can defend his or her homeland; defense is a cause in and of itself. That's where the home team advantage comes from. But if you're going to fight an offensive war, you've got to have a cause. Religion is a common one, as is acquisition of wealth. Ours in Vietnam was a little shakier: democracy, or anti-communism. That worked well for the Cold War, but not as well for its proxy wars. If you have to come with something like the "domino effect" to explain your war, you're not going to get the kind of fanatical support that you need to win. From the troops or the home front, I mean. If you don't have a really compelling cause, you've got to have some faith. And, not that I know a lot about the 1960's and 1970's, but it seems to me that America's religious fervor was somewhat lacking compared to what it was during World War II and earlier. Actually, I don't know why I've been carrying on. Herr puts it way better than I could:
"...you couldn't blame anybody for believing anything...Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they'd killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends' underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pairs of socks. He took a lot of shit about it ("When you go to sleep we're gonna eat your fucking cookie"), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn't kidding."
Something has to replace religion, and in this case it's superstition. Come on, an oatmeal cookie? People went crazy because they had nothing to fall back on, nothing to believe would save them. Herr makes this abundantly clear, I think. Recommended for anyone interested in the Vietnam War.
September 1, 2010
Made me curious about the spectral kingdoms and extinguished dynasties of pre-colonial Vietnam, the spooky historical geography which haunts Herr from under the French place names and American grids. Contemplating an unreal old map in his Saigon apartment, Herr knows “that for years now there had been no country here but the war”:
Herr senses continuity only in Saigon, that “unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia,” a Babylon of discotheque whoredom and American civilian contractors who rev their Harleys up the steps of Buddhist shrines. By contrast, Huế and Da Nang, seats of the vanished Nguyễn and Champa kingdoms, are like “remote closed societies, mute and intractable.” In Huế after the battle that demolished so much of the city, bouncing over debris in a jeep with a South Vietnamese major and his driver, Herr gets curious about the old Imperial Palace:
Besieged in Khe Sanh with the Marines, Herr looks up at the hills in which lurk NVA artillery positions, raiding parties and Annamese ghosts:
~
Reading this, I was surprised to find how historical the Vietnam War now feels. The slang, the jive, the racial tension, the rock lyrics—no longer yesterday, but much more distant. Our time has its own wars now. Growing up, Vietnam was “yesterday,” a war people my parents’ age were still trying to figure out. Two of my uncles were fucked by the experience; and my dad will always be grateful for his medical draft deferment. As a boy with appropriately violent media tastes growing up in the 1980s and early 90s, I was drenched by images of that war: rice patties, rotor wash, ambushes, shotgun bongs, black pajamas. On family trips to the video rental place, I went straight for the war movies, was a repeat-renter of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Flight of the Intruder and all that other shit. I was a faithful viewer of Tour of Duty—its intro theme was “Paint it Black”!—and I even watched reruns of China Beach on Lifetime (not much action, but Dana Delaney was—is—fine).Vietnam was to me what WWII (at least as represented by episodes of Combat! and John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima) was to Herr and the grunts he wrote about: the shadow, the test, the Last War.
And as the Last War it held a glamour no amount of my dad’s ranting, no negative societal consensus—Disaster, Nightmare, Fuck-Up—could ever entirely dissipate. One of Herr’s colleagues, Tim Page, was approached by a publisher to do a Vietnam book whose aim would be to “take glamour out of war.” Page howled: “It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex!” He was right to laugh. Put as much gore on camera as you like, young men will not be dissuaded. They will still think: how would I stand up in that? Could I handle that? “Realism” only makes war sexier. There is no such thing as an anti-war film, said Truffaut.
The terrain above II Corps, where it ran along the Laotian border and into the DMZ, was seldom referred to as the Highlands by Americans. It had been a matter of military expediency to impose a new set of references over Vietnam’s older, truer being, an imposition that began most simply with the division of one country into two and continued—it had its logic—with the further division of South Vietnam into four clearly defined tactical corps. It had been one of the exigencies of the war, and if it effectively obliterated even some of the most obvious geographical distinctions, it made for clear communication…
Herr senses continuity only in Saigon, that “unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia,” a Babylon of discotheque whoredom and American civilian contractors who rev their Harleys up the steps of Buddhist shrines. By contrast, Huế and Da Nang, seats of the vanished Nguyễn and Champa kingdoms, are like “remote closed societies, mute and intractable.” In Huế after the battle that demolished so much of the city, bouncing over debris in a jeep with a South Vietnamese major and his driver, Herr gets curious about the old Imperial Palace:
I’d been talking to Sergeant Dang about the Palace and about the line of emperors. When we stalled one last time at the foot of the moat bridge, I’d been asking him the name of the last emperor to occupy the throne. He smiled and shrugged, not so much because he didn’t know, more like it didn’t matter. “Major Trong is emperor now,” he said, and gunned the jeep into the Palace grounds.
Besieged in Khe Sanh with the Marines, Herr looks up at the hills in which lurk NVA artillery positions, raiding parties and Annamese ghosts:
Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all caparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game.
