Overall a very good book, that sits up there with any Vietnam story ever told. I think I expected a little more from the book that was the basis for the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but... When it came down to it, all that was taken from this book for those films were very minor details, short anecdotes and characters. There was so much of the book that was left untouched by Hollywood.

But the stories were good, and Herr's experience was very unique. There were angles on that war that were very new to me after reading the book, but... I think with all the time he was there, and all the missions he experienced first-hand, I expected a little more in the book. It is told in a very technical way, and not in any kind of narrative thread so it can get a little jumbled or confusing at times, but then again, perhaps that was what the Vietnam war was all about.

Here are three things that will be very helpful to you should you decide to read the book (they came in handy for me, and I wish I had looked at all this stuff before reading(:

- First.. A good glossary of terms and slang used during the war. Here is a link to one, http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history_... , though there are several if you just google it.

- Second. A map of Vietnam during the war. http://www.emersonkent.com/images/vie... is a good one. Pay special attention to the geographical locations of Saigon, Hanoi, Dak To, Danang, Pleiku, Hue, and Khe Sahn.

- Third. There is actually a sort of track listing in the front (actually credits for publishing rights). This along with other songs mentioned during the book provide a t soundtrack to the book. Make a playlist for yourself in Grooveshark or iTunes, it actually accompanies the book very well. I have provided the track listing below, in the order they appear in the book. It really added to the experience for me. Enjoy!

1. Tighten Up by Archie Bell & The Drells
2. Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash
3. Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
4. Magical Mystery Tour by the BEatles
5. San Francisco by Scott McKenzie
6. For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield
7. Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding
8. Where Have All the Flowers Gone by the Kingston Trio
9. Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix
10. Ode to Billy Joe by Bobbie Gentry
11. Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan
12. Trouble Everyday by Frank Zappa
13. 2000 Light Years from Home by the Rolling Stones
14. Citadel by the Rolling Stones
15. Good Morning Little Schoolgirl by the Yardbirds
16. Galveston by Glen Campbell
17. Black is Black by Los Bravos
18. Hungry by Paul Revere & The Raiders
19. We Gotta Get Out of this Place by The Animals
20. Shotgun by Junior Walker & the Allstars

This is war reportage as heartbreaking poetry. One of the roughest pieces of writing I have ever encountered. Beautiful, angular and harsh stylistically. There is a wonderfully (and terrifyingly) immersive quality to this book.

In two weeks I'll be flying to Hong Kong, setting sail for Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia to deliver a series of lectures on a luxury cruise ship. The topic I chose, "Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes," has exposed me to some wonderful films, a number of which I've reviewed on my blog or written about in my column for 3 Quarks Daily. And I've immersed myself in bios of Pearl Buck, Anna Leonowns (the real-life Anna of The King and I), Anna May Wong, Pierre Boulle, Somerset Maugham, along with books about classic films set in Asian locales: Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Lost Horizon, Apocalypse Now -- many of which I've reviewed here. On top of that, I've been working diligently to get my bridge game up to snuff . . .

Mostly, I'm aiming for a light touch with the material. This is a cruise, after all. Bob Hope's and Bing Crosby's good-natured racism in The Road to Singapore is entertaining in its way, as is Charlie Chan's fortune-cookie wisdom. I can share Yunte Huang's insightful discussion of Yellowface from his marvelous book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History without driving my audience into the bar for an early drink, explore stereotypes of "Chinamen" through Disney cartoons and extravagant musical numbers featuring Rin Tin Tin, even! Work in a little commentary on The Good Earth's Depression-era message about the virtue of hard work on the land, illustrated with stills from the movie and comparing them to iconic photographs from the period.




Luise Rainer and babies during the Chinese famine





Dorothea Lange's portrait of Migrant Mother in the dust bowl drought


Sure, the Dust Bowl and the Chinese famine were tough times, but they're pretty remote. Not so the Vietnam war. My cousin Alan was a U.S. Army sharpshooter in Vietnam. He was ten years older than me, and I didn't really get to know him until long after his tour of duty. I do remember him dropping by the house in the early 1980s to visit when our uncle was recuperating from a hit-and-run accident -- this uncle was a bachelor and the rest of the family took turns caring for him (it was a terrible accident). Alan was always reading about the Vietnam war, and he'd talk about it to anyone who was willing to listen, but I had the impression that he was still trying to figure it out. Why were we there? Why was he asked to do the things he did? Was it worth it, in the end?

Vietnam damaged my cousin irreparably. He had a failed marriage behind him, troubled relationships with family members. He made a decent living, working for the Post Office, but never seemed to have enough money, was seriously in debt. In 2002, not long after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, Alan shot himself. He had many problems, had cut himself from nearly everyone, but I can't help seeing a correlation.

Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years. But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review.

Tim O'Brien writes exquisitely about his experience in The Things They Carried. I recommend his book, and count it as a high point in my life as a reader, that I was able to hear him read from it and answer questions from an audience of students (my son among them) who were of draft age during the height of our involvement in Iraq. He reconstructs the shattered lives of his dead companions with poignancy and restraint. O'Brien writes from a distance of years, however. Herr writes from the thick of things and is unrestrained, angry, self-hating and self-pitying, filled with disgust and compassion, his reactions still raw, it felt to me in places:

I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn't squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.

When our cruise ship docks in Vietnam and I disembark in Danang, or Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I'll be seeing those places through my cousin Alan's eyes, thanks to Michael Herr.

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

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

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

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

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

[2.5 stars] I don't doubt that Dispatches is a Great War Book. The fault is with me. I'm not a good non-fiction war book reader. All the battles and shooting and carnage that Herr reports on made me feel numb.

Interestingly, two of my all-time favorite works of fiction are about war: The Things They Carried (Vietnam) and Redeployment (Iraq/Afghanistan). Both of these powerful books brought me much closer to understanding the experience of war than Dispatches did.

”Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, ci siamo stati tutti”

Corrispondente di guerra per Esquire al seguito delle truppe americane durante la guerra in Vietnam, Michael Herr racconta in questo libro dalle dimensioni tutto sommato contenute (poco più di 250 pagine) ciò che ha visto, che ha condiviso, che ha provato in un anno e mezzo trascorso al fronte (dal 1967 al 1969).
Considerato uno dei migliori libri sui conflitti armati che siano mai stati scritti, ha ispirato anche tanta cinematografia bellica, compresi film capolavoro come “Apocalypse now” e “Full metal jacket” (lo stesso Kubrick definì decisivo l’apporto di Herr alla sceneggiatura).
Un doloroso reportage in cui l’autore registra e racconta le fatiche quotidiane condivise con i soldati al fronte, l’allucinante sequenza di crudeltà che travolse un’intera generazione di ragazzi arruolati nell’esercito e scaraventati in una giungla dalla follia della guerra.
Che libro! Capolavoro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1kzd...

”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.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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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.

I was completely transported. Equally horrific and mesmerizing.

No matter what I choose as adjectives to describe Dispatches, it could not amount to anything other than diminishing the raw brilliance of Herr's writing to some tired clichè. Dispatches is unlike any book Ive read or anything I could have imagined. It is in a class of its own. It has been claimed as the finest personal account of war ever written. Im not arguing.

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.

Straszna książka, momentami było mi niedobrze, miałam koszmary w nocy, nie polecam.
5/5