Dispatches, by Michael Herr
From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.
So I'm trying something new (and no, it's not "actually be faithful about doing book reviews" although it also, sort of, is) and I want to record it for posterity, i.e., my future self, who I assume has the same terrible memory that current self does. At least, I can't imagine that my memory is going to get better. So I'm committing myself to the 2019 PopSugar Reading Challenge, and my plan is to faithfully set down the books I choose and read, here, in my own personal corner. As a warm-up, I've decided to post a review of the last book I read, Dispatches. Who's up for some little light reading, am I right?!
Actually, that's not even true, and I just realized it, because I finished A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue after Dispatches and didn't remember until just now, even though it was literally the day before yesterday. I wasn't joking about my memory.
So maybe it makes sense for me to review Dispatches then, because it truly is a book that sticks with you. Not the plot; there is none. It's more the sense of being in a certain time and place (here: the Vietnam War, circa 1968) and the emotions that come with it than any linear story-line or through-point.
The book is very roughly segregated into sections, but it reads more like one continuous fever dream. For those who loved Apocalypse Now, this guy did the narration and honestly, probably hugely influenced the feel of the movie. Michael Herr is a master at conveying the closing distance to madness from living in these conditions, the grunts who just want to leave, the generals who can't admit that the war is failing, the correspondents who are drawn to it, not realizing yet that everything else in their life will be duller and grayer by comparison (even if they aren't literally being shot at and mangled) once they leave the war zone.
This really was an incredibly well-written book. It's sad, incredibly sad, as you realize the futility and waste going on, the refusal to consider the human cost of things, and, in hindsight, the loss of normalcy for the soldiers who went over there. In one of the later sections about the correspondents who went over there, Herr describes a soldier trying to show one of the photojournalists pictures of a dead posed vietnamese woman, severed heads, ears, destruction, not realizing that "every other soldier had the same pictures". There's racism, not only towards the Vietnamese, but between the white and black soldiers. There's the sense that these kids (one of them is twenty) may be indelibly wounded from the things they've seen and done. A long section is about the siege at Khe Sanh, the endless shelling, and immobility, and also the strange quiet when the rains lifted and support arrived, a place where you could easily go mad in hell and return weeks later to find that it's nothing more than a standard outpost, returned again to being militarily unimportant.
I also learned that Errol Flynn had a son, Sean, who was a Vietnam War photojournalist. I was so taken by this news, I looked him up on wikipedia and spoiled the ending of the book: the golden boy (at least the way Herr describes him) two years after the events of Dispatches, takes a bike through Cambodia in search of Viet Cong and disappeared, declared dead fourteen years later, although it's believed he only lived one.
It's not the easiest book to read (in fact, I bemoaned to more than one person that I wished it were about a hundred pages shorter) but I'm glad I read it, sad it happened, but satisfied that this record was made, to preserve the time, to give us knowledge, possibly, to avoid a recurrence.