~
Reading this, I was surprised to find how historical the Vietnam War now feels. The slang, the jive, the racial tension, the rock lyrics—no longer yesterday, but much more distant. Our time has its own wars now. Growing up, Vietnam was “yesterday,” a war people my parents’ age were still trying to figure out. Two of my uncles were fucked by the experience; and my dad will always be grateful for his medical draft deferment. As a boy with appropriately violent media tastes growing up in the 1980s and early 90s, I was drenched by images of that war: rice patties, rotor wash, ambushes, shotgun bongs, black pajamas. On family trips to the video rental place, I went straight for the war movies, was a repeat-renter of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Flight of the Intruder and all that other shit. I was a faithful viewer of Tour of Duty—its intro theme was “Paint it Black”!—and I even watched reruns of China Beach on Lifetime (not much action, but Dana Delaney was—is—fine).Vietnam was to me what WWII (at least as represented by episodes of Combat! and John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima) was to Herr and the grunts he wrote about: the shadow, the test, the Last War.
And as the Last War it held a glamour no amount of my dad’s ranting, no negative societal consensus—Disaster, Nightmare, Fuck-Up—could ever entirely dissipate. One of Herr’s colleagues, Tim Page, was approached by a publisher to do a Vietnam book whose aim would be to “take glamour out of war.” Page howled: “It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex!” He was right to laugh. Put as much gore on camera as you like, young men will not be dissuaded. They will still think: how would I stand up in that? Could I handle that? “Realism” only makes war sexier. There is no such thing as an anti-war film, said Truffaut.
February 4, 2020
In 1969 I was a kid oblivious to all the clues of the Vietnam War around me ... the Sunday picnic trips to Fort Knox where my uncle was training and from where he'd eventually be sent to serve in Southeast Asia, driving trucks in an out of the hot zones, constantly sniped at, but surviving to return a somewhat angry man. I remember trips to the George Patton Museum there, where large paintings of Air Cav choppers graced the upper walls dramatically with slogans like "winning the war with air power," etc.
During those days, after school, me and my sister would get off the bus and head for a neighbor's house across the street where we'd be baby sat till Mom came home from work. One day a guy named Mike began showing up at the baby sitter's house. He was the oldest son, as it happened, and he was quiet to the point of being unnerving. Mike was tanned and handsome -- like one of those NASA astronauts on TV -- and he kept to himself, usually devoting his days to tinkering with cars in the driveway and garage. Mike and his cars were like a symbiotic ritual. He'd sometimes have an AM radio going along with an unfiltered cigarette as he clanked around on a transmission... the Beatles singing about "Lady Madonna" on those long ago sunny days. Mike's resolute standoffishness seemed intimidating to me, but at the same time the clockwork-like certainty of his simple therapeutic activity provided an odd sense of comfort. He'd just gotten back from Vietnam and he had a weird stiff hunch to his shoulders that kept his head always slightly angled off center -- apparently the result of a war souvenir. One day Mike showed us slides he'd had made from his Vietnam photos. The room went dark and the fan of the slide projector whirred and blew out hot air as the images filled the wall, and all I can remember was a lot of sameness... huts and greenery and canvas-covered dirty-brown things. It was one of the few times he seemed sociable. It was all he could do to give us any hint of where he'd been and what he'd done. In the end, I don't think Mike was as scary as my kid brain supposed. I was just ignorant. But, in that way, I was not too far from most of the American adults at the time.
Most Americans had set ideas about the war and wrenched those to fit their views regardless of all facts, logic, decency. Those who weren't there mostly got their news of the war from the news, and if the news was bad or the eyewitness accounts contradictory to the official story, then fake news worked just as well then as now. For all too many, it was all a big football game; you were either for the home team or you were for the out-of-town rivals; a commie, or something similarly dirty. Armchair strategizing happened all across the American Barco-lounger landscape... "we could win this thing if we'd only..." or "we coulda won it if we'd only..." etc., etc. These face-saving platitudes were part of the soundtrack of American domestic life in the 1970s.
I won't say much about Michael Herr's journalistic tour de force, Dispatches, as by now it's an old book with a long trail of glowing reviews out there for you to peruse. The late Herr was a Kentucky boy out of Lexington, something I didn't know, and even more embarrassingly I was unaware that he'd contributed dialogue to a cherished film, Apocalypse Now, not at all surprising given the similarities of tone between that artful epic and this incomparable book.
Dispatches is a litany of horrible, terrible things written about gorgeously. It is immediately immersive and stays that way unwaveringly to the last word. It is un-putdownable, a masterpiece, even in those moments were some of the jaded periodisms now come off as slightly precious. I can't imagine there being a better book affording an on-the-ground feel for the war and the cross-sections of perceptions and the disconnects between the regular grunts and the euphemism-spewing generals, the kind who called a typhoon "an advantageous change in the weather."
