Evan's Reviews > Dispatches

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