Dispatches

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.

“After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories...where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information."



Michael Herr's Dispatches was an incredible first-hand account of the Vietnam War. What he wrote felt compelling and authentic and in that respect reminded me of Tim O'Brien's work. There were some things that stuck out, including his account of the Tet Offensive, specifically waiting for it to happen and what passed as sleep for those who were doing the waiting. As a war correspondent, I felt Herr was able to provide both a big picture of the war and a much more intimate one of how individual soldiers coped. Also, the way Herr mixed the sometimes absurd with the horror of war made it easy to make the connection to his work on Apocalypse Now. Should have read this a long time ago. Fantastic!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Li este livro há muitos anos e quis logo traduzi-lo. Em 2019, uma conjugação feliz de circunstâncias levou a que a Antígona publicasse esta tradução, da minha lavra.

Em 1967, com 27 anos, Michael Herr (1940-2016) partiu para o Vietname como correspondente da revista «Esquire». Pormenor importante: foi ele que insistiu em partir, nada a isso o obrigou. Chegou a Saigão em Novembro de 1967, nas vésperas do início da fase mais violenta da guerra. Com efeito, a 30 de Janeiro de 1968 os norte-vietnamitas lançaram a ofensiva do Tet, de efeitos devastadores. Herr esteve presente na batalha de Hue, cidade imperial vietnamita destruída nesta ofensiva, e esteve também no famoso cerco de Khe Sanh (junto à fronteira vietnamita), que decorreu de Janeiro a Julho de 1968.

Ou seja, Herr assistiu ao vivo ao que se passou no Vietname em 1968, o ano de todos os perigos, o ano do fim das ilusões. Em 1969, regressou aos EUA, e publicou «Dispatches» em 1977. Mais tarde, participou na escrita dos monólogos de «Apocalypse Now» (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) e foi co-autor do argumento de «Full Metal Jacket»/«Nascido Para Matar», de Kubrick (1987). Quem viu este último filme recorda certamente a batalha urbana ali encenada, que se passa precisamente em Hue. Já agora: quem ler «Despachos» e vir estes dois filmes reconhecerá em ambos cenas extraídas, sem tirar nem pôr, do livro. Apenas um exemplo: a famosíssima cena de «Apocalypse Now» em que, nas trincheiras americanas junto à ponte de Do Lung, um soldado dispara uma granada para matar um vietcong preso no arame farpado.

«Despachos» é, antes de mais, um excelente livro sobre a Guerra do Vietname. É também um excelente livro sobre a guerra. Mas não se trata de um livro de denúncia. «Denúncia» implica pormo-nos de fora de uma situação e apontarmos uma iniquidade. Toda a denúncia tem as suas limitações (já que não deixa de ser uma postura relativamente confortável). Não me interpretem mal. Há muita coisa para denunciar na Guerra do Vietname, que foi, em certa medida, a guerra que pôs fim a uma certa inocência da América e, em certa medida, à nossa inocência colectiva. Representou o fim da ideia de que os EUA se podiam assumir como uma espécie de reserva moral das democracias.

Herr vai muito além da mera denúncia e tira-nos do nosso conforto. Num registo perturbador e clarividente, diz-nos: «Se o horror fosse a única cor na paleta da guerra, há muito que teria deixado de haver guerras.» (cito as palavras dele num excelente documentário de Coco Schrijber, «First Kill», de 2001). Diz-nos que a guerra satisfaz certas pulsões profundas que medram em nós. Enquanto não reconhecermos essas pulsões e não as tentarmos compreender, o mesmo ciclo de violência continuará a repetir-se. Só nos restam duas alternativas, portanto: fingirmos que não é assim ou percebermos que assim é e tentarmos perceber porquê, para quebrarmos este ciclo infernal.

Há aqui uma postura de pessimismo, mas trata-se de um pessimismo lúcido, que me faz lembrar aquela vez em que Cormac McCarthy afirmou: «Sou pessimista acerca de muitas coisas, mas não vejo razão para me sentir deprimido por causa disso.» E que me faz lembrar Orwell («1984»): «A imagem do futuro é a imagem de uma bota a calcar um rosto humano.»

Ao descrever o que sentia durante um bombardeamento ou tiroteio, Herr diz-nos que era um sentimento confuso e torrencial, e que, depois de muito pensar, percebeu que era o mesmo que tinha sentido da primeira vez que despira uma rapariga. «A guerra nunca era aborrecida.»

Houve razões mais íntimas para eu fazer esta tradução. Fiz um ano de vida no dia 30 de Janeiro de 1968. Foi precisamente na noite de 30 para 31 de Janeiro de 1968 que começou a ofensiva do Tet. O meu pai (alferes miliciano médico) desembarcou a 1 de Novembro de 1967 no porto de Nacala (Moçambique) para participar na Guerra Colonial, o mesmo mês em que Herr chegou ao Vietname. Em 1969, o meu pai veio-se embora da guerra, o mesmo ano em que Herr regressou a casa.

Ainda Michael Herr: «Creio que o Vietname foi o que tivemos em lugar de uma infância feliz.»

