It was pretty raw reporting about war and it did a great job of telling the glories and the sickness that war brings. Some of the anecdotes are horrifying and others are thrilling. It would be hard to report on war in a better way.

I unfortunately was not as into it as I could have been as I have been overloaded with Vietnam literature and hearing about the war so much has been tiring as I feel surrounded by the brutality and senselessness of it.

The book isn’t especially critically minded but it does leave room for judgment and I feel that I understood life at war ever so slightly better after having read it.

n  n    ‘’Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an administration that believed the command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space.’’n  n

If you are a cinema enthusiast and particularly of war films, chances are you have Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in your ‘’All-time favourite war films’’ list. These two films, besides revolving around a common setting and being directed by two giants of the industry, credit the involvement of Michael Herr in their development. He was tasked with composing Martin Sheen’s rough-and-tumble narration in Apocalypse Now, and he also co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, based on Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers. As in many of his films, Kubrick prefers developing his screenplays from a book. In 1985, after owning the rights to The Short-Timers, Kubrick contacted Herr to help him expand the story into a film script. So, what attracted Coppola and Kubrick to enlist the services of Michael Herr? The answer will be this book right here by the title of Dispatches.

Amongst the books written on the war, Dispatches stands out as the most consequential, unflinching and intimate. Michael Herr went to Vietnam for eighteen months between 1967 and 1969 as a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine. This period happened to coincide with the major escalation of the war, The Tet Offensive (30 January–23 September 1968). The focus of the book is mainly around The Battle of Huế and The Battle of Khe Sanh. However, instead of detailing the battles themselves, Herr narrates the lives of the soldiers and his fellow war correspondents in and around the war zone. He was beneficiary of the US government’s decision to grant correspondents unprecedented access to Vietnam. Moreover, he writes about life inside fortified Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as it relates to the dynamics between ARVN soldiers, US military personnel and the city’s residents. His writing is interceded by his introspective meditations on the war itself.



Many describe the writing style in this book as a stream of conciseness type. I tend to agree with that assessment. Concepts are disjointed and repetitive throughout the book. Especially, descriptions of harrowing experiences have a weighty feel to them. This perhaps relates to Herr’s own traumatic experience in Vietnam. In his 1990 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, he briefly talked about why it took him nine years to publish Dispatches, by saying;

n  ‘’It just took a long time. It took what it took, you know? I was afraid to finish the book….. It was something obsessive retentive. I had some very private, intimate business to go through before I could let that book go….. It's still awkward for me to talk about it’’n

This is a good indication that while the book might feel anecdotal at times, it has many imprints of the personal as well as the collective. This makes it hard to recommend unless one is really invested in the history of The Vietnam War. Having said that, if one is interested in the history of the war, this book is downright essential.

I read this book after my last Exam of the Spring semester of 1979 after having been urged to do so by a close friend for most of the previous three months.

Dispatches is a very good book about the terrible tragedy that the Vietnam War was for the young Americans who were serving there and about the muddled direction of the American war effort which made a North Vietnamese victory seem inevitable to anyone participating at the front on either side.

Disptaches was nothing less than sensational at the time it was released. It provided a picture of the Viet Nam war which had simply not appeared elsewhere previously in the English speaking world.

The other posted reviews speak eloquently for this book's greatest value; because of the accuracy of its descriptions and the compassion felt for the American soldiers, it managed to provide great comfort to those who lived through the experience.

It’s Nam and it’s the 60’s so there’s a lot of Hendrix and ‘grass’ and acid flashbacks, blood, bodybags, shrapnel, marines, and M16’s. The prose is jittery-weary hopped-up drugged-out and already by page two we get the Dexedrine pills and the best meth breath description we’re likely to hear, ‘Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.’

The atmosphere is permeated with ‘the acrid smell of cordite...of urine, of old sweat, C-ration decay, moldy canvas and private crud.’

This book is so immersive that it challenges the reality that books aren’t actually written in the moment they happen.
Not since Keith Richards’ memoir ‘Life’ have I been reading a book and wondering so strongly: How the hell is this guy still alive? Dispatches is a book where men pray not to have their manhood blown off. It’s an atmosphere fraught with the whirring thud of chinooks, flying bullets, shattered faces. The living faces are scarcely better, with ‘all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips...like looking into faces at a rock concert.’

I have to five-star this one for the sheer ‘saturating strangeness’ of the time and place Herr captures, but I was not enthralled throughout. I’m not a military guy so all the talk of guns and regiments and the 27th airborne and ‘grunts’ dragged on at some points. Of course I feel like a jerk saying that, I mean these guys are out there risking life and limb and all and I’m sitting back with an iced tea complaining about tedious paragraphs. But it’s all relative right?

The book is not without wit. ‘Flying over the jungle was almost pure pleasure, doing it on foot was nearly all pain.’

One clearly sees how this is a biblical work for journalists. Herr not only goes the gruesome distance and delivers the goods, but he also endlessly analyzes the creature that is the correspondent. He even questions the morality of the craft and considers the journalist as parasite, as ‘nothing more than glorified war profiteers.’
No doubt he has his affections for this creature too: ‘And by some equation that was so wonderful I’ve never stopped to work it out, the best and the bravest correspondents were also usually the most compassionate, the ones who were most in touch with what they were doing.’

An absolute nutter of a character named Tim Page shows up late in the book, a war photographer whom Herr lovingly chronicles like Sal Paradise recounting the quixotic charm of Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Charismatic wackadoos, Page and Moriarty share the same simple gift: An absolute YES attitude to life. And therein lies the secret truth to their captivating adventurous personas, they’re never coming from a place of no.

