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.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

“No one could write like Michael Herr.” So begins The Paris Review obit for Michael Herr. Just read a paragraph or two of this masterpiece and you’ll probably agree. I do. Read a few more pages and you begin to realize that literally everything about the Viet Nam War that entered into popular American culture is from this book and this writer.

Of course, he “cowrote” Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick, and he did the voice over for Apocalypse Now. But read this book and a lot more of his words come falling out of the tree of Nam war memories, like the famous moment in Apocalypse Now (not even long enough to be a scene that begins with this priceless exchange:

“Who’s the commanding officer here?”
“Ain’t you?”

We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher.

“Put that fucker away,” the Marine said, as though to himself. He drew the weapon, opened the breach and dropped in a round that looked like a great swollen bullet, listening very carefully all the while to the shrieking. He placed the M-79 over his left forearm and aimed for a second before firing.

There was an enormous flash on the wire 200 meters away, a spray of orange sparks, and then everything was still except for the roll of some bombs exploding kilometers away and the sound of the M-79 being opened, closed again and returned to the holster. Nothing changed on the Marine’s face, nothing, and he moved back into the darkness.

I don’t know what I like more about this book: his almost giddy excitement of riding the crest of the wave of the entire era of the 60s, or his scared shitless depiction of the actual fighting.

The short book is filled with “you can’t make this shit up” moments that are too numerous and too spot-on to recite, but I’ll throw out one or two, starting with this gem:

“If you get hit,” a medic told me, “we can chopper you back to base-camp hospital in like twenty minutes.”
“If you get hit real bad,” a corpsman said, “they’ll get your case to Japan in twelve hours.”
“If you get killed,” a spec 4 from Graves promised, “we’ll have you home in a week.”

Gallows humor like only a soldier can utter.

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.”

Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language.

As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try.

But don’t take my word for it, read the damn book. I can’t understand why this isn’t require reading for all American high school kids. I wasn’t cool enough in university to read this, although it’s been on my list forever. I could never get it at the Seattle library and never found it in print. Now I don’t read books in print form, but better late than never and it’s definitely better for my old eyes to have read it on my eBook.

Powerful book...esp the first half...not just the content, which is raw, but the language and punctuation even that captures brilliantly the maniacal be-bop riot of this heart of darkness ride into the horrid past.... Easy Rider (as, in fact, Sean Flynn quite literally was) comes to Saigon, Khe Sanh, Hue....

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.

Having been in VietNam and having been in some of the Marine Units that Michael Herr writes about in "Dispatches" is the best depiction of war in general and VietNam in particular that I have ever read. It started me on the path to healing that I had kept hidden since I came back from Nam. Thank You Michael.

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...

"Despachos" (1977) de Michael Herr é uma das obras sobre a guerra americana no Vietname mais citadas, o que dá conta do valor deste livro enquanto documento. O jornalista Michael Herr foi cobrir a guerra em 1967, com 27 anos, tendo passado lá 3 anos. Em 1977 publicou esta obra como testemunho direto do que lá passou. O mesmo testemunho que depois foi a base dos dois filmes mais importantes sobre o conflito — "Apocalypse Now" (1979) e "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) — nos quais participou na escrita dos guiões.

Dito isto, se como eu viveram o auge do cinema sobre o Vietname, nos anos 1980/90, e viram os dois filmes acima, e alguns dos filmes principais filmes dessa fase — "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "First Blood" (1982), "The Killing Fields" (1984), "Birdy" (1984), "Platoon" (1986), "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987), "Hamburger Hill" (1987), "Casualties of War" (1989) "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989), "Jacob's Ladder" (1990), "Hearts of Darkness" (1991), Heaven & Earth (1993) — então dificilmente aqui encontrão algo que não tenham já conhecimento.

Naturalmente, isto devia ser visto ao contrário. Os filmes é que não trazem quase nada de novo face ao livro que precede todos estes filmes. Aliás, o único filme que precede o livro é o péssimo "The Green Berets" (1968) com John Wayne, que Herr muito bem aqui critica. Mas tenho de dizer que vivi muito de perto esta fase do cinema. Durante muitos anos "Apocalypse Now" foi o meu filme de sempre, tendo-o visto mais de 20 vezes. Por isso, ao ler apenas agora a obra de Herr, não consegui deixar de a contaminar com toda a minha experiência pessoal cinematográfica. O processo de leitura buscava recriar em mim algo que não conseguia deixar de repescar das memórias desses filmes.