If you want a traditional historical context for the war, read something like Stanley Karnow's Vietnam first. If you want to understand the mentality that led us there, read Graham Greene's lovely novel, The Quiet American. But, if you want a poetic, impeccably crafted, heartfelt, passionately wrought, deeply thoughtful, uncompromising, and complex emotional prismatic canvas of war and its mad surreality, this is your first stop.
This svelte book has the feel of a thousand-page epic. It's a powerhouse experience, and gets my very rare Silver Holy Grail.
And I cannot wait to read it again.
eg/kr '20
During those days, after school, me and my sister would get off the bus and head for a neighbor's house across the street where we'd be baby sat till Mom came home from work. One day a guy named Mike began showing up at the baby sitter's house. He was the oldest son, as it happened, and he was quiet to the point of being unnerving. Mike was tanned and handsome -- like one of those NASA astronauts on TV -- and he kept to himself, usually devoting his days to tinkering with cars in the driveway and garage. Mike and his cars were like a symbiotic ritual. He'd sometimes have an AM radio going along with an unfiltered cigarette as he clanked around on a transmission... the Beatles singing about "Lady Madonna" on those long ago sunny days. Mike's resolute standoffishness seemed intimidating to me, but at the same time the clockwork-like certainty of his simple therapeutic activity provided an odd sense of comfort. He'd just gotten back from Vietnam and he had a weird stiff hunch to his shoulders that kept his head always slightly angled off center -- apparently the result of a war souvenir. One day Mike showed us slides he'd had made from his Vietnam photos. The room went dark and the fan of the slide projector whirred and blew out hot air as the images filled the wall, and all I can remember was a lot of sameness... huts and greenery and canvas-covered dirty-brown things. It was one of the few times he seemed sociable. It was all he could do to give us any hint of where he'd been and what he'd done. In the end, I don't think Mike was as scary as my kid brain supposed. I was just ignorant. But, in that way, I was not too far from most of the American adults at the time.
Most Americans had set ideas about the war and wrenched those to fit their views regardless of all facts, logic, decency. Those who weren't there mostly got their news of the war from the news, and if the news was bad or the eyewitness accounts contradictory to the official story, then fake news worked just as well then as now. For all too many, it was all a big football game; you were either for the home team or you were for the out-of-town rivals; a commie, or something similarly dirty. Armchair strategizing happened all across the American Barco-lounger landscape... "we could win this thing if we'd only..." or "we coulda won it if we'd only..." etc., etc. These face-saving platitudes were part of the soundtrack of American domestic life in the 1970s.
I won't say much about Michael Herr's journalistic tour de force, Dispatches, as by now it's an old book with a long trail of glowing reviews out there for you to peruse. The late Herr was a Kentucky boy out of Lexington, something I didn't know, and even more embarrassingly I was unaware that he'd contributed dialogue to a cherished film, Apocalypse Now, not at all surprising given the similarities of tone between that artful epic and this incomparable book.
Dispatches is a litany of horrible, terrible things written about gorgeously. It is immediately immersive and stays that way unwaveringly to the last word. It is un-putdownable, a masterpiece, even in those moments were some of the jaded periodisms now come off as slightly precious. I can't imagine there being a better book affording an on-the-ground feel for the war and the cross-sections of perceptions and the disconnects between the regular grunts and the euphemism-spewing generals, the kind who called a typhoon "an advantageous change in the weather."
If you want a traditional historical context for the war, read something like Stanley Karnow's Vietnam first. If you want to understand the mentality that led us there, read Graham Greene's lovely novel, The Quiet American. But, if you want a poetic, impeccably crafted, heartfelt, passionately wrought, deeply thoughtful, uncompromising, and complex emotional prismatic canvas of war and its mad surreality, this is your first stop.
This svelte book has the feel of a thousand-page epic. It's a powerhouse experience, and gets my very rare Silver Holy Grail.
And I cannot wait to read it again.
eg/kr '20
February 17, 2018
[2.5 stars] I don't doubt that Dispatches is a Great War Book. The fault is with me. I'm not a good non-fiction war book reader. All the battles and shooting and carnage that Herr reports on made me feel numb.
Interestingly, two of my all-time favorite works of fiction are about war: The Things They Carried (Vietnam) and Redeployment (Iraq/Afghanistan). Both of these powerful books brought me much closer to understanding the experience of war than Dispatches did.
Interestingly, two of my all-time favorite works of fiction are about war: The Things They Carried (Vietnam) and Redeployment (Iraq/Afghanistan). Both of these powerful books brought me much closer to understanding the experience of war than Dispatches did.
January 23, 2023
"Despachos" (1977) de Michael Herr é uma das obras sobre a guerra americana no Vietname mais citadas, o que dá conta do valor deste livro enquanto documento. O jornalista Michael Herr foi cobrir a guerra em 1967, com 27 anos, tendo passado lá 3 anos. Em 1977 publicou esta obra como testemunho direto do que lá passou. O mesmo testemunho que depois foi a base dos dois filmes mais importantes sobre o conflito — "Apocalypse Now" (1979) e "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) — nos quais participou na escrita dos guiões.
