My knowledge of the war in Vietnam is fairly limited, and inextricably bound up with its depiction in countless movies, games, books and TV shows since the year of its release. My only formal education of the conflict came from a module at school on the Cold War; it was never taught in much detail, perhaps because Britain never participated, yet I’ve always retained something of a peripheral awareness of it. Even before I’d seen ‘Apocalypse Now’ I’d known (or I thought I’d known) what it was all about: scrawny, sweating marines with slogans painted across their helmets; fleets of helicopters swooping low across a jungle of a deeper green; and terrible, motiveless, inconceivable acts of violence. In contrast to the great victory of WWII, Vietnam is supposed to be the bad war, a strange endeavour that (without the wider global context of the time) seems like a colossal waste of human life. It’s a great folly, and while most follies grow into a certain faded nobility with the passing of time, this one only seems to grow more mysterious, twisted and absurd.This book is perhaps the motherlode of so many of the depictions of the war which we still fall back on today. The author spent time ‘in country’ as a correspondent for Esquire magazine, a role which involved being directly embedded with marines in a number of locales. He was not only close to the action but directly involved with it, even to the point of being shot at (and occasionally shooting back, though to limited effect). His writing is intense, personal, and highly subjective. It uses unconventional, informal written techniques to attempt to reach an almost expressionist plane of depiction. It’s not a primer on the conflict itself, and would probably be of limited use to a historiographer trying to piece together a complete picture of any given campaign — but it is an extraordinary account of what it was like to be there. ‘As the chopper rose again and turned, his weight went back hard against the webbing, and a dark spot the size of a baby’s hand showed in the centre of his fatigue jacket. And it grew — I knew what it was, but not really — it got up to his armpits and then started down his sleeves and up over his shoulders at the same time. It went all across his waist and down his legs, covering the canvas on his boots until they were dark like everything else he wore, and it was running in slow, heavy drops off his fingertips.’The writing is careful, unhurried, and in its way somewhat pointless. By this I mean that it is not economical with words, and it does not aspire towards the detached objectivity of conventional journalism. It sprawls, not uncomfortably. In the example above, it serves no moral or historical or documentary purpose to depict the progress of this particular bloodstain; the technique is entirely literary. Instead, the writing entirely absorbs the reader within that moment — we actually come to see what the author saw, and there’s a frightening precision to that clause that hangs at its heart: ‘I knew what it was, but not really’. Those words could sum up this book, which in its totality is attempting to grasp towards a broader truth about the experience of this particular war through the juxtaposition of stories evocatively told.There’s things here that are so extraordinary in their strangeness that if they appeared in a work of fiction a reader might dismiss them as impossible. The noise of a baby crying amplified to terrible levels, blaring down from a ‘psyops soundship’ as a form of propaganda. The colonel who plans to shorten the war by dropping piranhas into the rice paddies occupied by the enemy. The commander who has the bodies of the dead thrown from the air some two hundred feet onto a village to terrify the locals. The colonel who liked to have his helicopter fly very close to the ground so he could fire his handgun into trapped groups of enemy soldiers. These are only the most memorable examples of things you could not believe were possible in the twentieth century, in a war conducted by a supposedly disciplined, civilised nation. Or perhaps some or all of these things don’t surprise today as much as they did at the time. The sense of the war here that might once have seemed so controversial, or even anti-American, has (to a certain extent) become just what the world thinks Vietnam was. All these ‘bad war’ tropes are still remarkably persistent, and at a certain point in this book I began to wonder whether it would be possible for it to tell me a horror story about Vietnam that I would dismiss as actually unbelievable. Does there exist a war story so awful that I could look at it and say: there’s no way that could have happened? I think perhaps not. But it’s not all about horror. This passage conveys well the other side of our notion of the war as a kind of emblematic nightmare, a mixed-up catalogue of the very best and worst the sixties and seventies had to offer: ‘Most of one wall was covered with a collage that Davies had done with the help of some friends. It included glimpses of burning monks, stacked Viet Cong dead, wounded marines screaming and weeping, Cardinal Spellman waving from a chopper, Ronald Reagan, his face halved and separated by a stalk of cannabis; pictures of John Lennon peering through wire-rimmed glasses, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown; coffins draped with American flags whose stars were replaced by swastikas and dollar signs…’There’s a kind of irresistible glamour in this, a certain edgy appeal. Perhaps that’s exactly what Esquire magazine originally saw in this writing; something that carried the suggestion of being apolitical, almost amoral, drifting about the combat zone in a purple haze. There’s a sense of the same kind of feeling J.G. Ballard documented so well in ‘Empire of the Sun’ — that while the immediate conditions were basically hellish, there were certain moments in those circumstances that possessed a kind of eternal glamour that would go on to resonate throughout a person’s life. There’s a lovely short epilogue at the very end of this book where the author recalls his return home after the war: ‘feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda. Mine opened out into war and loss.’But what about your loss, I wonder? Does it matter to the reader that the author felt this way? What about the others who were not so lucky, who didn't have the privilege of poring over their feelings in print? The stories of others who suffered are largely incidental here. Their lives are relegated to the sidelines once the author's finished with them. This is a necessary process which makes up the other side of the New Journalism, I suppose: the most violent conceivable imagery becomes grist to the mill of the keen writer or