Βαθμολογία: 9/10

Ο Μάικλ Χερ κάλυψε τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ σαν ανταποκριτής του περιοδικού Esquire, από κάποια στιγμή μέσα στο 1967, μέχρι το 1969. Έκατσε στο Βιετνάμ δεκαοχτώ ολόκληρους μήνες και είδε τα πάντα. Έδωσε παρών σε μικρές και μεγάλες μάχες, είδε πτώματα στρατιωτών, πεζοναυτών και αμάχων, είδε σοβαρά τραυματισμένους, είδε απίστευτα τοπία κατεστραμμένα από τόννους εμπρηστικών βομβών, είδε διαλυμένες πόλεις και εγκαταλελειμμένα χωριά, γνώρισε ένα κάρο τρελαμένους τύπους, που είτε ήταν τρελαμένοι πριν καν πατήσουν στο Βιετνάμ είτε ήταν μια χαρά παιδιά που τρελάθηκαν από την παράνοια και το χάος του πολέμου... τέλος πάντων, είδε όλα αυτά που μπορεί να δει κανείς σ'έναν πόλεμο τέτοιου μεγέθους.

Ο Χερ δεν ήταν ένας δημοσιογράφος σαν όλους τους άλλους, δεν έγραφε αυτά που του έλεγαν οι υπεύθυνοι τύπου του στρατού, δεν ωραιοποιούσε καταστάσεις και πρόσωπα. Και αυτό το βιβλίο είναι όσο ωμό, ρεαλιστικό και παρανοϊκό θα περίμενε κανείς από ένα βιβλίο που περιγράφει την τρέλα και το χάος του πολέμου του Βιετνάμ. Ο συγγραφέας μας περιγράφει πολλές κουλές καταστάσεις, μας παρουσιάζει μερικούς πραγματικά αξιομνημόνευτους τύπους - απλούς φαντάρους, πεζοναύτες, άλλους ανταποκριτές, τρελαμένους φωτογράφους-, μας ταξιδεύει στις ζούγκλες, τις πόλεις, τα χωριά και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, μας βάζει στην μέση των μαχών, ανάμεσα στις σφαίρες, τις βόμβες ναπάλμ, τους όλμους και τα σράπνελ. Δεν υπάρχει αρχή, μέση και τέλος, παρά το απόλυτο χάος. Μην περιμένετε, δηλαδή, μια ιστορία με απόλυτη συνοχή. Αυτό το βιβλίο είναι το Βιετνάμ του '60, το Βιετνάμ του πολέμου. Δεν υπάρχει συνοχή σ'αυτό.

Αλλά δεν είναι μόνο αυτά που περιγράφει, οι καταστάσεις, τα τοπία και τα πρόσωπα που μας παρουσιάζει, οι ιστορίες που μας εξιστορεί, είναι και ο τρόπος του, το στιλ γραφής του, που είναι σαν ένα καλό τριπάρισμα. Αυτή η γραφή ταιριάζει απόλυτα με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ, έτσι καταφέρνει και περνάει στον αναγνώστη το χάος, την παράνοια και την τρέλα του πολέμου. Και αυτό μου άρεσε πολύ. Σίγουρα η γραφή δεν είναι για όλα τα γούστα, σε σημεία είναι ίσως και περίεργη, αλλά προσωπικά θα έλεγα ότι έτσι έπρεπε να είναι. Ένα στεγνό, δημοσιογραφικό στιλ γραφής θα έκανε την ιστορία να μοιάζει μ'ένα δελτίο τύπου του στρατού ή με μια περιγραφή ενός ιατροδικαστή που εξετάζει ένα πτώμα. Βαρεμάρα εις την δευτέρα. Τώρα το κείμενο είναι ζωντανό, διαβάζεται γρήγορα και δίχως ανάσα, αγχώνει τον αναγνώστη με τις περιγραφές, τον κάνει να δένεται με τους τρελαμένους τύπους που γνώρισε ο συγγραφέας στο Βιετνάμ.

Θα βάλω πέντε αστεράκια στο βιβλίο. Όχι απαραίτητα γιατί σαν λογοτεχνικό κείμενο είναι καλύτερο από ορισμένα άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα τέσσερα αστεράκια ή είναι εξίσου καλό με άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα επίσης πέντε αστεράκια, αλλά γιατί πολύ απλά με άρπαξε από τον γιακά και δεν με άφησε σε ησυχία παρά μέχρι που έφτασα στο τέλος. Με έσυρε στα ορύγματα, τα χαντάκια, τους ορυζώνες, τα δασώδη βουνά, τα καταφύγια και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, και μου έδειξε το σκληρό και παρανοϊκό πρόσωπο του πολέμου, που καταστρέφει κτίρια και τοπία αλλά κυρίως καταστρέφει ανθρώπινες ψυχές. Επίσης, είναι από τα ελάχιστα βιβλία σχετικά με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ που βρίσκει κανείς στα ελληνικά. Έχω μια σχετική λίστα non fiction βιβλίων που θα ήθελα να διαβάσω (The Things They Carried, If I Die In A Combat Zone: Box Me Up And Ship Me Home, A Rumor Of War, Chickenhawk κ.α.), και δυστυχώς όλα τους είναι αμετάφραστα. Έχω σκοπό να τα διαβάσω, ακόμα και στ'αγγλικά.

Υ.Γ. Η ελληνική έκδοση (εκδ. θεωρία, 1984) δείχνει λιγάκι τα 30+ χρόνια της, τουλάχιστον όσον αφορά την παρουσίαση του κειμένου και την επιμέλεια. Η μετάφραση μου φάνηκε ικανοποιητική για τα χρόνια της.