Riveting and brilliant account of the chaotic and stressed out world of the soldier in Vietnam as digested by an embedded journalist. From nearly 10 years of hindsight, Herr writes from his experience as a correspondent for Esquire for a one year period from 1967 to 1968, a time of major escalation in the war, including the Tet Offensive and major sieges of Hue and Khe Sahn. The quality of the writing is solid and renders a great balance between the visceral experiences of combat (the terror, mental erosion, and core of endurance) and reflections on the moral bankrupcy of this unfortunate war. Although he can�t speak directly on being a participant in combat, he shared enough of the dangers and miseries of the soldiers to render a vision that lies somewhere between the subjective and objective perspectives. The mix between first, second, and third person narrative kept a great dynamic.

I knew little about “Dispatches” before I started reading it, just that it was included in the “Reporting Vietnam” volumes of the Library of America. By default, it had a good reputation. Reading, or rather listening to the audiobook, I fell in to the poetic writing, where I wanted to replay sentences to hear them again. I listened for the construction of the book, how it was put together, what rafters were used to carry the weight of the story. I was surprised in that the construction was not based on chronology, or location, but more on thoughts about everything experienced by the author mixed together – the places, the people, the events big and more commonly small and intimate. Herr put together the book as a series of themes, where the focus of the writing was different, and I found the occasional changes really helped keep attention high while telling the story in not-so-conventional way. As I continued in the book, I really felt the similarities to the movie Full Metal Jacket, and I wasn’t surprised after finishing that the book’s author worked on the screenplay to that movie. The movie made an impression on me. It came out when I was 24 and working for a defense contractor, and I saw it with a friend just a year off of his two year tour in the Army. That short peacetime tour had greatly changed my friend, and I wondered how the intensity of experience of war could change people, stretching and ripping. This book explains that.

Ojej, ale to jest dobre. Nie porównywałem wersji polskiej z oryginałem, ale polski przekład sam w sobie czyta się doskonale, w czym zasługa panów Majera i Szpaka.Jako tłumacz bardzo doceniam płynność tekstu, świetne oddanie mowy potocznej czy tak ważnych dla tego dzieła wulgaryzmów.
Wiem, że nie jest to reportaż, bo Herr dodał tu sporo rzeczy, które powstały w jego wyobraźni. Nie powstałyby jednak, gdyby sam nie przeżył wiele z tego, co opisywani żołnierze, bo koszmaru Wietnamu nie można sobie wyobrazić, jeśli ktoś nie znalazł się w samym jego środku.
A zarzuty, że treść jest poszatkowana i chaotyczna? Cóż, na wojnie daleko od ładu i porządku, więc i jej opis nie musi ich zawierać.

I know, I know I am only betraying my own ignorance by giving this book one star. I read the first 50 or so pages and I can see it all too clearly. You feel like you're there, in Vietnam, with the troops, experiencing all that horror, that hell. Well, guess what? After a long day and I'm ready to settle in with a cozy read,I can't face the nightmare. Maybe someday I'll be in the mood to feel sick to my stomach and I can brag that I have read this but as for now...No thanks.

I'm trying to say that he writes exquisitely but it's too painful.

A strangely compelling book; basically Hunter S. Thompson / Tom Wolfe style New Journalism, but a very spaced-out, hazy, poetic, vaguely "late-1960s-hangover"-vibe version, and then applied to some of the darkest topics imaginable. A very tough read, in a way, but expressing deeper truths.

Herr is also the key source for both Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now (not a bad pedigree), which makes it sort of the ur-text for poetic-apocalyptic-hellscape meditations on war and postmodernity.



p. 67:

In Saigon, I saw friends flipping out almost completely; a few left, some took to their beds for days with the exhaustion of deep depression. I went the other way, hyper and agitated, until I was only doing three hours of sleep a night. A friend on the Times said he didn't mind his nightmares so much as the waking impulse to file on them. An old-timer who'd covered war since the Thirties heard us pissing and moaning about how terrible it was and he snorted, "Ha, I love you guys. You guys are beautiful. What the fuck did you think it was?"

p. 111:

I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet. 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. . . . but of course we were intimate, I'll tell you how intimate; they were my guns, and I let them do it.

very well-written and impactful, highly recommend!!!

„Depesze” to mistrzostwo literackiego reportażu wojennego. Dosadny, bardzo obrazowy, wręcz filmowy język oddaje koszmar wojny w Wietnamie. Czytelnik czuje całkowite niezrozumienie celów, amok, a czasem narkotyczny haj towarzyszące rzuconym tam amerykańskim chłopakom. Mocny pacyfistyczny wydźwięk bez cienia dydaktyzmu to siła tej pozycji. Słuchałam w świetnym odczytaniu Andrzeja Ferenca.

Estaría entre 3,5 estrellas y 4, pero me he decantado por subirlo, por lo que cuenta y cómo lo cuenta.
Seamos sinceros este libro partía con una gran desventaja: hace poco volví a leer "Nada y así sea" de Oriana Fallaci, y no he podido evitar compararlos, entre otras cosas porque Herr y Fallaci estuvieron en Vietnam en la misma época: 1967 - 1968.
Ciertamente "Despachos de guerra" es un gran libro: estilísticamente me ha gustado mucho, Herr escribía realmente bien, y también me ha gustado dónde centraba el foco, a saber, en las experiencias (muchas veces aterradoras) de los soldados, en el infierno que pasaban. Y en otras ocasiones narraba anécdotas de los corresponsales de guerra, esos "locos" que odiaban las guerras, al mismo tiempo que las amaban.
Escrito unos 10 años después de su paso por Vietnam, es un libro muy cerebral, en ocasiones algo frío, escrito desde la distancia emocional, muy similar a la frialdad del objetivo de una cámara.
En definitiva, un libro más que recomendable, para todos aquellos interesados en esa horrible faceta de la historia reciente... ahora bien, si se trata de personas que, como yo, prefieren los libros más viscerales, recomiendo sin duda antes "Nada y así sea".

I've read this book six or seven times and it feels new every time. As good a book as any written about Vietnam, visceral, smart, hallucinatory, funny, drenched in rock and roll, and absolutely serious. Herr pretty much invented the writing style that defines the 60s to me--sort of like Dylan in prose. What makes it more than a tour-de-force is Herr's absolute clarity--Baldwinian--that death is at the center of it all and that the real American tragedy is our refusal to admit or deal with it.

I’ve been waiting to read this for so long. It did not disappoint.

As I reached the end, I started wondering if I liked this or The Things They Carried more. I know, I know, the latter is “fiction,” but if you’ve read it, you know why I’m placing it in that in between space.

One of the main differences between the two books is in style. Herr’s writing is definitely poetic at times: “I watched the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea...and one last chopper revved it up, lifted off, and flew out of my chest.” But more often, as the title suggests, it feels like reading reports from the paddies and jungles of hell written by a modern day Dante. In keeping with that metaphor, Herr’s Virgils—I don’t believe there is a Beatrice to be found in ’Nam—are the grunts, the land, the water, the drugs, the noise, the music, and the intense fear of darkness. Herr’s prose, unlike O’Brien’s, has the cadence and diction of machine gun bursts, every sixth bullet changed out for an illumination round. Despite its brevity storytelling, it’s a hard read. I don’t mean that as in difficult or shocking, though it’s often both—I’m speaking more about the tough exterior of the men the jungle and the words...each is, to use Herr’s striking imagery toward the end, “like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda.”

Couldn't get past the "Breathing In" part, too depressing! Not all of us were murdering whore mongrel dope heads, although there were those, but never met or knew any. 8th RRU Phu Bai 66-67.

[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.