When it’s all over, Herr returns to the U.S. and captures his befuddlement with a brilliant phrase that anyone who's spent extended time abroad let alone in a war zone might appreciate, ‘the hallucination of home.' Again we get the unsettling comparison of the Vietnam vets Herr sees on the streets looking indistinguishable from the rock n roll vets. He drifts and longs achingly to be back in Vietnam, amongst his beautiful lunatics, young and alive in the heady deadly energy of his generation’s immortal and immoral Southeast Asia combat zone.

This is a tremendous book. It reminded me of All Quiet on the Western Front in terms of its emotional impact, but was probably even a bit stronger.
To me, its strength is in its capacity to see and discuss the emotional impact of war and senseless slaughter on the otherwise good, gentle young men who would ordinarily never have done such things.
There are many books about war written by historians, journalists and others, but few written with the authentic gut wrenching pain that can only come from someone who has been there.
Both the Vietnam War with its 58,000 dead American casualties and WW I were senseless stupidities entered into not for the good of the country, but for the good of the “military industrial complex” described by Eisenhower.
This books mentions US bombers dropping 120,000,000 pounds of explosives on a small area in one week and accomplishing nothing militarily important except reinforcing the resolve of the “enemy” to expel us from THEIR country. How much money did the “defense” contractors make on 120,000,000 pounds of explosives? Why is life so cheap?

Łooooooojajebe. Herr, Majer i Szpak wzięli szczotę ryżową i przeczesali mi mózg.

”Flip religion, it was so far out, 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 pair 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.”

n  n

Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn.

n  n
Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar.

n  n
Sean Flynn and Dana Stone

The point I’m trying to make is that war correspondents were at as much risk as the combat soldiers they were there to write about. The soldiers were in awe of them because it was beyond comprehension to a drafted marine to think that anyone would want to be in this hell by choice. ”Two Marines that I hadn’t even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on…. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.”

General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans. He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven’s poem.

Anecdote of a Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens

The battle was considered a victory by both sides. With the American commanders claiming a x10 ratio for kills they could estimate 10,000 to 16,000 KIA off of 1,602 bodies actually found. The Americans lost 2,016 killed and 8,079 wounded. after the battle the American blew up the base and moved out. The NVA swarmed in to take over the area. You might ask yourself what was accomplished.

n  n

”We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. the smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the streeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence.”

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

The men who came back from Vietnam have minds filled with dark places, shards of pain, and trapped screams. Night sweats, twisted sheets, bruises from wrestling demons, and fear parched throats haunt their nights long after they return home.

”I’ve been having this dream,” the major said. “I’ve had it two times now. I’m in a big examination room back at Quantico. They’re handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, “How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?’”
…
“After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.”

Michael Herr’s dreams are a melted series of images, sounds, and smells.

”In the months after i got back the hundreds of helicopters I’d flown in began to draw together until they’d formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny, and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder.”

n  n

The writing in this book is superb. The words are dropped on you out of the bays of planes with bombs that explode around your ears and rattle your spinal cord. The dialogue is the crackle of gunfire coming at you through the elephant grass, zip, vip, zip. The stories will bring you so close to the action that spent ordinance will be hailing on your helmet as it falls through the canopy. Herr helped with the screenplays for the movies Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Whether he receives credit or not this book has influenced every Vietnam movie ever made or that will ever be made. This is best read from a foxhole with a shaker full of vodka and the smell of moist earth in your nostrils.

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War is Forever

Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don’t kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.”

The opposite of war is not peace but justice, the access to judgments of equity that mitigate coercion. Essentially war is unfairness made the norm, “a psychotic vaudeville.” War is unfair because there is no human recourse to the random exercise of power. The unfairness of war affects everyone even those, especially those, exercising the power. The further out on the tendrils of power, as these tendrils encounter victims, the more unfairness, the more coercion, exists. At that zero-distance, coercion is unremittingly ugly:“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.” Is there any other word than de-humanization? “‘Well, you know what we do to animals . . . kill ’em and hurt ’em and beat on ’em so’s we can train ’em. Shit, we don’t treat the Dinks no different than that,’” says one young soldier with neither apparent irony nor shame.

Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion. Who can judge who is most defiled, the soldier coerced by his superiors or the soldier’s victim coerced by him? All suffer through either grief or memory. Herr knows this: “Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn’t live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive... Every time there was combat you had a licence to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again.”

The effects of the unfairness of war are cumulative and gestational. They ripen and metastasize : “And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years... it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes... They’d say (I’d ask) that they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R& R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear,”

Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: “...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.” This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: “A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before.” This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: “... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour.” And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: “They believed that God was going to thank them for it.”

There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’”

No ideal was left unmolested. No injustice was left un-trivialized. No confession of guilt was ever offered without rationalization. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: “It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene.” But injustice will not lie quiet. The effects of war are genetic; they are passed on as a dismal legacy of power and its unfairness. The country tried to forget and dug itself deeper, coerced itself, into violence that it now performs on itself at the armed hands of its children to the consternation of their parents. The country does seem to be screaming now. But no one is really listening. No one cares if they annihilate themselves in their undeclared civil war. If only they would tweet about it less.

What kind of mad man voluntarily goes in theater during a vicious war? Dumbfounded soldiers and marines often asked this of Michael Herr. As a war correspondent for Esquire, he went not just to the periphery, but into the viscera of 1968 Vietnam. These are war stories in the raw; from Herr himself and from the very servicemen who lived the tales, many of whom had trouble distinguishing between their love of service and contempt for the Vietnam War.

Note: Herr also assisted with two of the most badass war films ever made. He co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and provided written narration for Apocalypse Now.

Wow!! This was a fascinating first-hand account from a guy on the ground and in the mix!!

This is one of my 2 or 3 favorite books on the US perspective of the Vietnam War. No surprise that I found it just as compelling on re-read.

Terrible circumstances have been terrifically described.