Jesus Christ, man. What a book.

One of the greatest Vietnam narratives I've ever read. Michael Herr was a screenwriter for both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. It is no surprise after reading this that Coppola and Kubrick would select Herr for this task. He is amazing.

I am a huge fan of Full Metal Jacket. Of course, Gustav Hasford's Short-Timers (an out-of-print book that is impossible to find for less than $80 online) was the basis for that story. However, this book felt almost like an extended sequel or spiritual twin, where instead of being a Marine, Joker was a war correspondent working for Esquire magazine. I could hear Joker's voice channeling through Herr, which I totally dug.

Herr's writing is beautiful and expressive. He brings you a grunt's-eye-view of the action. I never understood what was happening in the battle of Khe Sanh until I read this. I would read five more books about Vietnam if they were all this moving and good.

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.

Michael Herr's book Dispatches describes the author's experience as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. Dispatches allows the reader to understand the experiences of the soldiers in the Vietnam War. You as reader should experience the emotional side that a GI went through in this war.There was a lot of emotion described of the GI but the writing of it lacked cohesion. It had little structure and I felt disappointed. The first fifty pages are extremely hard to comprehend. There is a stream of information that comes across in bits and pieces of memories that are not sentences but rambling babble. For instance, page 44 "If milk snake could kill you,you might compare the mission and its arms to a big intertwined ball of baby milk snakes mostly they were there that innocent and about the conscious and a lot, one way or the other, had some satisfaction." Can anyone out there who read this book tell me what I have just read? Huh? It doesn't make sense. There are other numerous ramblings on in this book that make no sense at all either. Maybe this book would have a deeper meaning if your are a veteran of that war. It just seems Herr is writing in some drug induced dream. Reference to his own drug use and that of GIs are in this book. Maybe that was the intention of his writing to characterize Vietnam War as one unfocused mess. Thank you Vets that have served in Vietnam. I rather hear the story from you than this one.

I read this book once long ago. I still consider it a great book, but I found something missing this time around: humanity. I got the feeling Mr. Herr was just looking for quirky quotes to make soldiers look like fruit loops or, worse, psychotic killers. He totally missed anything about the other sides of their personalities. I have been around enough veterans to know that other side exists. I pictured him rushing off to a pen and paper every time he heard someone say something unusual and ignored any talk about, oh I don't know, maybe girlfriends? I will try and point out some sections which may or may not show what I mean.

Here's a war story it took him "a year to understand."--"Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened." Herr asked, "So what happened?" The guy just walks off in disgust. I guess it reflects the general hatred of newspeople trying to get stories. And, of course, the man already told him he didn't know what happened.

A correspondent once said to some soldiers in the jungle, "Gee, you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here." The soldiers "almost pissed themselves laughing."

A chopper is pulling soldiers out of a losing battle. Not everyone can fit. American GIs start shooting ARVN soldiers hanging on to the helicopter and pulling it down.

Famous story: Some reporters ask a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" He responds, "It's easy. You just don't lead 'em so much." Get it? Pretty funny, huh? But I wonder, "Are the reporters making a false assumption? Do the reporters get that they are being pranked?"

Herr claims a "serious tiger lady" was "going around on a Honda shooting American officers on the street with a .45." I have never been able to substantiate that story. One commander thought it was a man dressed in an ao dai because a .45 was "an awful lot of gun for an itty bitty Vietnamese woman."

Almost everyone had some sort of good luck charm. I know I had a St Christophers medal someone gave to me.

At Khe Sanh a man gets killed by a grenade rigged on the outhouse door. Everyone knew it was really a GI that did it.

"Going crazy was built into the tour."

"Load all the Friendlies onto ships and take them out to the South China Sea. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships."

"Most Vietnamese and most Montagnards considered each other inferior." I knew North Vietnamese who looked down on the South Vietnamese as sort of farmers or hicks. The North was more industrial.

The daily briefing was known as the Five O'Clock Follies.

Westmoreland did not want to lose at Khe Sanh. Johnson did not want "any damn Dinbinfoo." They assured the country that Khe Sanh would be held at all costs. The defenders became hostages, nearly 8,000 Americans and Vietnamese. Herr compares Khe Sanh to the "planted jar in Wallace Stevens's poem. It took dominion everywhere."

