Dispatches

I was saddened to read the obituaries of Michael Herr who died just a few days ago at the age of seventy-six. For a lot of people, particularly men, of around my age his book Dispatches captured the essence of the Vietnam War, a campaign with which I have always had a bit of an obsession.

I turned twelve years old in 1975, just as the Americans withdrew from South Vietnam and, shortly afterwards, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. For the previous few months I had been captivated by the seemingly interminable reports each night on the television news showing firefights, helicopter sorties and general mayhem as the war drew gradually towards it close. Of course, I had very little idea what it was all about but show more to a young boy it simply all looked very exciting.

The Vietnam War was perhaps the first multimedia engagement, with footage broadcast nightly to the rest of the world, courtesy of a huge corps of reporters (from both the traditional press and the burgeoning television companies who were eager to fill their news programmes with footage from the front). Michael Herr spent several years as part of that press corps, travelling all over the country in military helicopters and planes, writing articles for Esquire, Time and Life magazines.

The book is very difficult to describe – Herr effortlessly conveys the horrors of engagement, the terror and the brutality, yet also the camaraderie and sensitivity that the troops displayed, all set against the backdrop of the draft and the Civil Rights movement back home. His style is vibrant – Herr was, after all, one of the earliest and most adept exponents of what was then the emerging literary form of ‘New Journalism’. Fact written as seamlessly and engagingly as fiction.

Herr’s prose is meticulous, often veering towards the poetic, paradoxically often hitting its most purple patches when tackling the most awful subject matter. He also captures the zeitgeist of the times. Rest and recreation spells in Saigon were played out to an amazing sound track of 1960s rock, fuelled by handfuls of hallucinogens and downers. There is a wistfulness there, too (‘Of course, coming back home was a down. What could you do for a finish’), and a feeling that the rest of his life would always be coloured by his experiences in Vietnam. (‘I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.’) He doesn’t glamourise war, but there is an inescapable sense that participation made combatants different from the rest of us. show less

Intense, hallucinogenic, truer than true, this is the story of a hard year in Vietnam by a very talented writer. Michael Herr spent 1968 with the grunts, in Tet, at Khe Sanh, on China Beach. He spent it drinking in the bar of the the Continental Hotel, smoking dope in Saigon slums, sipping whiskey in bunkers by the light of parachute flares. You can't read this book and not feel the madness, the glamour, the transfixing power of War, and the way it touched and and transformed the men who fought it.

This book is the most haunting, visceral account of the Vietnam War that I have yet read. Michael Herr captures the essentially surreal character of the war, from the isolated and strange atmosphere in the Saigon drug scene to the absurdities of the "five o'clock follies", to the front-less fighting against the Viet Cong in both the jungles and in set battles. I felt in reading this that I got a real sense for how crazy it must have felt to be involved in the war from an American perspective, and what mental gymnastics were required to continue to justify a U.S. presence that became increasingly absurd as time went on. This is a highly readable account from a journalist who was there, who doesn't have any ideological or professional show more agenda to redeem or explain. show less

Wow.

I wasn't there "in the shit", but nothing I have ever read on Vietnam reads more authentic that this work by a correspondent that hunkered with "the grunts", was at Khe San, smoked weed and drank whiskey in the bunkers and got real with it in a way bordering on gonzo journalism.

I did a little research and was in no way surprised to learn that Michael Herr later became a Hollywood writer, lured to the movies by Francis Ford Coppola to work on Apocalypse Now. The tone and outlook of this book and that movie are very much aligned. The scene at the bridge is exactly as described, right down to the stoned M79 gunner killing the screaming VC with a single, instinctive shot in the dark. The movie was surreal based on a war that was show more surreal and Herr reported that surreal aspect as he experience it, it appears. show less

Snappy writing, mixing up war reporting with lots of memoir episodes and anecdotes, about a quarter of the material becomes a bit navel gazing about the war reporters themselves and a vietnamese perspective is essentially missing.
The anger is here, the waste, the lack of a goal. But what this isn't, is some kind of history of the Vietnam war, even in part. Khe Sanh features heavily, but only with an indirect eye. This is a slice in time, with quick sketch portraits of named and unnamed soldiers, brief encounters, great quotes. It all felt very Hunter S Thompson and it made sense in retrospect as this is categorized in the "new journalism" style (he'd call it gonzo), which calls into question how accurate this all is. Reviews by show more veterans suggest it rings true, but is that in the sense of capturing the vibe rather than the literal truth of what happened? As Herzog suggests in his own memoirs, the literal truth can be less True than the fictionalized account.
What did we learn here? A bit of the trough every Vietnam movie has been siphoning inspiration from, and not just in the sense of the capsule moments, but the style, a roving camera circling our protagonist storyteller as waves of horror, boredom and action wash over him in a conflict he doesn't understand or particularly wants to fight. show less

In Dispatches Michael Herr recaptures his time in Vietnam in a vivid and stylishly harsh manner. As an independent journalist, he was able to choose which story to follow and often would catch helicopter rides between locations. He covered a huge part of Vietnam, including Saigon, Khe Shan and Hue. This is an excellent read about Vietnam but it is full of fear, death and the ravaging effect that this war had on both the people there and America as a whole.

He was able to get up close and personal with the serving soldiers and it is here, with a backdrop of rock and roll music, the psychological effects of drugs and the general demoralization of the troops, that one gets the clearest picture of the turmoil and uncertainty that the show more average grunt was facing. In covering the war, Michael Herr became one of them, eating their food, smoking their joints, and sharing their bunkers as bombs fell around them. One particular story of him being the only living passenger on a chopper full of body bags was particularly harrowing.

Michael Herr guides his reader through the craziness that was Vietnam and by the end of the book I felt numb and drained. From the chaos to the inhumanity, Herr doesn’t flinch from showing us the way it was. show less

Chaotic scenes for pages on end, hard to digest. Probably the purest, most honest way of writing about war. There are film that achieve this even better, but the part about the correspondents' role and position in this war is brilliant and covers all the controversies including Herr's own doubts about what to write.