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A review of Dispatches

by Michael Herr

How did Vietnam feel? A long prose poem by the screenwriter of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple

Dispatches Men tick differently from women, right? The mental structures the genders are born with, what they react to ... John le Carré praised Dispatches as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Well ... I love men, I hate war, men are in some way fascinated by war. What could I learn about men, war and myself by plunging into Michael Herr's book?

Let's start with the mystique around toughness and the ability to kill cold-bloodedly. "God help his opposite numbers unless they had at least half a squad along, he was a good killer, one of our best." Does our first-person narrator really subscribe to this stuff? Does one have to to stay sane? A kind of a fatalism feels specifically late 1960's: "Something almost always went wrong somewhere, somehow. It was always something vague, unexplainable, tasting of bad fate, and the results were always brought down to their most basic element – the dead Marine. ... And you knew that, sooner or later, if you went with them often enough, it would happen to you too." Herr quotes the song lyrics that felt particularly poignant at the time, including Hendrix and the Stones and Dylan – and you can feel the stuckness, the futility: what choice did they have? The only ones who don't pose the question, "Why am I here?" have found fulfillment in weapons, in killing, in hate.

The author was a journalist in Vietnam between 1967 and 1969, with the troops in action, on "shore leave" in Saigon or Danang. The "grunts" – the Marines doing the dirty work – accord the journalists a warm welcome, imploring them to tell it like it is, sure that the real story isn't getting through. And Herr knows the stories can be found among the soldiers. We soon share his ironic distance to press conferences where drastic situations are described in optimistic, veiled terms, to insipid warnings "against losing pay vouchers and currency-exchange slips" on the Armed Forces Radio Network.

Macho facts of life like fear, bravery, foolhardiness, and the thrill of machinery are described in a plainspoken and thus affecting way. The language is crude, death never far away. We're not spared disgusting details, from the bleakness of makeshift barracks to jungle decay to stumbling over corpses. The writing is more of a prose poem than a journalistic description or explanation of events.

It's interesting to read this book in the wake of the 2003 war on Iraq: the same deluded American people are at it again. "They worked in the news media, for organizations that were ultimately reverential towards the institutions involved: the Office of the President, the Military, America at war and, most of all, the empty technology that characterized Vietnam."

Why did the Vietnam war bring out a sadistic streak in its participants: because it seemed so dehumanizingly pointless at the participants' level, so far from the known constraints of convention? Or did the dehumanizing element come from above – from the distance between the Administration's ideals and the reality of the Vietnamese jungle?

I've never read a book that's so much about death – about fear, about fatalistic acceptance, about corpses. It's not a book you savor. But it takes you back to the huge amount going on in people's imaginations at the time (e.g., the decade's assassinations, expressive rock music, the loss of faith in authority) and the war's ravaging effect on the American psyche.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Dispatches

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003

Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
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--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
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--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
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--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia - by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
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