At a camp called Langvei, the defenders were overrun by Russian tanks.

The grunts seemed to run around more when they knew a television crew was around. Reminds me of a scene in Apocalypse Now.

This is an extraordinary telling of a journalist’s experiences covering the Vietnam war. It’s basically a memoir, but it reads like something so much more important than that. It is powerful and moving, and reiterates the value and importance of the free press as a counter to the lies of our “leaders”. Ageless message, especially poignant in 2018.

AMAZING

I'd kind of heard of this, but didn't know its significance and avoided reading about it while reading it. Turns out he later wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which makes sense because Vietnam film is 100% rooted in the language and stories of this book. I'm conflicted because it tells things as horribly as they were and yet within this book is the seed for the romanticism of the Vietnam war. All those movies and all those people I always felt were enjoying them for all the wrong reasons.

Vietnam. Crazy, huh? The last great boy's club. The last conscripted war. The first modern war.

Two-hundred pages and it took a long time to read. Because it crammed, and true. It's all true, so it hits hard, and if you skim you are missing real, harrowing stories. What a fucked up thing, a clearly defined period of time where a life is worth less than usual. A half-price sale on lives.

It's laced with contradictions, probably the most honest way to talk about war, especially war as murky as the Vietnam one. Herr takes all his internal mess and dumps it on the page. That is not a criticism.

(It's purely from an American point of view. Is it impossible for us to understand the East at war? At all? That film Eastwood made, the Japanese side of the Iwo Jima story, Letters from Iwo Jima. It was admirable, but the only clearly drawn characters in it were a general who'd spent a lot of time in the states and adopted a western mode of thinking and another young character who went against his orders.)

Michael Herr captures the feelings, the violence, and the insanity of the late 1960s. In 1969 I went to college instead of Vietnam and I graduated the year it all came crashing down. A significant portion of my youth was spent trying to understand from journalism what was happening in Southeast Asia; only later would I realize that the understanding I sought was not and could not be available from file-at-five journalism. Herr was accredited to Esquire and was free of that pressure. He explains why he went to Vietnam: “Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. 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.”

Herr does a great job of capturing the brutal jargon of the U.S. Administration when it spoke of the war. Kill ratios, right there in the paper on the dining table (I saw this in high school). The press got the facts but it missed the story: “…most of what the [U.S.:] Mission wanted to say to the American public was a psychotic vaudeville…” Herr says a very profound thing that I believe is characteristic of journalism generally, and might be applicable to Afghanistan today: “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history.”

Herr’s profiles of his colleagues are worth reading. Dana Story, Tim Page, and Sean Flynn to mention a few.

Here he records the conversation of some airborne troops that had survived the high casualties of the Dak To operation, as they wait for airlift out:
“You guys are so full of shit it’s coming out of your fucking ears!” one man was saying. PRAY FOR WAR was written on the side of his helmet, and he was talking mostly to a man whose helmet name was SWINGING DICK. “You were pissing up everything but your fucking toenails, Scudo, don’t you tell me you weren’t scared man, don’t you fucking dare, ‘cause I was right fucking THERE man, and I was scared SHIT! I was scared every fucking minute, and I’m no different from anybody else!”
t“Well big deal, candy ass,” Swinging Dick said. “You were scared.”
t“Damn straight! Damn straight! You’re dam fucking straight I was scared! You’re about the dumbest motherfucker I ever met, Scudo, but you’re not that dumb…”
tHe started to get up but his knees gave under him. He made a quick grasping spasm out of control, like a misfire in the nervous system, and when he fell back he brought a stack of M-16’s with him. They made a sharp clatter and everyone jerked and twitched out of the way, looking at each other as though they couldn’t remember for a minute whether they needed to find cover or not…they were all laughing, and Pray For War was laughing harder than any of them, so hard that it filled suddenly with air and cracked over into high giggles. When he lifted his face again it was all tracked with tears.
t“You gonna stand there, asshole?” he said to Swinging Dick. “Or are you gonna help me up on my fucking feet?”
Swinging Dick reached down and grabbed his wrists, locking them and pulling him up slowly until their faces were a couple of inches apart. For a second it looked like they were going to kiss.
t“Looking good,” Pray For War said. “Mmmm, Scudo, you are really looking good, man. It don’t look to me like you were scared at all up there. You only look like about ten thousand miles of bad road.”



