This is an important book which shows the reader some truths not only about this part of history but also about human nature. You can be cross about the fictitiousness and an overflow of oniric narration but this does not change the important issues the book brings to light. It is one of those ones which get under your skin and make you think, rethink and recommend it.

Herr said once that most people are not aware they have a dark side.

Dispatches holds a lot of power within it passages and is probably one of the best memoirs I have ever read. It is a cutthroat scope on the brutality of the Vietnam Conflict. It will reel you in and keep you wrapped into a world of unjustified pain and suffering. It is raw and real. It will make you speed through the pages at a force that you do not expect. It opens you and exposes you to unwanted territory.

"OKay, Jim," Mathew said, and Day Tripper started to giggle.
The radio delivered a dramatized warning against losing pay vouchers and currency-exchange sips. and then the disc jockey came on again. "This one's a request for Hard-Core Paul and the Fire Team, and for our groovy CO, Fred the Head...."
"Hey, Mayhew, turn that up. Turn it on up.".......

There's something happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Tellin' me I've got to beware.
I think it's time we stopped, children,
What's that sound?
Everybody look what's goin down...

... I never knew a member of the Vietnam press corps, who was insensible to what happened when the words"war" and "correspondent" got joined. The glamour of it was possibly empty and lunatic, but there were times when it was all you had, a benign infection that ravaged all but your worst fears and deepest depressions. Admitting, for argument's sake, that we were all a little crazy to have gone there in the first place, there were those whose madness it was not to know always which war they were actually in, fantasizing privately about other, older wars, Wars I and II, air wars and desert wars and island wars, obscure colonial actions against countries whose names have since changed many times..."

The writing is absolutely beautiful, deep, and poetic. The documentation from Michael Herr flowed as a personal diary and evidence of war within Vietnam, the grunts (soldiers), VC (Viet Cong), the people of Vietnam and Western interest. It provides a sense of utter terror but obligation to show the world the truth of what occurred in Vietnam.

Really powerful nonfiction account of the Vietnam War. Intense.

Though by no means the central point or theme of this book (which was something like war is hell) the problems of the free press struggling against direction from business, government leadership, and military is notable particularly because of our current political problems.

n  But of course we were intimate, I'll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it.n

I wrote a poem to a coworker last Friday--long story--and in part of it, I tried to tell her how much I admired Dispatches and how deeply I responded to it: I said that the book itself felt like poetry, that it had that kind of density of insight. With any other form of journalism, this level of beauty would be condensation that fogged up the glass and made it harder to see the subjects, but with Herr's writing, the style itself is the window, or rather something less clear and more visceral. Dispatches tattoos the Vietnam War on your mind.

I had trouble reading too much of this at a time, in part it's more experience-driven than narrative-driven and in part because of the aforementioned weight, with the end result that this is a short book that nonetheless feels bottomless. Herr talks about the atrocities of the war and his love for the men who committed them. He never flinches and he never backs away--his successors in fiction, for our more recent wars, are probably Ben Fountain and Phil Klay--and as a result, he finds and tells incredible stories. He mentions jouranlists who referrd to "no-story operations," and talks about how foreign he finds that concept: "Those were the same journalists who would ask us what the fuck we ever found to talk to grunts about, who said they never heard a grunt talk about anything except cars, football and chone. But they all had a story, and in the war they were driven to tell it."

The mix was so amazing: incipient saints and realized homicidals, unconscious lyric poets and mean dumb motherfuckers with their brains all down in their necks; and even by the time I left I knew where all the stories came from and where thy were going, I was never bored, never even unsurprised.

The stories are here: the grunt who keeps an actual calendar drawn on the back of his helmet, the guy who checks Stars and Stripes religiously for a death from his hometown because he figures it's such a podunk place two people from it won't die in Vietnam, the space blanket that gets forced on Herr because he mentions being cold, the journalist who is incredulous about the charge to take the glamour out of war, the soldier who keeps wandering away from the airstrip and the plane that's supposed to take him home. The effect here is of the illumination rounds he mentions--arcs of clarity with real impact. But I should emphasize, because this is rare for me, that the stories here, though memorable, significant, haunting, funny, varied, and pretty much everything else under the sun, stood out less than the remarkable clarity of Herr's style and philosophy. It's strange to read a book and come away effectively wanting the author as your biographer, which of course can't happen now--RIP, Michael Herr, another victim of 2016--but that's the feeling I had here, because Herr is such an intelligent, unsentimental, loving interpreter of what he witnesses, because he feels the weight of it all and records it in such a way that I felt it too.

