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.

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.

Riveting and brilliant account of the chaotic and stressed out world of the soldier in Vietnam as digested by an embedded journalist. From nearly 10 years of hindsight, Herr writes from his experience as a correspondent for Esquire for a one year period from 1967 to 1968, a time of major escalation in the war, including the Tet Offensive and major sieges of Hue and Khe Sahn. The quality of the writing is solid and renders a great balance between the visceral experiences of combat (the terror, mental erosion, and core of endurance) and reflections on the moral bankrupcy of this unfortunate war. Although he can�t speak directly on being a participant in combat, he shared enough of the dangers and miseries of the soldiers to render a vision that lies somewhere between the subjective and objective perspectives. The mix between first, second, and third person narrative kept a great dynamic.

I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read. I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of war and the men who fight it.

Rather than a chronological account of the Vietnam "Conflict," I see Michael Herr's book Dispatches as a series of vignettes showcasing his impressions of places and people, stories of the minutiae and daily lives of the soldiers, tales of the Command's statements (many in great contrast to what Herr actually saw on the frontlines), and retellings of the escapades of his fellow journalists (and photographers).

The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter:

"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."

Contrast this poetry with the simple and effective prose in the telling of this horror:
Trigger warning - graphic depiction of injury

"A little girl was lying on the table, looking with wide dry eyes at the wall. Her left leg was gone, and a sharp piece of bone about six inches long extended from the exposed stump. The leg itself was on the floor, half wrapped in a piece of paper. The doctor was a major, and he'd been working alone. He could not have looked worse if he'd lain all night in a trough of blood. His Hands were so slippery that I had to hold the can to his mouth for him and tip it up as his head went back. I couldn't look at the girl. . . . He placed his hand on the girl's forehead and said, 'Hello little darling.' "

Herr's descriptions of people and places and these sketches are brilliant. Where I struggle is with his detailing of situations. A lot of these are abtruse. There are passages and sections I had to read multiple times to wring some meaning from them; there were many pages where I felt I was slogging through mud.

Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. And I appreciate his oblique criticisms of the powers that be--juxtaposing quotations from the General Staff and the G.I.s on the ground to make his point.

A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary.

I struggled with rating this book and finally settled on 3.5 stars rounded up because of the thought it stimulated and my feeling that this is an important work in the cannon of Vietnam war literature.

Buddy read with Julie.

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.

"I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did."

What a book. The first section, "Breathing In," is one of the most astounding things I've ever read. Relentless, harsh, lyrical, and filled with more insights than some writers achieve in an entire lifetime. I marveled over every line and dog-eared so many pages the book doubled in thickness. If the idea of reading an entire memoir about the Vietnam War doesn't appeal to you, maybe just try "Breathing In." I guarantee you've never read anything like it.

After you've read "Breathing In," take a little break and come back to the book later. The blessing and the curse of Dispatches is that the rest of it doesn't match the intensity of "Breathing In." This is a curse because the rest of the book is a little more ordinary, but a blessing because I'm not sure either the writer or the reader could keep up that pace for another 200 pages.

That doesn't mean those other 200 pages aren't worth reading, though. A lengthy section on Khe Sahn provides an excellent sense of what it was like to be there, and given America's habit of invading small countries, the questions it raises are as relevant now as they were then. ("Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?" someone asks Herr, and he thinks but doesn't say: Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena.) A chapter on reporters in Vietnam is fascinating and instructive, the official "spin" contrasted with what really happened on the ground in a way that will sound very familiar to anyone who's been paying attention for the past 15 or so years. Herr was an "embedded" reporter before we called it "embedded," but there was no special treatment back then. You went in the field, you experienced what the soldiers experienced, no more or less. You went where you wanted and drew your own conclusions. Some soldiers hated the embedded reporters because they didn't have to be there and could leave whenever they wanted; some soldiers admired them for the same reason. We owe a debt to these reporters: Much of what we now know was true about the Vietnam War is due to their persistence and bravery. Better to see, says Herr. I didn't go through all of that not to see.

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'...")

Absolutny sztos. Reportaż jak reportaż, ale jak to jest napisane!

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.

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.

My hat's off to anyone who can sum up this book in a review. It is beyond anything I've ever read in its portrayal of men at war as witnessed by the war correspondents who accompany them on the front lines. Unlike the embedded journalists of our own time, the writers and photographers who covered Vietnam were much closer to being free agents, restricted only by their ingenuity and fearlessness to seek out the action that would represent the essence of America's military presence in southeast Asia ("There it is . . ."), while the evidence everywhere was of an irrationality raised to such a pitch that it had become something driven only by itself.

Unable to remain objective or even conceive of objectivity, Herr and his colleagues yield to a kind of hallucinatory experience, depicting the war as a phantasmagoria, a really bad trip that also seduced them with what one of them insists is a compelling glamour. To read this book is to experience Vietnam not as a historical record or analysis, or even a personal memoir, but as a kind of hypnotic nightmare from which many, including survivors, never wake.