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!

No matter what I choose as adjectives to describe Dispatches, it could not amount to anything other than diminishing the raw brilliance of Herr's writing to some tired clichè. Dispatches is unlike any book Ive read or anything I could have imagined. It is in a class of its own. It has been claimed as the finest personal account of war ever written. Im not arguing.

I was completely transported. Equally horrific and mesmerizing.

I stopped at page 14. Just could not deal with stream of consciousness, cool, hip, groovy, hey man short dispatchy sentences writing style. One day I’ll try again.

An interesting, thought provoking, memorable, unsentimental, sometimes entertaining account of the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968 from a war journalist's perspective. Herr provides a good account of what it was like to be there. Like many war journalists, Herr is in Vietnam by choice and he comes close to being badly injured and killed on more than one occasion. Herr provides a sympathetic account of regular soldiers -providing descriptions of their fear, nerve, ennui, cynicism and thrill seeking behaviours. He writes about the soldiers coping mechanisms - drugs, alcohol, music, radio and sporting activities. There are descriptions of many interesting characters. A worthwhile read.

What a cool, crazy guy this Herr character. What the f* were they thinking? But yes, it was all one big great adrenaline rush, a brush with death.

This book really (if I may judge) tells you 'what it was like'. New Journalism in late 60's Vietnam, here we go! (As I'm writing from my ivory tower in the Western World, where no radical change ever happens.) It's thrilling how the horror and gore gets put to the side, like they embraced those but also recognized how they obstruct a clearer view of the story at hand.

I read somewhere that not all of it mayhaps be non-fictional a hunnerd pur-cent, but who cares! If that makes the reading more enjoyable, it embellishes the book at the cost of truthful purity. Why would you not want that?

This is "Apocalypse Now" in book form, from the perspective of a friendo of that crazy journalist at the end. My only friend, the end.

A volte ti fanno una domanda e l’unica risposta che puoi offrire è: “Dipende” (segue nella mente un noto motivetto spagnoleggiante). Tipo, c’è stato un periodo in cui avevo delle pretese da fotoamatore serio e molto compunto, e regolarmente qualcuno mi domandava: “Chi è il tuo fotografo preferito?”. La risposta, ovviamente, “dipende” da un sacco di fattori, primo fra tutti la tipologia di immagini. Mi state chiedendo di un ritrattista da studio, di un artista immerso nel sociale (nettamente Lewis Hine)o di un fotografo in grado di catturare l’anima e l’essenza di un irripetibile momento musicale (e qui mi tocca dire mio fratello)? Appunto, dipende.

Ma se proprio, per motivi che in questo momento non riesco neppure a immaginare, mi trovassi di fronte ad una tragedia evitabile solamente con una mia risposta secca alla domanda “Chi è il tuo fotografo preferito?”, probabilmente farei il nome di Don McCullin.

Dispacci, il libro di Michael Herr che mi ha accompagnato in questi ultimi giorni di vacanza, è una fotografia di McCullin sviluppata su 292 pagine di racconti dal fronte. Corrispondente di guerra durante la guerra del Vietnam, Herr ha dato vita a quello che – con ogni probabilità – è uno dei migliori tre libri sui conflitti armati che siano mai stati scritti (e, parentesona, è giustamente inserito nella lista dei 1001 libri da leggere a tutti i costi). Avete presente “Apocalypse now” e “Full metal jacket”? Ecco, senza Herr non sarebbero mai venuti alla luce, e non solo per il suo ruolo (definito decisivo dallo stesso Kubrick) nella realizzazione del film. Herr ha segnato un’epoca identificando un modo nuovo, vero, tremendamente agganciato alla realtà di raccontare gli orrori che spensero un’intera generazione a stelle e strisce. Dispacci è privo di qualsiasi forma di pietismo, infinitamente lontano da una ossessione malata per il macabro, splendidamente in grado di raccontare la totale distanza fra il “raccontato” e il “vissuto”.

CITAZIONI
“Ovunque tu andassi ti sentivi dire: «Be’, spero che troverai una storia», e ovunque andassi la trovavi”.
“Continuo a pensare a tutti i ragazzi che son stati rovinati da diciassette anni di film di guerra prima di venire in Vietnam a farsi rovinare per sempre”.