My aspirations for a military career died with the Cambodia invasion of ’70. Without setting foot in Vietnam an American could scarcely avoid some kind of impact in those years. The morally bankrupt venture poisoned every aspect of life. Michael Herr captures it better for me than anyone.
t

Overall a very good book, that sits up there with any Vietnam story ever told. I think I expected a little more from the book that was the basis for the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but... When it came down to it, all that was taken from this book for those films were very minor details, short anecdotes and characters. There was so much of the book that was left untouched by Hollywood.

But the stories were good, and Herr's experience was very unique. There were angles on that war that were very new to me after reading the book, but... I think with all the time he was there, and all the missions he experienced first-hand, I expected a little more in the book. It is told in a very technical way, and not in any kind of narrative thread so it can get a little jumbled or confusing at times, but then again, perhaps that was what the Vietnam war was all about.

Here are three things that will be very helpful to you should you decide to read the book (they came in handy for me, and I wish I had looked at all this stuff before reading(:

- First.. A good glossary of terms and slang used during the war. Here is a link to one, http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history_... , though there are several if you just google it.

- Second. A map of Vietnam during the war. http://www.emersonkent.com/images/vie... is a good one. Pay special attention to the geographical locations of Saigon, Hanoi, Dak To, Danang, Pleiku, Hue, and Khe Sahn.

- Third. There is actually a sort of track listing in the front (actually credits for publishing rights). This along with other songs mentioned during the book provide a t soundtrack to the book. Make a playlist for yourself in Grooveshark or iTunes, it actually accompanies the book very well. I have provided the track listing below, in the order they appear in the book. It really added to the experience for me. Enjoy!

1. Tighten Up by Archie Bell & The Drells
2. Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
3. Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
4. Magical Mystery Tour by the BEatles
5. San Francisco by Scott McKenzie
6. For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield
7. Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding
8. Where Have All the Flowers Gone by the Kingston Trio
9. Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix
10. Ode to Billy Joe by Bobbie Gentry
11. Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan
12. Trouble Everyday by Frank Zappa
13. 2000 Light Years from Home by the Rolling Stones
14. Citadel by the Rolling Stones
15. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl by the Yardbirds
16. Galveston by Glen Campbell
17. Black is Black by Los Bravos
18. Hungry by Paul Revere & The Raiders
19. We Gotta Get Out of this Place by The Animals
20. Shotgun by Junior Walker & the Allstars

Βαθμολογία: 9/10

Ο Μάικλ Χερ κάλυψε τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ σαν ανταποκριτής του περιοδικού Esquire, από κάποια στιγμή μέσα στο 1967, μέχρι το 1969. Έκατσε στο Βιετνάμ δεκαοχτώ ολόκληρους μήνες και είδε τα πάντα. Έδωσε παρών σε μικρές και μεγάλες μάχες, είδε πτώματα στρατιωτών, πεζοναυτών και αμάχων, είδε σοβαρά τραυματισμένους, είδε απίστευτα τοπία κατεστραμμένα από τόννους εμπρηστικών βομβών, είδε διαλυμένες πόλεις και εγκαταλελειμμένα χωριά, γνώρισε ένα κάρο τρελαμένους τύπους, που είτε ήταν τρελαμένοι πριν καν πατήσουν στο Βιετνάμ είτε ήταν μια χαρά παιδιά που τρελάθηκαν από την παράνοια και το χάος του πολέμου... τέλος πάντων, είδε όλα αυτά που μπορεί να δει κανείς σ'έναν πόλεμο τέτοιου μεγέθους.

