Michael Herr “Dispatches” – The Vietnam War

Michael Herr’s Dispatches was first published in 1977 and is a non-fictional book.

There are all kinds of first hand accounts of war. I’ve read quite a few, probably more than I should have at an age when most people were still trying to work through the dolled up teenage literature so heavily prevalent. I went straight to Eric Maria Remarque, Sven Hassel and suchlike.
The Vietnam war has seeped down deep into the mythology of America that it is subjected to a little cross cultural bleeding. But the thing is, there haven’t been many books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches to say anything about the experience itself.
I do the movie thing too, so it’s easier for me to find references in that arena. But there’s a lot of tricky territory to navigate and it’s easy for it to disintegrate into a moral tale like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or a convenient backdrop the way it’s used in a great many bland American action movies.
There is a brilliant jewel of a parallel here in a totally different style, though, and that’s Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1994). But that’s a story for a different time.
Herr’s perspective is that of the perpetual outsider, because he is a journalist. That being said he is in it with the soldiers because he is a battle field journalist. He’s there in the mud and jungle and in the strange highlands alongside the soldiers seeing what they see, but one step removed from them, because he isn’t actually fighting. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get shot at, though.
But he is trained at observing and that makes this book more immediate. He has an uncanny ability to keep the bigger picture in mind, what’s being said by the generals and press officers as well as what’s going on in the field. He offers a million observations of minutiae like the gunner in a helicopter that asks him to cover up the corpses they’re riding with when the tarp comes loose, or random comments and little throw-away things, like the patter of the soldiers trying to distance themselves or the things they’ve written on their helmets and flak jackets. “A sucking chest wound is natures way of telling you you’ve been in a fire fight”, that kind of thing.
It takes a while to figure it out, because the tone is seductive, but this is actually literature. It might as well be fictional, it is written with that kind of sensibility. It doesn’t pretend to be a truthful account of what happened while Herr was “in country”. It records the experience and gives the reader a good sense of what it was like, of how these event actually felt for someone who was there.
The movie reference isn’t idle on my part, Herr does that himself too, saying those that were there knew what movie they were in. It’s this kind of awareness of cultural pattern that’s laid down over all of it as a template that makes this book so much a warrior poet retelling on par with Sassoon or Remarque. It doesn’t matter if Herr is describing the way Saigon feels or the jungle or the highlands, or his fellow journalists or the grunts.

The telescoping eye of the author gives you glimpses and catches and explanations as well as just remembrances that enhance and enrich the descriptions. There’s very little glory in it all, but there is a kind of beauty none the less, and that makes it all the more compelling and horrific. Which is just the way you want this kind of narrative to be really, at least to my mind.

Mule