Dispatches

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Colleagues" discusses life amongst Herr's fellow war correspondents, including more detailed profiles of those he knew best: Flynn, the son of the Golden Age movie star, and Stone. Both ultimately disappeared in Cambodia and were declared MIA. He recounts the amazement of the grunts that these journalists have actually chosen to risk their lives covering the war when they could have done otherwise. He is moved by the stories they tell him and even more so by their intense desire to have them reach the public; many of them fill this book. 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.

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 it were only unconventional journalism, it would stand with the best there is - but it's a good deal more than that . . . I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, about any war, that any writer has ever accomplished It was at this point that I began to recognise every casualty, remember conversations we'd had days or even hours earlier, and that's when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He'd been hit in both legs, both arms the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to take a picture of him like this to send to his wife. 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? 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.”

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.A light, warm breeze blows into his face and Michael Herr, master of war journalism, pulls down the peak of his baseball cap. It's not just that those who line up to praise his book, Dispatches , above all others include John le Carré, William Burroughs and Tom Wolfe, it is that he invented a genre, a new way of writing about war, the cruelty of war, the pity of war and the savage, hollow laugh of the warrior. 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. In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway . . . he seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, Frank Zappa and Francis Bacon I went through that thing a number of times and only got a fast return on my fear once, a too classic hot landing with the heat coming from the trees about 300 yards away, sweeping machine-gun fire that sent men head down into swampy water, running on their hands and knees towards the grass where it wasn’t blown flat by the rotor blades, not much to be running for but better than nothing.” Three to compare That's wonderful, but that has nothing to do with the guy sitting at the desk, you know? It's out of his hands, beyond his control and is, in a way, absolutely not personal. You know what I mean?

The upshot was a book, published in 1977, which every journalist and writer – from John le Carré to Robert Stone – who had ever been in a war zone wished they’d written. Comparisons were made with books like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, but this was different: it was by a writer not a soldier, and it was the writer’s sensibility that made his book captivate a whole generation of readers. Another celebrated New Journalist, Hunter S Thompson, spoke for the profession when he said: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts the rest of us in the shade.” Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language. 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)? GROSS: You said that when you went to Vietnam, you were on a different frequency from the rest of the journalists who were there. What were you looking for that was different from what they were looking for? After publishing Dispatches, Herr disclosed that parts of the book were invented, and that it would be better for it not to be regarded as journalism. In a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Times, he admitted that the characters Day Tripper and Mayhew in the book are "totally fictional characters" and went on to say:Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. As I'd never read a single thing on the Vietnam War before - why it took me this long I've no idea, the last time I would have heard any of these mentioned was probably the last time I re-watched some of the classic Nam movies from the 80s. And that must have been almost 20 years ago. The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter: Having read Dispatches, it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death