Dispatches

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As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try. Besieged in Khe Sanh with the Marines, Herr looks up at the hills in which lurk NVA artillery positions, raiding parties and Annamese ghosts:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. 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?

Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine.

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. Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years. But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review. Dispatches essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Dispatches by Michael Herr. In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words. At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon.

The whole book was supposed to help the Marines – the ones that were going to be forgotten as soon as the war ended – to live in the memory of others. Herr’s stories were not about heroes, they were about every guy – either good or bad – he met on his long way. Sometimes sad, sometimes disturbing, sometimes optimistic, sometimes absolutely mad and heartless, those men couldn’t be deluded into believing that everything was going to be fine. They found themselves trapped in Hell and there was no one to help them. After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories...where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information."

Sean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.” A man cleans portrait of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in Karachi. Photograph: Rehan Khan/EPA you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' Which wasn't at all true of me. I was there to watch.”

After publishing Dispatches, Herr disclosed that parts of the book were invented, and that it would be better for it not to be regarded as journalism. In a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Times, he admitted that the characters Day Tripper and Mayhew in the book are "totally fictional characters" and went on to say: Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977. Many extremist groups looked on western journalists as legitimate targets, for kidnapping at least, and at one point Walsh is saved by the man he has hired a car from. Overhearing a group of men discussing the logistics of grabbing Walsh, the rental man bundled the Irish journalist into the vehicle and sped away. Islam or the army were supposed to be the glue holding the place together. Yet both seemed to be tearing it apart Declan Walsh Grimes, William (2016-01-06). "Elizabeth Swados, Creator of Socially Conscious Musicals, Is Dead at 64". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-09-14.