Dispatches
Although I’ve recommended and argued that Michael Herr is an example of an unfettered U.S. war correspondent, it’s been thirty some years since I read his book. Presently, I cannot put my hands on my copy. What follows is another, Wendy Smith, reader’s endorsement of his book. Ms Smith includes samples of his prose.
NOTE: While in Vietnam, Herr pal’d around with the "English" (not American) photo journalist Tim Page (Page, BTW, was the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in
Apocalypse Now).
“Liberated from deadlines by his freeform assignment from
Esquire magazine, Herr spent much of his time hanging around with grunts like the exhausted kid who replied to the standard question, ‘How long you been in-country?’ by half-lifting his head and saying, very slowly, ‘all fuckin’ day,’ or the soldier detailed on reconnaissance patrol who told the reporter that the pills he took by the fistful ‘cooled things out just right’ and that ‘he could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope.’ Unlike his colleagues working for mainstream media, Herr was under no obligation to solicit and report the military command’s unwaveringly optimistic statements; instead, he listened to ‘grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder and killed people all the time,’ men who despised sugar-coated official platitudes about what they were doing there as much as the most committed antiwar activist did.”
“Herr dissected that complex, fraught relationship in a situation where the stakes were mortally high. He thought of himself as the grunts’ brother, sharing their miseries and dangers in the field. On the surface, they seemed to agree. They gave him their helmets and flak jackets, found him mattresses to sleep on, threw blankets over him when he was cold. ‘You’re all right man,’ they said, ‘you got balls.’
“But then would come ‘that bad, bad moment . . . the look that made you look away,’ or the comment of a rifleman watching a jeepload of correspondents drive off: ‘Those fucking guys, I hope they die.’ Then the distance was clear. ‘They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way,’ Herr wrote. ‘They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices.’ He was not their brother, and he came to a conclusion many reporters prefer not to draw: ‘You were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.’ There was only one way to honor that responsibility, and the grunts told him what it was. ‘They would ask you with an emotion whose intensity would shock you to please tell it, because they really did have the feeling that it wasn’t being told for them, that they were going through all this and that somehow no one back in the World knew about it.’
“Herr told as many of their stories as he could cram into a narrative burning with his fierce belief that ‘conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.’ He told the story of a freaked-out Marine, throwing away fatigues soaked with the blood of ‘some guy he didn’t even know [who] had been blown away right next to him, all over him.’ There was no way to wash them clean, the soldier said, near tears: ‘You could take and scrub them fatigues for a million years, and it would never happen.’ He told the story of a battalion in the midst of the Tet Offensive’s worst days, afflicted with despair so terrible that men from Graves Registration going through the personal effects of dead soldiers sometimes found letters from home ‘delivered days before and still unopened.’
“Over and over, Herr described major battles with massive casualties on both sides that didn’t so much end as stop when the North Vietnamese picked up most of their dead and vanished into the jungle. Command proclaimed them victories, but it was hard to feel victorious at the top of Dak To’s Hill 875, which hundreds of Americans had died to take, where there were exactly four Vietnamese bodies. ‘Of course more died, hundreds more,’ Herr wrote, ‘but the corpses kicked and counted and photographed and buried numbered four. . . . Spooky. Everything up there was spooky . . . you were there in a place where you didn’t belong.’
“There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner [M60 machinegun], ‘How can you shoot women and children?’ and he answered, ‘It’s easy, you just don’t lead ‘em so much.’” – Michael Herr
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/war-weary/
:vomit 2:
Edward and the squirrel watch too.
