1 October 2020

Dispatches by Michael Herr


My favourite movies are always Vietnam War movies. I am particularly obsessed with Apocalypse Now and Platoon. We have done Vietnam for two movie clubs already, and the group still hasn't watched Born on the Fourth of July with me.. I can narrow down my obsession with these movies to a few things: I love the music associated with this era (Ben always says I have boomer taste) and the dark humour. When I first learned about the Vietnam War in high school I remember being horrified by the concept of a draft. So it almost seems like it took me too long to get to a Vietnam memoir, but here I finally am... 

I had never heard of Michael Herr before reading Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir (reviewed in full here) where she cites his writing on Vietnam frequently. Herr also contributed to the narration scenes in Apocalypse Now and was a cowriter for Full Metal Jacket (another favourite). Born in 1940, Herr didn't enlist in the war to fight, nor was he drafted. He voluntarily went over as a war correspondent and it clearly defined the rest of his life. 

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it."

I think with a lot of memoirs sometimes the problem is that the narrator experienced something unique or interesting, but they lack the writing skills to make it worth telling. This is absolutely not the case with Herr. He is an insanely talented writer and I had to stop myself from writing down too many quotes from the first 20 pages alone. He's a really great reporter and observationalist... in this respect he reminded me of Joan Didion, with his ability to immediately put you into the time and space he occupied in Vietnam: 

Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear."

Michael Herr who died at 76
Michael Herr who died at 76
Dispatches doesn't really spend any time on higher-ups in the army chain, most of his focus is on the young men who were on the ground daily. The people he focuses on seem so similar to the characters we often see in the movies: disillusioned, crude, and sometimes disturbed. I remember this scene where he is talking to a really young midwestern solider and he says: "How do you feel when a 19 year old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he's gotten too old for this kind of shit?" 

Herr also met a kid from Miles City, Montana who read an internal newspaper called The Stars and Stripes every single day looking at the list of casualties to see if anyone from his hometown had been killed. The guy didn't even know if anyone else from Miles City was serving in Vietnam, but he said he knew that if there was and they died, than he would survive: "I mean, can you just see TWO guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?"

Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered. Some feared head wounds, some dreaded chest wounds or stomach wounds, everyone feared the wound of wounds, the Wound."

A scene from Full Metal Jacket - Herr writes about seeing this "slogan" written on a helmet 

I do feel like Herr really captured that dark and dismal humour that is often associated with the soldiers. He talks about naive and new-to-the-area correspondents who almost immediately have to put their foot in their mouths after comments like "gee, you must really see some beautiful sunsets in here." Herr is also really great at recording dialogue and wrote down one of these jokes: "If you kill for money you're a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you're a sadist. If you kill for both you're a Green Beret."

Earlier this year I watched Spike Lee's Da Five Bloods. The movie looks at black veterans who return to Vietnam after decades back in America. The movie really opened my eyes to how many black men fought in the Vietnam War and how often they're forgotten. The movie mentions this crazy statistic about how they make up like 11 per cent of the civilian population in America, and in Vietnam made up 23 per cent of combat troops (and 16 per cent of the draftees). Herr mentions in his book how the murder of Martin Luther King "intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done." 

But you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you'd  gone."

I should quickly add that one thing that I find so compelling about the Vietnam War is how such a colossal waste of time and human life it was. They sent so many young people over there, many who didn't come back, for absolutely no purpose - just more bullshit about "fighting communism." I also realize that this war killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people and wanted to add that you don't get any Vietnamese perspective in this book. This is something I am really interested in, and at the end of Dispatches there is a list of recommendations. 

I would recommend this memoir to anyone who is interested in the Vietnam War. If you liked any of the movies I mentioned above, you'll find Dispatches compelling. 

1 comment:

  1. "I should quickly add that one thing that I find so compelling about the Vietnam War is how such a colossal waste of time and human life it was. They sent so many young people over there, many who didn't come back, for absolutely no purpose - just more bullshit about "fighting communism.""
    It's always "interesting" to see non-Vietnamese people say this, then say nothing, absolutely nothing about the current state of Vietnam. Did you know that Americans left in 1973 but the war went on for another 2 years, & the 2 Vietnams were united under the communists? Did you know what happened to South Vietnam & the South Vietnamese after 1975? Did you know Vietnam is a single-party state now, one of the countries with the worst record of human rights? I guess not. I guess you don't care either.

    "I also realize that this war killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people and wanted to add that you don't get any Vietnamese perspective in this book."
    The fact that you say Vietnamese perspective shows that you're quite ignorant of the Vietnam war. You mean North Vietnam. You mean the communists. The often ignored South Vietnamese perspective is totally different.

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