Ο Χερ δεν ήταν ένας δημοσιογράφος σαν όλους τους άλλους, δεν έγραφε αυτά που του έλεγαν οι υπεύθυνοι τύπου του στρατού, δεν ωραιοποιούσε καταστάσεις και πρόσωπα. Και αυτό το βιβλίο είναι όσο ωμό, ρεαλιστικό και παρανοϊκό θα περίμενε κανείς από ένα βιβλίο που περιγράφει την τρέλα και το χάος του πολέμου του Βιετνάμ. Ο συγγραφέας μας περιγράφει πολλές κουλές καταστάσεις, μας παρουσιάζει μερικούς πραγματικά αξιομνημόνευτους τύπους - απλούς φαντάρους, πεζοναύτες, άλλους ανταποκριτές, τρελαμένους φωτογράφους-, μας ταξιδεύει στις ζούγκλες, τις πόλεις, τα χωριά και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, μας βάζει στην μέση των μαχών, ανάμεσα στις σφαίρες, τις βόμβες ναπάλμ, τους όλμους και τα σράπνελ. Δεν υπάρχει αρχή, μέση και τέλος, παρά το απόλυτο χάος. Μην περιμένετε, δηλαδή, μια ιστορία με απόλυτη συνοχή. Αυτό το βιβλίο είναι το Βιετνάμ του '60, το Βιετνάμ του πολέμου. Δεν υπάρχει συνοχή σ'αυτό.

Αλλά δεν είναι μόνο αυτά που περιγράφει, οι καταστάσεις, τα τοπία και τα πρόσωπα που μας παρουσιάζει, οι ιστορίες που μας εξιστορεί, είναι και ο τρόπος του, το στιλ γραφής του, που είναι σαν ένα καλό τριπάρισμα. Αυτή η γραφή ταιριάζει απόλυτα με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ, έτσι καταφέρνει και περνάει στον αναγνώστη το χάος, την παράνοια και την τρέλα του πολέμου. Και αυτό μου άρεσε πολύ. Σίγουρα η γραφή δεν είναι για όλα τα γούστα, σε σημεία είναι ίσως και περίεργη, αλλά προσωπικά θα έλεγα ότι έτσι έπρεπε να είναι. Ένα στεγνό, δημοσιογραφικό στιλ γραφής θα έκανε την ιστορία να μοιάζει μ'ένα δελτίο τύπου του στρατού ή με μια περιγραφή ενός ιατροδικαστή που εξετάζει ένα πτώμα. Βαρεμάρα εις την δευτέρα. Τώρα το κείμενο είναι ζωντανό, διαβάζεται γρήγορα και δίχως ανάσα, αγχώνει τον αναγνώστη με τις περιγραφές, τον κάνει να δένεται με τους τρελαμένους τύπους που γνώρισε ο συγγραφέας στο Βιετνάμ.

Θα βάλω πέντε αστεράκια στο βιβλίο. Όχι απαραίτητα γιατί σαν λογοτεχνικό κείμενο είναι καλύτερο από ορισμένα άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα τέσσερα αστεράκια ή είναι εξίσου καλό με άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα επίσης πέντε αστεράκια, αλλά γιατί πολύ απλά με άρπαξε από τον γιακά και δεν με άφησε σε ησυχία παρά μέχρι που έφτασα στο τέλος. Με έσυρε στα ορύγματα, τα χαντάκια, τους ορυζώνες, τα δασώδη βουνά, τα καταφύγια και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, και μου έδειξε το σκληρό και παρανοϊκό πρόσωπο του πολέμου, που καταστρέφει κτίρια και τοπία αλλά κυρίως καταστρέφει ανθρώπινες ψυχές. Επίσης, είναι από τα ελάχιστα βιβλία σχετικά με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ που βρίσκει κανείς στα ελληνικά. Έχω μια σχετική λίστα non fiction βιβλίων που θα ήθελα να διαβάσω (The Things They Carried, If I Die In A Combat Zone: Box Me Up And Ship Me Home, A Rumor Of War, Chickenhawk κ.α.), και δυστυχώς όλα τους είναι αμετάφραστα. Έχω σκοπό να τα διαβάσω, ακόμα και στ'αγγλικά.

Υ.Γ. Η ελληνική έκδοση (εκδ. θεωρία, 1984) δείχνει λιγάκι τα 30+ χρόνια της, τουλάχιστον όσον αφορά την παρουσίαση του κειμένου και την επιμέλεια. Η μετάφραση μου φάνηκε ικανοποιητική για τα χρόνια της.

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.