"We all had roughly the same position on the war: we were in it, and that was a position."

Dispatches

The main dispatch in this book on the Vietnam War by journalist Michael Herr is called Khe Sanh. This is as good an example of war reportage that I have read. This chapter was largely written in the second person which is unusual but effective.

Khe Sanh was a forward military base near the border with Laos. It took more fire than any other base in the Vietnam War before it was shut down and as a result experienced a frightening number of casualties as well as the casualties that came in from the medivacs - dead and wounded infantry from the nearby jungles and hilltops that Americans would often defend. The real life stories of the soldiers are so vivid and the writing is top notch. The other chapters were closer to four stars for me. The author went on to write the Full Metal Jacket screenplay and was good friends with Stanley Kubrick.

5 stars overall.

The thing about war books is how timeless they are, from Homer to Homs. So it's odd reading a "dated" book about Vietnam to find that it's Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever grunts shoot and get shot at. The blood, the fear, the thrill, the sarcasm, the black humor, the superstition, the body bags, the music, the enemy, the drugs, the killing, the being killed.

The book roars out of the gate with a great opening. The longest section, on Khe Sanh, is classic Vietnam lit. Sometimes it's tough to even read in bed at night. Disturbing shit. And the commanders. My God. George McGovern had them right: "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in." Which is why George McGovern won a sum total of one state when he ran for president. The Republic of Massachusetts.

After the Khe Sanh chapter, it loses a bit of air. The sketches become shorter, sketchier, though still powerful. Herr befriended the son of actor Errol Flynn -- Sean Flynn, who finally went missing on a bike ride into Cambodia in 70. Death, meet wish. And I hear that Herr himself is now a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas or something. That's a lot of meditation, cleaning all this off. A lifetime.

As war books go, one of the better written ones. Only it took me back to places I did not want to go. Mary Karr's rec (from The Art of Memoir). Blame Mary. ("Proud Mary keeps on burnin'...")

A combat journalist's account of his time in Vietnam, "Dispatches" combines harrowing realism with insightful observation, often unwound in stream-of-consciousness prose. It is an exercise in what is sometimes referred to as "New Journalism", and while it is more memoir than hard history, it is an invaluable immersion into the Vietnam conflict that lends depth and color to more traditional works on the topic.

"Dispatches" should not be the only book you read about the Vietnam War, but it very definitely should be ONE of the books you read. Herr effectively breathes life into all of the people and situations included in his stories, and simply put, there is no other book about the conflict like it. I have read "Dispatches" several times, and I cannot recommend it more strongly.

(One side note: astute readers may notice a number of quotes in "Dispatches" that were used as lines in Stanley Kubrick's late 1980's film "Full Metal Jacket." Michael Herr was one of the screen writers for "Full Metal Jacket", and it is a measure of the twisted reality he encountered in Vietnam that words and situations from his own life would fit so well into Kubrick's dark and almost bleakly satirical film.)

Made me curious about the spectral kingdoms and extinguished dynasties of pre-colonial Vietnam, the spooky historical geography which haunts Herr from under the French place names and American grids. Contemplating an unreal old map in his Saigon apartment, Herr knows “that for years now there had been no country here but the war”:

The terrain above II Corps, where it ran along the Laotian border and into the DMZ, was seldom referred to as the Highlands by Americans. It had been a matter of military expediency to impose a new set of references over Vietnam’s older, truer being, an imposition that began most simply with the division of one country into two and continued—it had its logic—with the further division of South Vietnam into four clearly defined tactical corps. It had been one of the exigencies of the war, and if it effectively obliterated even some of the most obvious geographical distinctions, it made for clear communication…

Herr senses continuity only in Saigon, that “unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia,” a Babylon of discotheque whoredom and American civilian contractors who rev their Harleys up the steps of Buddhist shrines. By contrast, Huế and Da Nang, seats of the vanished Nguyễn and Champa kingdoms, are like “remote closed societies, mute and intractable.” In Huế after the battle that demolished so much of the city, bouncing over debris in a jeep with a South Vietnamese major and his driver, Herr gets curious about the old Imperial Palace:

I’d been talking to Sergeant Dang about the Palace and about the line of emperors. When we stalled one last time at the foot of the moat bridge, I’d been asking him the name of the last emperor to occupy the throne. He smiled and shrugged, not so much because he didn’t know, more like it didn’t matter. “Major Trong is emperor now,” he said, and gunned the jeep into the Palace grounds.