Dito isto, se como eu viveram o auge do cinema sobre o Vietname, nos anos 1980/90, e viram os dois filmes acima, e alguns dos filmes principais filmes dessa fase — "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "First Blood" (1982), "The Killing Fields" (1984), "Birdy" (1984), "Platoon" (1986), "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987), "Hamburger Hill" (1987), "Casualties of War" (1989) "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), "Jacob's Ladder" (1990), "Hearts of Darkness" (1991), Heaven & Earth (1993) — então dificilmente aqui encontrão algo que não tenham já conhecimento.
Naturalmente, isto devia ser visto ao contrário. Os filmes é que não trazem quase nada de novo face ao livro que precede todos estes filmes. Aliás, o único filme que precede o livro é o péssimo "The Green Berets" (1968) com John Wayne, que Herr muito bem aqui critica. Mas tenho de dizer que vivi muito de perto esta fase do cinema. Durante muitos anos "Apocalypse Now" foi o meu filme de sempre, tendo-o visto mais de 20 vezes. Por isso, ao ler apenas agora a obra de Herr, não consegui deixar de a contaminar com toda a minha experiência pessoal cinematográfica. O processo de leitura buscava recriar em mim algo que não conseguia deixar de repescar das memórias desses filmes.
Assim, a leitura acabou sendo bastante aborrecida, porque ausente de novidade, mas talvez pior, porque já não tenho 20 anos, tendo acabado a sentir todo o excesso de arrogância americana no discurso de Herr. Algo que era natural em todo esse cinema dos anos 80-90, mas que nessa altura eu aceitava bem. Hoje, e depois de ter lido obras como o belíssimo "O Simpatizante" de Viet Thanh Nguyen ou a belíssima novela gráfica "The Best We Could Do" de Thi Bui, em que nos é dado a ver o outro lado da guerra, não me consigo ligar mais a nada disto. O modo como Herr apresenta todo o descaramento e arrogância americana impressiona e afasta. Claro que sem todo esse sentimento, nunca teria sido possível convencer o governo americano, e os seus contribuintes, a enterrar milhares de milhões de dólares naquela guerra, tal como estão agora a fazer na Ucrânia.
Mas como disse, este livro é um documento que vai continuar a ser lido por muitos e muitos anos sempre que alguém quiser tentar perceber o que se passou no terreno naquela guerra. Por isso a excelente tradução portuguesa do Paulo Faria, que veio tantos anos depois, apenas editado pela Antígona em 2019, continua a ser bastante relevante.
Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Dito isto, se como eu viveram o auge do cinema sobre o Vietname, nos anos 1980/90, e viram os dois filmes acima, e alguns dos filmes principais filmes dessa fase — "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "First Blood" (1982), "The Killing Fields" (1984), "Birdy" (1984), "Platoon" (1986), "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987), "Hamburger Hill" (1987), "Casualties of War" (1989) "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), "Jacob's Ladder" (1990), "Hearts of Darkness" (1991), Heaven & Earth (1993) — então dificilmente aqui encontrão algo que não tenham já conhecimento.
Naturalmente, isto devia ser visto ao contrário. Os filmes é que não trazem quase nada de novo face ao livro que precede todos estes filmes. Aliás, o único filme que precede o livro é o péssimo "The Green Berets" (1968) com John Wayne, que Herr muito bem aqui critica. Mas tenho de dizer que vivi muito de perto esta fase do cinema. Durante muitos anos "Apocalypse Now" foi o meu filme de sempre, tendo-o visto mais de 20 vezes. Por isso, ao ler apenas agora a obra de Herr, não consegui deixar de a contaminar com toda a minha experiência pessoal cinematográfica. O processo de leitura buscava recriar em mim algo que não conseguia deixar de repescar das memórias desses filmes.
Assim, a leitura acabou sendo bastante aborrecida, porque ausente de novidade, mas talvez pior, porque já não tenho 20 anos, tendo acabado a sentir todo o excesso de arrogância americana no discurso de Herr. Algo que era natural em todo esse cinema dos anos 80-90, mas que nessa altura eu aceitava bem. Hoje, e depois de ter lido obras como o belíssimo "O Simpatizante" de Viet Thanh Nguyen ou a belíssima novela gráfica "The Best We Could Do" de Thi Bui, em que nos é dado a ver o outro lado da guerra, não me consigo ligar mais a nada disto. O modo como Herr apresenta todo o descaramento e arrogância americana impressiona e afasta. Claro que sem todo esse sentimento, nunca teria sido possível convencer o governo americano, e os seus contribuintes, a enterrar milhares de milhões de dólares naquela guerra, tal como estão agora a fazer na Ucrânia.
Mas como disse, este livro é um documento que vai continuar a ser lido por muitos e muitos anos sempre que alguém quiser tentar perceber o que se passou no terreno naquela guerra. Por isso a excelente tradução portuguesa do Paulo Faria, que veio tantos anos depois, apenas editado pela Antígona em 2019, continua a ser bastante relevante.
Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
June 23, 2022
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
“No one could write like Michael Herr.” So begins The Paris Review obit for Michael Herr. Just read a paragraph or two of this masterpiece and you’ll probably agree. I do. Read a few more pages and you begin to realize that literally everything about the Viet Nam War that entered into popular American culture is from this book and this writer.
Of course, he “cowrote” Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, and he did the voice over for Apocalypse Now. But read this book and a lot more of his words come falling out of the tree of Nam war memories, like the famous moment in Apocalypse Now (not even long enough to be a scene that begins with this priceless exchange:
“Who’s the commanding officer here?”
“Ain’t you?”
We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher.
“Put that fucker away,” the Marine said, as though to himself. He drew the weapon, opened the breach and dropped in a round that looked like a great swollen bullet, listening very carefully all the while to the shrieking. He placed the M-79 over his left forearm and aimed for a second before firing.
There was an enormous flash on the wire 200 meters away, a spray of orange sparks, and then everything was still except for the roll of some bombs exploding kilometers away and the sound of the M-79 being opened, closed again and returned to the holster. Nothing changed on the Marine’s face, nothing, and he moved back into the darkness.
I don’t know what I like more about this book: his almost giddy excitement of riding the crest of the wave of the entire era of the 60s, or his scared shitless depiction of the actual fighting.
The short book is filled with “you can’t make this shit up” moments that are too numerous and too spot-on to recite, but I’ll throw out one or two, starting with this gem:
“If you get hit,” a medic told me, “we can chopper you back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes.”
“If you get hit real bad,” a corpsman said, “they’ll get your case to Japan in twelve hours.”
“If you get killed,” a spec 4 from Graves promised, “we’ll have you home in a week.”
Gallows humor like only a soldier can utter.
There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.”
Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language.
As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try.
But don’t take my word for it, read the damn book. I can’t understand why this isn’t require reading for all American high school kids. I wasn’t cool enough in university to read this, although it’s been on my list forever. I could never get it at the Seattle library and never found it in print. Now I don’t read books in print form, but better late than never and it’s definitely better for my old eyes to have read it on my eBook.
“No one could write like Michael Herr.” So begins The Paris Review obit for Michael Herr. Just read a paragraph or two of this masterpiece and you’ll probably agree. I do. Read a few more pages and you begin to realize that literally everything about the Viet Nam War that entered into popular American culture is from this book and this writer.
Of course, he “cowrote” Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, and he did the voice over for Apocalypse Now. But read this book and a lot more of his words come falling out of the tree of Nam war memories, like the famous moment in Apocalypse Now (not even long enough to be a scene that begins with this priceless exchange:
“Who’s the commanding officer here?”
“Ain’t you?”
We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher.
“Put that fucker away,” the Marine said, as though to himself. He drew the weapon, opened the breach and dropped in a round that looked like a great swollen bullet, listening very carefully all the while to the shrieking. He placed the M-79 over his left forearm and aimed for a second before firing.
There was an enormous flash on the wire 200 meters away, a spray of orange sparks, and then everything was still except for the roll of some bombs exploding kilometers away and the sound of the M-79 being opened, closed again and returned to the holster. Nothing changed on the Marine’s face, nothing, and he moved back into the darkness.
I don’t know what I like more about this book: his almost giddy excitement of riding the crest of the wave of the entire era of the 60s, or his scared shitless depiction of the actual fighting.
The short book is filled with “you can’t make this shit up” moments that are too numerous and too spot-on to recite, but I’ll throw out one or two, starting with this gem:
“If you get hit,” a medic told me, “we can chopper you back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes.”
“If you get hit real bad,” a corpsman said, “they’ll get your case to Japan in twelve hours.”
“If you get killed,” a spec 4 from Graves promised, “we’ll have you home in a week.”
Gallows humor like only a soldier can utter.
There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.”
Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language.
As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try.
But don’t take my word for it, read the damn book. I can’t understand why this isn’t require reading for all American high school kids. I wasn’t cool enough in university to read this, although it’s been on my list forever. I could never get it at the Seattle library and never found it in print. Now I don’t read books in print form, but better late than never and it’s definitely better for my old eyes to have read it on my eBook.
June 29, 2015
the writing is glib, self-important and embarrassing in that desperate-to-be-cool kind of way, which gets in the way of what is ostensibly the *actual* subject - the vietnam war. instead, it seems that the vietnam war was merely a canvas for the real subject of the book, his own writing, which is unfortunately completely insufferable.
"Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar." gtfo. worst.
"Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar." gtfo. worst.
January 21, 2024
Dude can write!!! The first full chapter, “Breathing In”, is a breathless masterpiece putting you right in the swirling mess of it, reaching out to all aspects of the war and pulling them in as it sucks you in with it. But this is not all. In “Khe Sanh” Herr changes pace for a slower, more sparsely populated narrative, which despite the lower octave does not let up in intensity or observation, and finally breaks out of the surrounded marine base and shifts to a series of grimly funny scenes with the military managers of the war. “Illumination Rounds” opens with one of the most terribly realistic scenes in the book and continues to strobe individual scenes to create an overall picture of joyous horror, the joy being primarily that one can read about it as if it had just occurred from the distant, though not moral, safety of time.
