Dispatches

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Walsh is a wonderful writer, with a gift for sketching an impression of a place, time and ambience with a few brief lines. He knows how to interweave travelogue with an account of the relentless tensions that always threaten to burst through each vignette in the book. What also shines through is the relish with which Walsh throws himself into the far corners of Pakistan, into crowds, celebrations and rites, with a drive born of fascination with the land and its people. By the end of Walsh’s time in Pakistan, the winner in this epic struggle is clear: the ISI and the military machine that stands behind it. “It seemed to boil down to one hard truth: the military always wins,” his realises as he prepares to leave, never to return. “When the ISI men come to the door, the illusion of a democratic state melts away.” 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.” Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do _that_? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan...Can _you_ take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn." He pointed to a picture he'd taken, Flynn laughing maniacally ("We're winning," he'd said), triumphantly. "Nothing the matter with _that_ boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is _good_ for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it. 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”.

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. 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)? 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.” The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists.

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. 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. 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?

A cominciare dall’assoluta consapevolezza che nessuno sa contro chi e per cosa sta combattendo, dalla completa coscienza che sia tutto inutile e folle.

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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. 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: 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. Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971