--- versione illustrata su http://capitolo23.com/2017/01/09/rece...---

This was a chore to read. I haven't read many books about the Vietnam war but all of them have been far better than this.

The groovy, poetic, disjointed style felt very dated and the stories at times were so oblique I just gave up trying to understand what the author was writing about and plugged on hoping to make to the end. The author's use of parenthetical comments was another unenlightening irritant.

The darkness, folly and futility of the war came across now and then but while that was probably this book's strength when it was first published it's just not a revelation today. This book's day has passed and there are other, better choices.

Michael Herr i Wietnam swoją drogą, ale ciekawa rzecz – w większości polskich recenzji przewija się nazwisko tłumacza, i to w jak najbardziej pozytywnym kontekście. Ewenement. Może więc też od tego zacznę. Krzysztof Majer zdobył za swoje tłumaczenie nagrody (i nominacje). Rzeczywiście trudno nie zauważyć, że „Depesze” czyta się nadzwyczaj gładko, a rozmowy żołnierzy brzmią bardzo naturalnie. Problem w tym, że jest to język XXI wieku, bardzo uwspółcześniony, i przez cały czas bardzo rozpraszało mnie to, że tak się 50 lat temu po prostu nie mówiło. Gdyby moi rodzice sięgnęli po tę książkę, której akcja rozgrywa się w czasach, które pewnie całkiem nieźle pamiętają, byliby zapewne zdziwieni, że zupełnie się w niej nie odnajdują. Ten przekład być może lepiej trafia do współczesnego czytelnika, ale moim zdaniem z powodzeniem mógłby być o wiele neutralniejszy – i jednocześnie ponadczasowy. Gdyby akcja toczyła się np. podczas obecnej wojny w Afganistanie, pierwsza ustawiłabym się w kolejce do obsypywania p. Majera pochwałami (ach, tłumaczenie przekleństw to niekiedy prawdziwa sztuka, a jemu wychodzi to na piątkę), a tak to jednak trochę mi tu zgrzyta. Trochę przesadzając: tak samo nie chciałabym czytać powieści o kowbojach, którzy pozdrawiają się swojskim „no siema, ziomuś”.
Mimo wszystko warto jednak będzie sięgać po jego kolejne prace. Na mojej liście "tłumaczy, których zauważyłam podczas czytania książki i chcę sobie zapamiętać" to chyba pierwsze nazwisko, które pojawi się tam nie dlatego, że powinnam je omijać szerokim łukiem, a wręcz przeciwnie. :)

No to teraz sama treść: duży plus. Nieprzegadana, dobrze pokazująca chaos wojny w Wietnamie (choć momentami tekst robił się trochę zbyt bezładny), oszczędna w słowach dla maksymalizacji efektu. Zbiór luźnych przemyśleń okołowojennych, zapisów krótkich spotkań na froncie, wymian zdań na pozór bez większego znaczenia, jako całość dobrze chyba oddający ówczesne realia.

"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.

...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.

"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.

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.'

I tend to like war novels, but have not read a great deal of nonfiction about any war. I went into this book knowing that a couple of Goodreads friends had rated it highly, so I was hopeful. And it was even better than expected. Five plus stars.

The Vietnam war has been written about extensively, and recently I have read a few fiction books set in the war. But, Michael Herr's Dispatches is by far the most intimate. It is a close, eloquent and meaningful picture of the war. I was a child during the era and had a mother who turned off the television when these images were broadcast, so I do not have any firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the war. I know only what I have seen in movies and read in books, and I felt like I had learned a lot. This book showed me the details. It showed me the men. It showed me the pain. I felt transported to the war, and I am grateful for his openness. Despite the fact that it is written in reflection, looking back on the war, the intensity is there.

Herr was a war correspondent working for Esquire magazine when he arrived in Vietnam in 1967, at the age of 27 (five years older than the average age of the men fighting in the war). He journeyed with the soldiers throughout the country. He talked with them, ate with them, and slept with them.
He was an observer. He left Vietnam in 1969 and began working on this book. He had a breakdown that kept him from his work for nearly 5 years, but eventually published the memoir in 1977. Herr died in 2016, and it seems as though he came to hate his celebrity. He left the war, but it does not to seem to have left him.

War is forever. This book should be required reading for all politicians.