In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words. At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon.
The impact of this book is stronger for the fact that it is all straight reporting, and in my view overtakes fiction on the war such as “The Things They Carried” because it is pure fact and because it is able to contrast the statements and positions of military officers and government agents against the perspectives of the foot soldiers.
If you read no other book about Vietnam, read this book. It is a brutal, good read.
--thanks Parenthetical!
In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words. At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon.
The impact of this book is stronger for the fact that it is all straight reporting, and in my view overtakes fiction on the war such as “The Things They Carried” because it is pure fact and because it is able to contrast the statements and positions of military officers and government agents against the perspectives of the foot soldiers.
If you read no other book about Vietnam, read this book. It is a brutal, good read.
--thanks Parenthetical!
January 28, 2019
Nulla ti potrà colpire
Dopotutto le storie di guerra non sono altro che storie di persone, scrive Michael Herr. Tra malinconia e coscienza del sangue, l'autore americano trova il coraggio di aggiungere, tra le pieghe del reportage storico che risveglia nella riflessione del lettore uno stato d'eccezione, controintuitivo, alcune parole definitive: ”Qualcuno, ma si trattava di casi estremi, trovava che quell'esperienza era stata semplicemente meravigliosa. Io credo che il Vietnam sia ciò che abbiamo avuto al posto di un'infanzia felice”. In questo testo, i soldati sono scissi tra la morte e la pace, con un corpo forte e deviato che si specchia nella vittima, nel lato peggiore dell'essere. È una terra arrabbiata quella descritta, tra giungla e colline, dove nessuno può proteggersi, dove nessuna ombra può più persistere, dove gli uomini non sanno come sentirsi vivi e diversi dai propri compagni perduti. Informazioni negli occhi, domande disperse sulla pelle, piombo che risuona nell'aria. Can Tho, Nha Trang, Saigon, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Quan Ngai, Danang, Hue, Khe Sanh. L'esperienza della guerra, raccontata con ossessione e senso dell'orrore, ha prodotto, nelle pagine di Herr, una potente e commovente narrazione bellica, che ha caratteri allucinatori e segmenti misteriosi, sullo sfondo di un'umanità insensata e disintegrata dalla tragedia.
Dopotutto le storie di guerra non sono altro che storie di persone, scrive Michael Herr. Tra malinconia e coscienza del sangue, l'autore americano trova il coraggio di aggiungere, tra le pieghe del reportage storico che risveglia nella riflessione del lettore uno stato d'eccezione, controintuitivo, alcune parole definitive: ”Qualcuno, ma si trattava di casi estremi, trovava che quell'esperienza era stata semplicemente meravigliosa. Io credo che il Vietnam sia ciò che abbiamo avuto al posto di un'infanzia felice”. In questo testo, i soldati sono scissi tra la morte e la pace, con un corpo forte e deviato che si specchia nella vittima, nel lato peggiore dell'essere. È una terra arrabbiata quella descritta, tra giungla e colline, dove nessuno può proteggersi, dove nessuna ombra può più persistere, dove gli uomini non sanno come sentirsi vivi e diversi dai propri compagni perduti. Informazioni negli occhi, domande disperse sulla pelle, piombo che risuona nell'aria. Can Tho, Nha Trang, Saigon, Qui Nhon, Pleiku, Quan Ngai, Danang, Hue, Khe Sanh. L'esperienza della guerra, raccontata con ossessione e senso dell'orrore, ha prodotto, nelle pagine di Herr, una potente e commovente narrazione bellica, che ha caratteri allucinatori e segmenti misteriosi, sullo sfondo di un'umanità insensata e disintegrata dalla tragedia.
March 25, 2022
Li este livro há muitos anos e quis logo traduzi-lo. Em 2019, uma conjugação feliz de circunstâncias levou a que a Antígona publicasse esta tradução, da minha lavra.
Em 1967, com 27 anos, Michael Herr (1940-2016) partiu para o Vietname como correspondente da revista «Esquire». Pormenor importante: foi ele que insistiu em partir, nada a isso o obrigou. Chegou a Saigão em Novembro de 1967, nas vésperas do início da fase mais violenta da guerra. Com efeito, a 30 de Janeiro de 1968 os norte-vietnamitas lançaram a ofensiva do Tet, de efeitos devastadores. Herr esteve presente na batalha de Hue, cidade imperial vietnamita destruída nesta ofensiva, e esteve também no famoso cerco de Khe Sanh (junto à fronteira vietnamita), que decorreu de Janeiro a Julho de 1968.