Assim, a leitura acabou sendo bastante aborrecida, porque ausente de novidade, mas talvez pior, porque já não tenho 20 anos, tendo acabado a sentir todo o excesso de arrogância americana no discurso de Herr. Algo que era natural em todo esse cinema dos anos 80-90, mas que nessa altura eu aceitava bem. Hoje, e depois de ter lido obras como o belíssimo "O Simpatizante" de Viet Thanh Nguyen ou a belíssima novela gráfica "The Best We Could Do" de Thi Bui, em que nos é dado a ver o outro lado da guerra, não me consigo ligar mais a nada disto. O modo como Herr apresenta todo o descaramento e arrogância americana impressiona e afasta. Claro que sem todo esse sentimento, nunca teria sido possível convencer o governo americano, e os seus contribuintes, a enterrar milhares de milhões de dólares naquela guerra, tal como estão agora a fazer na Ucrânia.

Mas como disse, este livro é um documento que vai continuar a ser lido por muitos e muitos anos sempre que alguém quiser tentar perceber o que se passou no terreno naquela guerra. Por isso a excelente tradução portuguesa do Paulo Faria, que veio tantos anos depois, apenas editado pela Antígona em 2019, continua a ser bastante relevante.

Publicado no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

"Where had he been to get his language?" is a question Herr asks himself in passing about a soldier he meets, but I think it's the implication in the question that explains why this is one of my favorite books. There are more informative books about Vietnam, speaking in traditional historical terms, but it's the language in this book that has stayed with me- I can open it up, turn to just about any page, and the store of English, with its almost limitless possibility and nuance, feels (very temporarily) replenished in me. Perception becomes less stifling and habitual, and opens up...ever so briefly. Language might seem like a strange thing to praise in a book about the Vietnam War- after all, it would seem that the most important aspect of the book would be essence, the war itself, while language is 'mere' style. But this book reminds me that the two are not mutually exclusive. It may be that for a writer language and experience sit on opposite ends of a pendulum, and the farther you go in one direction, the farther you can swing back in the other. The war was unlike anything Herr had experienced before, and it forced him to develop a new vocabulary to describe it.

Music also has the power to alter perception. Throughout the book, Herr describes hearing Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones; in Vietnam, for the first time, The Doors and "their distant, icy sound. It seemed like such wintry music..."; and The Beatles:

And in my head, sounding over and over, were the incredibly sinister words of the song we'd all heard for the first time only days before. 'The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away', it promised, 'Coming to take you away, dy-ing to take you away...' That was a song about Khe Sanh; we knew it then, and it still seems so...

But the emphasis on music isn't just idle description. Herr discovers that the desire for transcendence that music may have seemed like an answer to, that desire that he felt as a writer and human being, was also capable of being answered by Vietnam, and that pushed far enough it was the same answer. "On the street", he writes of being back in America, "I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock n' roll veterans...rock stars started falling like second lieutenants...what I'd thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don't know how to tell you how complicated that made my life."

------------

It all happened so fast, as they say, as everyone who has ever been through it has always said; we were sitting around listening to what we thought were Tet fireworks coming from the town, and then coming closer until we weren't stoned anymore, until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet...telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn't remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy.

...for the next six years I saw them all, the ones I'd really seen and the ones I'd imagined, theirs and ours, friends I'd loved and strangers, motionless figures in a dance, the old dance. Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterward you can't handle the experience. Until I felt that I was just a dancer too.

"The first rule", Schopenhauer wrote, "indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say." Herr, as a young writer, naturally wanted to have something to say, and was smart enough to understand that he didn't; he was probably drawn to experience that would alter him, that would allow him to transcend himself and his writing...to break on through to the other side, even. And yet when we seek out experience we also give up control, and sometimes the experiences that might allow us to transcend ourselves are not clearly distinguishable from the experiences that can destroy us. Sometimes they might be the same thing. For someone like Hunter S. Thompson, that was the thrill of it. But for Herr, discovering that transcendence and violence were inextricable meant that life was never the same again, not only for himself but for the world.