photographer. It’s a criticism readily acknowledged by the author when he writes:‘There’s no way around it, if you photographed a dead Marine with a poncho over his face and got something for it, you were some kind of parasite. But what were you if you pulled the poncho back first to make a better shot, and did that in front of his friends? Some other kind of parasite, I suppose. Then what were you if you stood there watching it, making a note to remember it later in case you might want to use it? These combinations were infinite, you worked them out, and they involved only a small part of what we were thought to be.’Every kind of journalist is surely implicated in this; indeed, one might as well draw out this reasoning to its end to encompass the entire military and civilian establishment involved in the war. Every violent action provokes any number of smaller parasitical actions on the part of individuals who are driven by motivations which perhaps they do not understand. And while the author does not exempt himself, the fact remains that he chose to be the one who both documents the violence, and who documents the methodology of documenting. What we are supposed to take from this, I think, is that the author is both down in it, and above it all because he's smart enough to see what's going on; but his writing is far more down in it than even he could realise. In places it has aged poorly. I don’t just mean the occasional lapse into baggy hippy lingo; I mean the casual adoption of racist language. Perhaps the intent was to mimic the patterns of army speech, but there’s a number of instances where the author refers to black people as ‘spades’ in what seems like his own voice. The Vietnamese are just ‘slopes’ to the marines, though the author seems comparatively reluctant to adopt this term himself. The people of the country are treated with a kind of wary respect tinged with distrust; as an enemy they are barely present except for as ghoulish creatures lurking in the hillsides, and as a civilian population they are basically impenetrable. There’s no attempt at all to tell their story, and maybe that’s for the best. But surely none of this would be compelling or credible if written today; we expect now that such accounts would fully engage with local attitudes, rather than placing them as the subject of the author’s overwhelming whim. For all the problems I have with it, I still think this a remarkable, important and disturbing book. It has some truly inspired writing, and it probably deserves to be read with a deal of care. Non-fiction writing has come a long way since the seventies, and we’re richer for it; certainly I’d be suspicious of anyone who came along claiming this book as their one and only influence. But as a document of its time, as a multi-angled atrocity exhibition of pop culture and modern warfare, it is surely one of the most interesting examples of that era.
”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.” 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. 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. Sean Flynn and Dana StoneThe 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 JarI placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill.The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the groundAnd 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 StevensThe 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. ”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’ downThe 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.” 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 damp earth in your nostrils.
What do You think about Dispatches (1991)?
I'd kind of heard of this, but didn't know its significance and avoided reading about it while reading it. Turns out he later wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which makes sense because Vietnam film is 100% rooted in the language and stories of this book. I'm conflicted because it tells things as horribly as they were and yet within this book is the seed for the romanticism of the Vietnam war. All those movies and all those people I always felt were enjoying them for all the wrong reasons.Vietnam. Crazy, huh? The last great boy's club. The last conscripted war. The first modern war.Two-hundred pages and it took a long time to read. Because it crammed, and true. It's all true, so it hits hard, and if you skim you are missing real, harrowing stories. What a fucked up thing, a clearly defined period of time where a life is worth less than usual. A half-price sale on lives.It's laced with contradictions, probably the most honest way to talk about war, especially war as murky as the Vietnam one. Herr takes all his internal mess and dumps it on the page. That is not a criticism.(It's purely from an American point of view. Is it impossible for us to understand the East at war? At all? That film Eastwood made, the Japanese side of the Iwo Jima story, Letters from Iwo Jima. It was admirable, but the only clearly drawn characters in it were a general who'd spent a lot of time in the states and adopted a western mode of thinking and another young character who went against his orders.)
—Pierce
This might be the most famous book written about the Vietnam war and the American soldiers involved. It took me a while to deal with the rhythms and cadence of author Michael Herr's narrative, which is a bit of a hallucinatory word trip. But as the book went on, I adjusted and learned so much I did not know about Vietnam, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the chaos of Saigon, the battle of Hue, the siege of Khe Sanh, the DMZ, Mekong Delta, etc. I didn't even know for sure the difference in the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong.There are sections of heartbreakingly beautiful writing, particularly as it pertains to the mindsets of the enlisted men (grunts), and also the bond formed between the journalists covering the war. The Khe Sanh section is outstanding. Herr ignores the propaganda spouted by the military command and instead focuses on the soldiers who must deal with the animal fear and reminders of death every day in a very foreign place. You can't help but put yourself in the place of these very young soldiers and imagine the disorientation and terror they must have felt.Herr also describes his own conflicted feelings after leaving Vietnam, as he finds he must deal with his own personal emptiness, missing the excitement and tension of the conflict, as well as the relationships formed.This is an insightful story about a very shameful time in our nation's history and its effect on those involved.
—Scott
Beautifully renderd account of tagging along as a journalist in 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...
—matt