Ou seja, Herr assistiu ao vivo ao que se passou no Vietname em 1968, o ano de todos os perigos, o ano do fim das ilusões. Em 1969, regressou aos EUA, e publicou «Dispatches» em 1977. Mais tarde, participou na escrita dos monólogos de «Apocalypse Now» (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) e foi co-autor do argumento de «Full Metal Jacket»/«Nascido Para Matar», de Kubrick (1987). Quem viu este último filme recorda certamente a batalha urbana ali encenada, que se passa precisamente em Hue. Já agora: quem ler «Despachos» e vir estes dois filmes reconhecerá em ambos cenas extraídas, sem tirar nem pôr, do livro. Apenas um exemplo: a famosíssima cena de «Apocalypse Now» em que, nas trincheiras americanas junto à ponte de Do Lung, um soldado dispara uma granada para matar um vietcong preso no arame farpado.
«Despachos» é, antes de mais, um excelente livro sobre a Guerra do Vietname. É também um excelente livro sobre a guerra. Mas não se trata de um livro de denúncia. «Denúncia» implica pormo-nos de fora de uma situação e apontarmos uma iniquidade. Toda a denúncia tem as suas limitações (já que não deixa de ser uma postura relativamente confortável). Não me interpretem mal. Há muita coisa para denunciar na Guerra do Vietname, que foi, em certa medida, a guerra que pôs fim a uma certa inocência da América e, em certa medida, à nossa inocência colectiva. Representou o fim da ideia de que os EUA se podiam assumir como uma espécie de reserva moral das democracias.
Herr vai muito além da mera denúncia e tira-nos do nosso conforto. Num registo perturbador e clarividente, diz-nos: «Se o horror fosse a única cor na paleta da guerra, há muito que teria deixado de haver guerras.» (cito as palavras dele num excelente documentário de Coco Schrijber, «First Kill», de 2001). Diz-nos que a guerra satisfaz certas pulsões profundas que medram em nós. Enquanto não reconhecermos essas pulsões e não as tentarmos compreender, o mesmo ciclo de violência continuará a repetir-se. Só nos restam duas alternativas, portanto: fingirmos que não é assim ou percebermos que assim é e tentarmos perceber porquê, para quebrarmos este ciclo infernal.
Há aqui uma postura de pessimismo, mas trata-se de um pessimismo lúcido, que me faz lembrar aquela vez em que Cormac McCarthy afirmou: «Sou pessimista acerca de muitas coisas, mas não vejo razão para me sentir deprimido por causa disso.» E que me faz lembrar Orwell («1984»): «A imagem do futuro é a imagem de uma bota a calcar um rosto humano.»
Ao descrever o que sentia durante um bombardeamento ou tiroteio, Herr diz-nos que era um sentimento confuso e torrencial, e que, depois de muito pensar, percebeu que era o mesmo que tinha sentido da primeira vez que despira uma rapariga. «A guerra nunca era aborrecida.»
Houve razões mais íntimas para eu fazer esta tradução. Fiz um ano de vida no dia 30 de Janeiro de 1968. Foi precisamente na noite de 30 para 31 de Janeiro de 1968 que começou a ofensiva do Tet. O meu pai (alferes miliciano médico) desembarcou a 1 de Novembro de 1967 no porto de Nacala (Moçambique) para participar na Guerra Colonial, o mesmo mês em que Herr chegou ao Vietname. Em 1969, o meu pai veio-se embora da guerra, o mesmo ano em que Herr regressou a casa.
Ainda Michael Herr: «Creio que o Vietname foi o que tivemos em lugar de uma infância feliz.»
Em 1967, com 27 anos, Michael Herr (1940-2016) partiu para o Vietname como correspondente da revista «Esquire». Pormenor importante: foi ele que insistiu em partir, nada a isso o obrigou. Chegou a Saigão em Novembro de 1967, nas vésperas do início da fase mais violenta da guerra. Com efeito, a 30 de Janeiro de 1968 os norte-vietnamitas lançaram a ofensiva do Tet, de efeitos devastadores. Herr esteve presente na batalha de Hue, cidade imperial vietnamita destruída nesta ofensiva, e esteve também no famoso cerco de Khe Sanh (junto à fronteira vietnamita), que decorreu de Janeiro a Julho de 1968.
Ou seja, Herr assistiu ao vivo ao que se passou no Vietname em 1968, o ano de todos os perigos, o ano do fim das ilusões. Em 1969, regressou aos EUA, e publicou «Dispatches» em 1977. Mais tarde, participou na escrita dos monólogos de «Apocalypse Now» (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) e foi co-autor do argumento de «Full Metal Jacket»/«Nascido Para Matar», de Kubrick (1987). Quem viu este último filme recorda certamente a batalha urbana ali encenada, que se passa precisamente em Hue. Já agora: quem ler «Despachos» e vir estes dois filmes reconhecerá em ambos cenas extraídas, sem tirar nem pôr, do livro. Apenas um exemplo: a famosíssima cena de «Apocalypse Now» em que, nas trincheiras americanas junto à ponte de Do Lung, um soldado dispara uma granada para matar um vietcong preso no arame farpado.
