Dispatches by Michael Herr

I finally found this book, which I have been trying to read for many years, at a Tokyo library. My first impression is that the writer is very talented. My second impression is that it's the war as viewed by a teen-ager. My third impression is that it was obviously very cool to go to Vietnam in those days - in other words, beautiful, popular people went, eg, Sean Flynn, the son of the actor Erroll Flynn. This is not the case of the Iraq War, where you rarely see beautiful, talented people. Rather, you see occasional white freelancers, some TV broadcasters, and lots of Arab journalists.

I read this book along with Herbert: The making of a soldier by Lt Col Anthony Herbert, America's most decorated enlisted man in the Korean War. The contrast was instructive. Herbert is a tough professional soldier, but with a conscience. He doesn't like the torturing of prisoners and civilians that seems routine during his stay in Vietnam, where he very successfully commands the 2nd battallion of the 173rd Airborne. His direct superior is J. Ross Franklin - ironically, also a heroic soldier from Korea, and one who succeeds in eventually pushing Herbert out of his post in Vietnam, and whom Herbert later accuses of condoning torture. Herbert's book is a riveting insider account of what a foul, corrupt and poisonous outfit the US Army really was in Vietnam - the murderous Phoenix programme, the torturing, the lying, the relentless killing of civilians, the waste, the incompetence and the carelessness. All narrated by an insider. To me the account was plausible. He was an older generation than the Vietnam soldiers, closer to WW2, and he comes from a decent working class background. I can see that kind of person being against torture, just as I trust my Granddad not to have participated in torture when he served in Belgium in the Second World War. Anyway, read the book and make up your own mind.

Herr partly picks up on this evil, but make no mistake: the book is primarily about Herr, not the war. He doesn't come out with an intellectually cogent pro or anti war stance. He's a fence sitter, very Yin-Yang about the war. His sympathies come across in quotes from a true character of the war, Larry Page, who on being requested to write a de-glamourized version of the war shakes his head and says:"Take the glamour out of war? How the hell can you do that? Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned on China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Sean Flynn..."

The irony of having a former film star coming to the war is not remarked on by Herr, who is very close to Flynn. To me, it seemed symptomatic: there was even more sex, money, booze, pot, glamour, vitality and prospects for personal gain in Vietnam than EVEN in Hollywood. The death of Flynn says it all: re-living Easy Rider, he and some chums jump on some rented Honda motorcycles and head out to Cambodia. They are captured and killed...oops, we are not in a movie after all, you can just imagine them thinking, just before the Khmner Rouge blow their brains out. Is this kind of journalism a sign of decadence of a sign of a healthy civil society taking on the government version of the war? I'm not sure. If the latter, does it have to come across as quite so self-indulgent and exploitative?

Herr says he makes little money in Vietnam, and this gains him the respect of the grunts. But actually, he made his whole career off one lousy year in a war zone. The only credits I could find for him on the Web are script writing roles for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. He now lives in secluded retirement - not surprisingly, he doesn't seem to have moved on much, and probably has little to say.

Now, I'm not saying Herr favours the war. He's against the war, but he loves the actual waging of war - the blood, the ripped -up corpses, the gaping wounds, the cool weapons, taking off from hot landing zones in powerful choppers; the camaraderie, the young, dead, handsome soldiers, the sheer sadistic voyeurism of it all. He calls the grunts 'beautiful killers, brutal and sweet" and tells how they look after him. Well, maybe they are looking after him so he doesn't write bad things about them. Overall, Herr doesn't specifically say why the war is wrong: there is no political analysis of why the war is likely to fail, there is little mention of the Vietnamese government, and there are even very few interviews with Vietnamese! This is probably the weakest part of the book - the only Viets he "interviews" are dead. In typical American fashion, the agonizing is focused on the perpetrators of the whole sorry mess, the Americans themselves. Screw the victims, in other words...they are just less interesting.

Finding the evidence he's against the war is an interesting challenge. There are few comments describing in accurate detail, reasons why the war is bad (ie badly run, politically counter-productive, morally corrupting and on on). You certainly get an idea of the atmosphere of the war, and maybe that's enough to carry the 'anti war' message, and part of his skill as a writer that he avoids lecturing. He certainly shows effectively the degrading impact of the war on certain Americans, and makes some astute comments

"We had this gook and we was gonna skin him" (grunt)

"American civilians...who were making it here like they were never making here like they'd never make it at home began forming into large, armed bands, carrying 45s and grease guns and Swedish Ks, and no mob of hysterical vigilantes ever promised more bad news. You'd see them at ten in the morning on the terrace of the Continental waiting for the bar to open, barely able to light their own cigarettes."

(After Hue '68) "We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic, and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop." (Great line!)

(After the battle of Dak To) "You were in a place where you didn't belong, where things were were glimpsed for which you would have to pay, an where things went unglimpsed for which you also to pay, a place where they did not play with the mystery but killed you straight off for trespassing. The town had names which laid a quick, chilly touch on your bones."

" They killed a lot of communists, but that was all they did, because the number of communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing."

And, possibly self-referential:"there were more young, apolitically radical, wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam than anybody ever realized!"

These are insightful observations, but they are almost irrelevant to the book. It seems to me that the war is a backdrop to Herr's evolution as an artist, or perhaps even as a human being. In that sense, it's not even about Vietnam, it's about the inner landscape of Herr and his glamorous, twisted, brilliant friends. I think this is what I find navel gazing and exploitative about the work. Unless and until the war is filtered through their consciousness (an amalgam of their cocks, brains, imagination and emotions) it's not really important - it doesn't even really exist. When he writes "the moment of initiation where you bend down and bit the tongue off a corpse" is about the taster, not the corpse. Clearly, the incident doesn't make any difference to the corpse.

And I think that's why he focuses so much on the Marines. These guys, contrary to their image as elite, highly trained, shock troops come across as an incompetent version of the Nazi SS: in love with death like a drunken sailor infatuated by a local whore, and just as devoid of brains - during the siege of Khe Sanh, for example, they didn't even have proper bunkers. But this fatal prodigality is part of their allure for Herr, and he covers them as much as he can. These guys come across as stupefied and badly lead, rather than glamorous.

I see an interesting link between this books (which has been described as truth in novelistic form) and the current blurring of lines in today's blogging community. Herr isn't really covering events, he's personalizing them, just as so many bloggers do. Perhaps it's the rise of the ego, from the babyboomer generation. We get the same trend in the 60s of the writer being the news, rather than covering news - Hunter S. Thompson springs to mind.

At the end of the book, we get a sense of what Herr is left with, and it's quite interesting, although characteristically elliptic. On his return:" I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualites, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock starts started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and life, but it didnt' seem so then...1969 had been so hot that I think it shorted out the whole decade, what followed was a mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X.

So what does he come home to? More manifestations of the war. Civilian life is actually a continuation, and his agony does not abate, although "one last chopper revved it up and flew out of my chest." This book really is about America. But I mourn for Vietnam.

Genesis

Goodness, I"ve created a blog in 30 seconds...can't quite believe it. Even my first choice URL name was free. Not quite ready for this. I want this to be an intellectual diary, and hopefully get feedback from commenters as well. I don't want it to be personal, I think.