Maciek's Reviews > Dispatches

"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
-Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971

Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now. Platoon. The Deer Hunter. First Blood. These are just some of the American movies which depict the war in Vietnam, which has served as inspiration for dozens of other films, novels and video games. The conflict in Vietnam has been written about extensively, and Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the first books to present an intimate, closeup picture of the war to the wider public. The first two movies owe a lot to Dispatches - Michael Herr co-wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is partially inspired by this book, and wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket together with Stanley Kubrick.

Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country.

The average age of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam was 22. These were young men, millions of miles away from home, stuck in a scorching and unforgiving climate, surrounded by jungles full of people they could not see. And for what? "I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good", he writes in one chapter, while quoting one of the soldier he talks to in another: "All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period". Most of these soldiers - these who survive - will be forever robbed of their youth: the book is full of physical descriptions of young men looking incredibly old and tired, being incredibly old and tired at the age of 23. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror. 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam; thousand veterans suffering from PTSD took their own lives after returning home.

This is a book written in retrospection, though it loses none of its intensity; while reading it we see a man who acts as if he has just emerged from the war, like it was yesterday. "I went to cover the war and the war covered me", Herr writes near the end and admits that it is "an old story", though in his case very true. This explains the tone of his book - very chaotic and disorganized, full of personal interjections; Herr writes as much about himself as he does about the soldiers and the war. He rejects the role of an impartial observer, and is an active participant in the events that he writes about, focusing on personal emotions and moods - his own and that of the soldiers - rather than tactical and military aspects of the war. What is most prominent is the absolute lack of safety and certainty for anyone, in a country where the invisible enemy hid in the hostile, unwelcoming climate, and despite being completely outnumbered and outgunned and killed always ready to attack and strike back again and again and again:

"You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement—the whole rotten deal—could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of those stories it was a wonder anyone was left alive to die in firefights and mortar-rocket attacks."

"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.”

How do you defeat an enemy whom you can't see and sometimes even recognize, and whom you keep shooting and killing, and who keeps coming back to kill you from underground tunnels, from bushes, from caves? You don't. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, Herr writes near the end of his memoir; he was repeatedly asked by the press for interviews about Vietnam, and to write another book about it; aside from his work on two films he never returned to it, and published only a few other books throughout the years, none of which had the impact of Dispatches. He died last year, after a lengthy illness, in Upstate New York. According to his daughter, Claudia, he came to resent his celebrity and no longer wrote; converting to Buddhism in his last years. I hope that he finally found peace.