Unit One Paper

            Michael Herr's Dispatches has some impressive blurbs on its cover and preliminary page, including a declaration from The New York Times Book Review that it is “The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War”. That is some singularly high praise, and a lot to live up to. But it only took a couple of pages for myself as a reader to realize that the compliment was going to be well deserved. It's written in first-person perspective, totally uncensored in its language and images, an gives a riveting sense of what it was like to have been there in Vietnam himself as a reporter, as well as vivid portrayals of the soldiers, officers, and civilians (from all sides in the war) that he encountered.

            For a true account of what was actually happening there, as opposed to the euphemisms and outright propaganda the US government was dishing out, this book is superb. Vietnam was a central issue of the Sixties and early Seventies, and Michael Herr was there, telling the truth unapologetically. I kept thinking as I read what a contrast, and yet complement, Herr's stories were to John Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. Kerry had to exercise some restraint and tact, of course, in such a high level setting, but yet was brutally honest in recounting the war crimes committed by US soldiers. Herr takes it a bold step further and puts you right there inside these atrocities: setting, characters, dialogue, and the gory details. It's no surprise that he would later co-author the screenplays for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, both of which were brilliant and irreverent movies about the conflict. Herr even supplies a “soundtrack” of sorts with numerous references to the music and bands that were popular at the time on the radio.

            The highlights, for me, of “Dispatches” (if you can call them that) were the candid descriptions of the senseless brutalities, along with the men who committed them. You could maybe account for that with the morbid curiosity we all experience when we witness scenes of injury or death; a part of us wants to ignore them, but another is compelled to witness it all. Herr says it succinctly: “You know how it is, you want to look and you don't want to look” (Herr 18). There's a particularly graphic couple of pages in the book's opening chapter “Breathing In”, where in short order, he relates being handed a bag of Vietcong ears in a plastic bag that a soldier had collected: “what looked like large pieces of dried fruit... but it had a bad weight to it” (34); a guy who was “building his own gook” (35) from various body parts of cadavers; and a really sick joke, in which a gunner is asked, “How can you shoot women and children?” The answer: “You just don't lead 'em so much” (35). As unsettling as these stories are, it's a large part of what sets the book apart. To quote another blurb, from Time: “Some stories must be told- not because they will delight and instruct but because they happened”.

            It's been said that the Vietnam War was the first “rock and roll war”, and as mentioned earlier, Herr cues up some examples. There were plenty of protest songs. Jimi Hendrix had Machine Gun, The Doors Unknown Soldier, War by Edwin Starr... but I think the ideal match for “Dispatches” is Country Joe and the Fish's Fixin' to Die Rag. It has the same black humor element and a sense of the absurd. And I think that's a subtle but crucial element of this book's success. There is an underlying theme of how so many of these war crimes were committed for the most banal of reasons- it was the soldiers' attempts to amuse themselves. It was funny. If that isn't a statement on the war, what is?

            In summation, I consider Dispatches by Michael Herr to be an essential reading for any who would attempt an understanding of the Vietnam War, and therefore equally needed for evaluating the Sixties as a whole. It is journalism at it's finest, brutally honest about the war and what it did to the men there; the music they listened to, the drugs they abused, the acts they committed. Their humanity.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print.