«Despachos» é, antes de mais, um excelente livro sobre a Guerra do Vietname. É também um excelente livro sobre a guerra. Mas não se trata de um livro de denúncia. «Denúncia» implica pormo-nos de fora de uma situação e apontarmos uma iniquidade. Toda a denúncia tem as suas limitações (já que não deixa de ser uma postura relativamente confortável). Não me interpretem mal. Há muita coisa para denunciar na Guerra do Vietname, que foi, em certa medida, a guerra que pôs fim a uma certa inocência da América e, em certa medida, à nossa inocência colectiva. Representou o fim da ideia de que os EUA se podiam assumir como uma espécie de reserva moral das democracias.
Herr vai muito além da mera denúncia e tira-nos do nosso conforto. Num registo perturbador e clarividente, diz-nos: «Se o horror fosse a única cor na paleta da guerra, há muito que teria deixado de haver guerras.» (cito as palavras dele num excelente documentário de Coco Schrijber, «First Kill», de 2001). Diz-nos que a guerra satisfaz certas pulsões profundas que medram em nós. Enquanto não reconhecermos essas pulsões e não as tentarmos compreender, o mesmo ciclo de violência continuará a repetir-se. Só nos restam duas alternativas, portanto: fingirmos que não é assim ou percebermos que assim é e tentarmos perceber porquê, para quebrarmos este ciclo infernal.
Há aqui uma postura de pessimismo, mas trata-se de um pessimismo lúcido, que me faz lembrar aquela vez em que Cormac McCarthy afirmou: «Sou pessimista acerca de muitas coisas, mas não vejo razão para me sentir deprimido por causa disso.» E que me faz lembrar Orwell («1984»): «A imagem do futuro é a imagem de uma bota a calcar um rosto humano.»
Ao descrever o que sentia durante um bombardeamento ou tiroteio, Herr diz-nos que era um sentimento confuso e torrencial, e que, depois de muito pensar, percebeu que era o mesmo que tinha sentido da primeira vez que despira uma rapariga. «A guerra nunca era aborrecida.»
Houve razões mais íntimas para eu fazer esta tradução. Fiz um ano de vida no dia 30 de Janeiro de 1968. Foi precisamente na noite de 30 para 31 de Janeiro de 1968 que começou a ofensiva do Tet. O meu pai (alferes miliciano médico) desembarcou a 1 de Novembro de 1967 no porto de Nacala (Moçambique) para participar na Guerra Colonial, o mesmo mês em que Herr chegou ao Vietname. Em 1969, o meu pai veio-se embora da guerra, o mesmo ano em que Herr regressou a casa.
Ainda Michael Herr: «Creio que o Vietname foi o que tivemos em lugar de uma infância feliz.»
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 19, 2021
When this came up in every list of “Best Nonfiction” books I reviewed, I decided it was time to add it to my list of books I’ve read - and loved. It truly is a marvel at conveying experiences unimaginable to those who weren’t there.
April 20, 2018
”Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, ci siamo stati tutti”
Corrispondente di guerra per Esquire al seguito delle truppe americane durante la guerra in Vietnam, Michael Herr racconta in questo libro dalle dimensioni tutto sommato contenute (poco più di 250 pagine) ciò che ha visto, che ha condiviso, che ha provato in un anno e mezzo trascorso al fronte (dal 1967 al 1969).
Considerato uno dei migliori libri sui conflitti armati che siano mai stati scritti, ha ispirato anche tanta cinematografia bellica, compresi film capolavoro come “Apocalypse now” e “Full metal jacket” (lo stesso Kubrick definì decisivo l’apporto di Herr alla sceneggiatura).
Un doloroso reportage in cui l’autore registra e racconta le fatiche quotidiane condivise con i soldati al fronte, l’allucinante sequenza di crudeltà che travolse un’intera generazione di ragazzi arruolati nell’esercito e scaraventati in una giungla dalla follia della guerra.
Che libro! Capolavoro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1kzd...
Corrispondente di guerra per Esquire al seguito delle truppe americane durante la guerra in Vietnam, Michael Herr racconta in questo libro dalle dimensioni tutto sommato contenute (poco più di 250 pagine) ciò che ha visto, che ha condiviso, che ha provato in un anno e mezzo trascorso al fronte (dal 1967 al 1969).
Considerato uno dei migliori libri sui conflitti armati che siano mai stati scritti, ha ispirato anche tanta cinematografia bellica, compresi film capolavoro come “Apocalypse now” e “Full metal jacket” (lo stesso Kubrick definì decisivo l’apporto di Herr alla sceneggiatura).
Un doloroso reportage in cui l’autore registra e racconta le fatiche quotidiane condivise con i soldati al fronte, l’allucinante sequenza di crudeltà che travolse un’intera generazione di ragazzi arruolati nell’esercito e scaraventati in una giungla dalla follia della guerra.
Che libro! Capolavoro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1kzd...
June 26, 2007
Fucking amazing. Supposedly the most famous journalistic account of the war in Vietnam... I wouldn't disagree. Nonfiction, but to me on par with any of O'Brien's work from a storytelling perspective, which is saying a lot. Outpaced the highest of expectations.
September 22, 2019
Absolutny sztos. Reportaż jak reportaż, ale jak to jest napisane!
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