Maybe it was my twenties I was missing and not the Sixties, but I began missing them both before either had really been played out. The year had been so hot that I think it shorted out the decade, what followed was mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X. It wasn't just that I was growing older, I was leaking time...

And yet one of the most striking and honest things about this book is the tone of nostalgia that runs through it. He realized that war satisfied something in him, that he was not so different from his friends who stayed in California and went to Doors concerts. As Herr puts it early in the book,

…somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of us there a true volunteer.

Or, towards the end, "A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."

Maybe the lesson is that experience can't always be sought out, utilized, and then walked away from. But what choice did Herr have, and what choice do any of us have? Because maybe we are just dancers, too.

I've often wondered what the rest of Herr's life was like, and why he published almost nothing else. One night a few months ago, half-asleep, I heard his name, of all places, on the Bill Simmons podcast. Simmons was interviewing Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair magazine, and asked him to name the best writer he'd ever pursued but couldn't get to write for him. Carter responded,

A writer I used to speak to, sometimes for almost three hours a day, for years and years, was Michael Herr. He'd written Dispatches, he was one of the great journalists of all time, and he...became a Buddhist after Vietnam...Michael was a wonderful, peaceful person...[but] in ten years of constant talking, I only got two pieces out of him. I would have liked more, but he said, 'I'm done writing.'

Fucking amazing. Supposedly the most famous journalistic account of the war in Vietnam... I wouldn't disagree. Nonfiction, but to me on par with any of O'Brien's work from a storytelling perspective, which is saying a lot. Outpaced the highest of expectations.

Have you ever used the word dispatch in a sentence before?

I haven't. I've called the local police before, and I've heard the employees who handle the communication between citizens and the police refer to themselves as “dispatch operators,” and I've heard them say “I'll dispatch an officer to your location,” but I can't think of any other use I've encountered in my own life.

For war correspondents, the plural noun “dispatches” is a well used one, meaning, basically: reports. Reports, typically brief in size, sent from the field to the people in power back home, to inform.

When I think of this word, I can't help but picture someone typing out a telegram to someone: “Heavy casualties. Need more young bodies. Stop.”

Whoa. That brings up two more words. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)?

And, one more: casualties. It has at the root of the word “casual,” but what could be less casual than asking young people to die for the sake of stupid wars?

And they're all stupid. Well, most of them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. War is so fucking stupid, I can't stand it.

I don't mean to insult anyone who has served in the military or is serving now. I mean to insult every leader who has ever flippantly involved their country, or their youth, in an unnecessary war. If you're reading this right now, you know: it's happening right now, again.

So.fucking.stupid. How's that for a telegram?

Do I seem angry, throwing around a couple of “F bombs” this morning in my reading response to this non-fiction account of the Vietnam “conflict?” I hope so. Do you want to know why? Because what happened in Vietnam didn't stay in Vietnam.

Michael Herr, the unlikely “war correspondent” brought home several souvenirs from Vietnam: insomnia, depression, anxiety, drug use, to name a few. And he was one of the lucky ones.

This book isn't an easy read (or a quick read). It's kind of a hot mess, to be honest. A hot mess that offers some brilliant, honest descriptions of what was happening in Vietnam. Mr. Herr is also unbelievably good at giving quick character sketches of the people around him: He was a small man with vague, watery eyes, slightly reminiscent of a rodent in a fable, with one striking feature: a full, scrupulously attended regimental mustache.

The most colorful dispatches I found here:

The players:

grunts
spades
Spooks
dinks
gooks

The details, the setting:

paved swamp
a scorched-earth policy
a John Wayne wetdream
war under water
the Flood had not lasted this long

The conclusion:

Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, we've all been there.



(War is hell, y'all, and we should never fucking forget it).

When this came up in every list of “Best Nonfiction” books I reviewed, I decided it was time to add it to my list of books I’ve read - and loved. It truly is a marvel at conveying experiences unimaginable to those who weren’t there.

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