“Dispatches” by Michael Herr
As part of my post-Tree of Smoke reading on Vietnam, Dispatches was recommended by trusted pen pals Kate and Duff. Herr was a writer for Esquire in his mid-20s when he went to cover the Vietnam war in the late 1960’s. He spent most of his time with marine soldiers on the ground, or “grunts” and his respect and affection for them is palpable. The feeling was mostly, but not always, mutual:
…another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way.
Herr’s prose is poetic, and often trippy, reflecting both the insanity of the war, and the drugs many took to help get through it. He often uses second-person address to draw the reader in:
It seemed the least of the war’s contradictions that to lose your worst sense of American shame you had to leave the Dial Soapers in Saigon and a hundred headquarters who spoke goodworks and killed nobody themselves, and go out to the grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder and killed people all the time.
It’s an interesting counterpart to Tim O’Brien’s Things They Carried. Herr was older and had a different vantage point, and Dispatches is labeled military history, not fiction. There are also some significant differences in the Army and Marine soldiers, according each to their author. The books are different, but the same. They’re often tragic and wrenching, but redeemed, perhaps, by the telling of other’s stories to show the brute stupidity of war. They are still frighteningly relevant today, and probably timeless.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
I’m glad you enjoyed it–I still have The Quiet American on the shelf, waiting for me. However, cries of “MOM! Come HERE!” mean that’s all I have to say for now.