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Dispatches

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Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. 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. At a time when many veterans would say little about their experiences during the war, Dispatches allowed for an experience and understanding of the war like no other source to date. Just the idea of being able to peace out when things get really nasty would have to be a pretty significant sleep aid. 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.

Come non ritrovare nelle parole di Herr tante situazioni dell’invasione dell’Iraq e dell’Afghanistan? 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. Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma.

Herr worked on the narration for the movie Apocalypse Now and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie Full Metal Jacket. Combined with the compelling urgency of Herr’s narration – every line set down as if it’s about to be interrupted by incoming shell-fire – there’s Herr’s mesmerising voice itself, perhaps the single greatest achievement of a book that, nearly 40 years on, offers the definitive account of war in our time, especially the Vietnam war – among the most terrible of the postwar wars. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

Despite every other kind of progress, humanity still lives and dies in conditions of either war or peace, a truth reflected in our literature. While the narrative is firmly rooted in Herr's role as a wartime journalist, he also bends the rules of what is traditionally expected of objective reporting. He is always quick to interject his opinion, uses expletives liberally, and has admitted to fabricating several characters that appear throughout the novel.Maybe the lesson is that experience can't always be sought out, utilized, and then walked away from. After the publication of Dispatches in 1977, Herr worked on the legendary film Apocalypse Nowin 1979. 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. For the US, it mainly started in 1961, or 1965, after the Tonkin resolution; for Herr it started in 1967 when he became Esquire’s war correspondent based in Saigon. I don't really want to go into that no-man's-land about what really happened and what didn't happen and where you draw the line.

Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South.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. I won’t try to prove to you how good it is, or how important it is, how it is one of the greatest works of the second great age of literary nonfiction in The United States. The reader has to learn on the run, just like those who went to Vietnam were dropped into the middle of something that only time and experience could orient them to. 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. His writingstyle is a way for Herr to approximate his experience of being in Vietnam,one that gives a feeling of constantly moving, and always having limited control over one’s situation and surroundings.

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