Besieged in Khe Sanh with the Marines, Herr looks up at the hills in which lurk NVA artillery positions, raiding parties and Annamese ghosts:

Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all caparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game.

~


Reading this, I was surprised to find how historical the Vietnam War now feels. The slang, the jive, the racial tension, the rock lyrics—no longer yesterday, but much more distant. Our time has its own wars now. Growing up, Vietnam was “yesterday,” a war people my parents’ age were still trying to figure out. Two of my uncles were fucked by the experience; and my dad will always be grateful for his medical draft deferment. As a boy with appropriately violent media tastes growing up in the 1980s and early 90s, I was drenched by images of that war: rice patties, rotor wash, ambushes, shotgun bongs, black pajamas. On family trips to the video rental place, I went straight for the war movies, was a repeat-renter of Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Flight of the Intruder and all that other shit. I was a faithful viewer of Tour of Duty—its intro theme was “Paint it Black”!—and I even watched reruns of China Beach on Lifetime (not much action, but Dana Delaney was—is—fine).Vietnam was to me what WWII (at least as represented by episodes of Combat! and John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima) was to Herr and the grunts he wrote about: the shadow, the test, the Last War.


And as the Last War it held a glamour no amount of my dad’s ranting, no negative societal consensus—Disaster, Nightmare, Fuck-Up—could ever entirely dissipate. One of Herr’s colleagues, Tim Page, was approached by a publisher to do a Vietnam book whose aim would be to “take glamour out of war.” Page howled: “It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex!” He was right to laugh. Put as much gore on camera as you like, young men will not be dissuaded. They will still think: how would I stand up in that? Could I handle that? “Realism” only makes war sexier. There is no such thing as an anti-war film, said Truffaut.

the writing is glib, self-important and embarrassing in that desperate-to-be-cool kind of way, which gets in the way of what is ostensibly the *actual* subject - the vietnam war. instead, it seems that the vietnam war was merely a canvas for the real subject of the book, his own writing, which is unfortunately completely insufferable.

"Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar." gtfo. worst.

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

Beautifully, vividly, outrageously, grotesquely renderd account of tagging along as a journalist in the peak years of Vietnam. The writing is fierce, hallocinogenic, searing, and very subjective. Herr is an Emersonsian transparent eyeball in this book, recording his impressions and imaginative reactions to the chaos and strange beauty surrounding him everywhere.

Some very interesting characters: Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who does war photography because he wants to truly see the world. Tim Page, who can't be summed up here let alone in the dozen or some-odd pages Herr gives him. He's worth a novel of his own.

There's all the brutality of war stuff (I hate to be so blase about it but we all have gotten some of that before haven't we, as readers?) which is persuasively set down. Cinematic prose for a situation where no one seemed to know which way was up- politically, militarily, mentally.

Herr did this in a series of articles for Esquire in the mid sixities. I only wish war reporting was this trenchat and true now. It is, if you check out George Packer's magisterial "The Assassin's Gate" but Herr is right in the middle of the shit...freaked-out, doped-up, awed and disgusted and exhilerated by what he's seen.

If you like your journalism (and for that matter, your politics, not that this is an ideological text in any way) just shy of Gonzo and heavy on the symbolic imagery- if you want to FEEL what it was like to be there- this book delivers the goods.

Fun fact: the heilcopter scene in "Full Metal Jacket" was taken from this book, and the film is half-based on it.

Herr also wrote the Martin Sheen voice over material in "Apocalypse Now"........so there's some pretty impressive pedigree for you.

I hope to dig into his "Walter Winchell" someday...

Sometimes it's not a bad thing to wait to read a book. I started having people urge me to read this one in, let's see, the summer of 1983, and it was only recently that I finally got around to it. I picked up a copy at the former Hanoi Hilton, where John McCain was held prisoner, now a museum, and read the first half on my way from Hanoi to Danang to Saigon (OK, Ho Chi Minh City). There is a fierce originality and honesty to the book, coupled with such intense subject matter, that made reading this a scalding experience, in a good way. I'm going to wait a month or two and read it again.