if it wasnt bad enough to step into the heart of hell during day you got cat sized rats scampering over you at night. u can almost smell the camphor as you read.
amazing book about 'Nam.

"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.

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.

I often find I learn a lot about geography and history through reading fiction, and though this book isn't fiction but a war correspondent's account of being in Vietnam in the late '60s, I hoped for the same here. My knowledge of the Vietnam war isn't good, and I hoped this book would remedy that. Unfortunately it's not an ideal first port of call, as it assumes a lot of prior knowledge that non-Americans may not possess, and was peppered with initials and acronyms but had no glossary or any other means of explanation. I connected with it only in patches - where the narrative occasionally narrowed its focus down to to a single person, and then it was possible to understand and to empathise, but these sections were relatively sparse. All in all I would concede it is fantastically well written, and worthy of more than the speed-reading I resorted to in the end.

Michael Herr's account from the front during the Vietnam War is regarded as one of the most important books to come out of that war, or any war for that matter. It's a revelatory read, not only because of the raw true stories, but also because of the unique perspective offered by a journalist embedded in the fray. Most war stories are told by soldiers or officers who have been there. Sometimes they're told by the civilians being invaded or finding themselves in the crossfire. But a journalist is neither a true participant or victim of war. They're willing observers, often caught in a tug-of-war between how they view things and how others see them. In some respects they stay on the sidelines, but as Herr demonstrates, that can be more of a figure of speech when photographers and journalists are assigned to actual patrols or bases and end up on the wrong end of an ambush or invasion force. The content of 'Dispatches' covers a wide range of emotions and excitement. Like other fine war novels, it reveals some uncomfortable truths that our Western peacetime narrative largely wishes to ignore, for better or worse.

My only gripe with the book was the writing style, which could swing from a more settled and smoother reading experience to muddled and disjointed one. A switching style like that isn't necessarily bad, but when the rambling man took over the narrative it was hard to stay invested or attentive. I understand that the style was a product of the 60s and 70s nosedive into a mix of war/drug/hippie/confusion culture, but it didn't change the fact it turned the reading experience into a grind at points. There's a certain liberal creativity going on in these areas, but that doesn't mean it always hits the mark. These sections with odd run-on sentences, questionable punctuation, and debatable word choices often left you feeling like you'd read a first draft that slipped by the editor before going to print. And from a career journalist, you would expect better.

That being said, 'Dispatches' is an essential read if you have any fondness for war stories or modern history. At the time Vietnam was a new kind of complicated battlefront, an ugly mix of 20th century political showdowns and punishing jungle warfare. Herr's book gives you more than a glimpse into just how entangled it all became to the people and places involved.

I read this book completely high! And I loved it. Well not exactly as much as I loved 'The things they carried', but I loved it. I have no idea if being high had anything to do with how much I enjoyed listening to the guy describe a brutal fire-fight, but it was good anyways. It's amazing that someone can tell a story about death and filth and bullets so beautifully, and at the same time with so much useful detail. Never a dull moment in this book. I loved it!
Oh, and just FYI, the movie 'Full Metal Jacket' is loosely based on this book.

For many years, the book most likely to come to mind when Vietnam was mentioned.
One of those 'I appreciate having read this, but once was enough.'
Five star strength and associations.
Many reviews to like, too.

The writing did not work for me. Too impressionistic, with too few specific details or actual elaborated stories. The constant generalities and second-person narration made the book feel nebulous instead of arrestingly concrete. Herr is obviously passionate, but I think there are better Vietnam memoirs.

Książka, która wciągnęła mnie bardzo szybko i pozwoliła na przyjrzenie się wojnie wietnamskiej z zupełnie innej perspektywy. Napisana bardzo sugestywnie, niemal się czuło zapach napalmu, palonej trawki, alkoholu i niemytych ciał. W uszach dźwięczy muzyka z tamtych lat - mocny Hendrix, odlotowy Zappa. No i ten język - niektórzy mogą uznać, że miejscami plugawy, ale... to przecież żołnierze i prawdziwa wojna. Dlatego chylę czoła przed tłumaczem (Krzysztof Majer) oraz redaktorem (Marcin Wróbel alias Marceli Szpak) - uważam, że doskonale oddali język oryginału.
Uprzedzam - to nie jest łatwa pozycja. I myślę, że warto tę książkę przeczytać dopiero wtedy, gdy ma się nieco pojęcia o samej wojnie w Wietnamie, bo "Depesze" nie są książką historyczną. Polecam ją każdemu, kto chce poznać ten mało znany kawałek dziejów ludzkości z pozycji okopu, schronu czy nawet plaży China Beach. Na hełmie żołnierza na okładce mamy hasło "War is hell" - ta książka jest jego doskonałym odzwierciedleniem, drążącym duszę czytelnika do bólu.

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:

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.

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.

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.