”Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anythingGuys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, C ”Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn’t blame anybody for believing anythingGuys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they’d killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. (“When you go to sleep we’re gonna eat your fucking cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn’t kidding.” Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict.

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The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire.

They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found.

If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn. Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for.oh wait.damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar. Sean Flynn and Dana Stone The point I’m trying to make is that war correspondents were at as much risk as the combat soldiers they were there to write about.

The soldiers were in awe of them because it was beyond comprehension to a drafted marine to think that anyone would want to be in this hell by choice. ”Two Marines that I hadn’t even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you’d have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you.” General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans.

He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven’s poem. Anecdote of a Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Wallace Stevens The battle was considered a victory by both sides. With the American commanders claiming a x10 ratio for kills they could estimate 10,000 to 16,000 KIA off of 1,602 bodies actually found. The Americans lost 2,016 killed and 8,079 wounded.

After the battle the American blew up the base and moved out. The NVA swarmed in to take over the area.

You might ask yourself what was accomplished. ”We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. 'Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?

How do 'Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.' We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?' -Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971 Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now.

The Deer Hunter. These are just some of the American movies which depict the war in Vietnam, which has served as inspiration for dozens of other films, novels and video games.

The conflict in Vietnam has been written about extensively, and Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the first books to present an intimate, closeup picture of the war to the wider public. The first two movies owe a lot to Dispatches - Michael Herr co-wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now, which is partially inspired by this book, and wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket together with Stanley Kubrick. Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country. The average age of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam was 22.

These were young men, millions of miles away from home, stuck in a scorching and unforgiving climate, surrounded by jungles full of people they could not see. And for what?

'I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good', he writes in one chapter, while quoting one of the soldier he talks to in another: 'All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Most of these soldiers - these who survive - will be forever robbed of their youth: the book is full of physical descriptions of young men looking incredibly old and tired, being incredibly old and tired at the age of 23. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror.

58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam; thousand veterans suffering from PTSD took their own lives after returning home. This is a book written in retrospection, though it loses none of its intensity; while reading it we see a man who acts as if he has just emerged from the war, like it was yesterday. 'I went to cover the war and the war covered me', Herr writes near the end and admits that it is 'an old story', though in his case very true. This explains the tone of his book - very chaotic and disorganized, full of personal interjections; Herr writes as much about himself as he does about the soldiers and the war. He rejects the role of an impartial observer, and is an active participant in the events that he writes about, focusing on personal emotions and moods - his own and that of the soldiers - rather than tactical and military aspects of the war. I'd never heard Dispatches mentioned in speech or in print until I got a copy of it in a package sent to me from my uncle, who'd died three or four days earlier. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the basis for not only Full Metal Jacket but also, to some degree, Apocalypse Now.

It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers a I'd never heard Dispatches mentioned in speech or in print until I got a copy of it in a package sent to me from my uncle, who'd died three or four days earlier. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the basis for not only Full Metal Jacket but also, to some degree, Apocalypse Now. It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers and anybody else who's willing. So you get to see all sorts of coping mechanisms and rationalizations and characters, including several who'd go on, slightly modified, to be characters in Full Metal Jacket. But the book brings up, mostly obliquely, two ideas that are very interesting to me. The first is that the grunts consistently call the correspondents crazy.

This makes sense at first; the grunts are forced to be there, and, given the chance, most of them would leave instantly. So it's a mystery to them why the correspondents don't feel roughly the same way. And it's unclear whether Herr is conscious of the main difference between him and them, w/r/t leaving. He can, which automatically makes it unnecessary. Just the idea of being able to peace out when things get really nasty would have to be a pretty significant sleep aid. And Herr makes himself look a little foolish every time he mentions how badass he feels, staying there, because he may know what it's like to be in Vietnam, but he has no idea what it might feel like to be stuck in Vietnam.

The second is the question of what exactly it is that makes Vietnam so much more relentlessly horrifying to our soldiers than any other war we'd fought up to that point (and possibly any war since). There are all the obvious answers: they lacked widespread homefront support; the Vietcong were indistinguishable from their allies; success couldn't be measured because there was no clear 'front' to show advances and retreats; the climate and weather were hellish; et cetera. But Herr has made me think of it in terms of broader trends in American culture (I'm sure these answers are obvious to some, but I really don't know much of anything about the Vietnam War, or American history, for that matter): mainly alienation of battle, and iconoclasm.

Alienation of battle makes sense. Before guns existed, you pretty much had to either kill your enemy face to face, or maybe shoot him with an arrow, but at any rate you had to be able to see him to kill him.

Even in World War II, you were pretty likely to be able to see the people you were trying to kill. And the key thing there is that your enemy had to be able to see you in order to kill you. So if you weren't at the front, you could be reasonably sure of not being suddenly murdered. Vietnam was different. You'd fire into the jungle almost at random, wasting thousands of rounds of 'suppressive fire,' and you'd never even see who you were shooting at, until they were dead. So if that's the M.O., you'd have to admit to yourself that you could easily be killed without ever seeing your own killer. Add that to the possibility (read: probability) of ambushes, and the realities of guerrilla fighting, and you can see how American soldiers tended to be a wreck.

Not that soldiers from other wars came home perfectly well-adjusted, but I think we can agree that the Vietnam War was a bit different. Then there's iconoclasm.

Anybody can defend his or her homeland; defense is a cause in and of itself. That's where the home team advantage comes from. But if you're going to fight an offensive war, you've got to have a cause. Religion is a common one, as is acquisition of wealth. Ours in Vietnam was a little shakier: democracy, or anti-communism. That worked well for the Cold War, but not as well for its proxy wars.

If you have to come with something like the 'domino effect' to explain your war, you're not going to get the kind of fanatical support that you need to win. From the troops or the home front, I mean. If you don't have a really compelling cause, you've got to have some faith. And, not that I know a lot about the 1960's and 1970's, but it seems to me that America's religious fervor was somewhat lacking compared to what it was during World War II and earlier. Actually, I don't know why I've been carrying on. Herr puts it way better than I could: '.you couldn't blame anybody for believing anything.Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they'd killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends' underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists.

Alea Jacta Est Skidrow Serial Killers there. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pairs of socks. He took a lot of shit about it ('When you go to sleep we're gonna eat your fucking cookie'), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn't kidding.' Something has to replace religion, and in this case it's superstition. Come on, an oatmeal cookie? People went crazy because they had nothing to fall back on, nothing to believe would save them.

Herr makes this abundantly clear, I think. Recommended for anyone interested in the Vietnam War. I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read. I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of wa I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read.

I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of war and the men who fight it. In two weeks I'll be flying to Hong Kong, setting sail for Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia to deliver a series of lectures on a luxury cruise ship. The topic I chose, 'Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes,' has exposed me to some wonderful films, a number of which I've reviewed on my blog or written about in my column for 3 Quarks Daily. And I've immersed myself in bios of Pearl Buck, Anna Leonowns (the real-life Anna of The King and I), Anna May Wong, Pierre Boulle, Somerset Maugham, along with books In two weeks I'll be flying to Hong Kong, setting sail for Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia to deliver a series of lectures on a luxury cruise ship.

The topic I chose, 'Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes,' has exposed me to some wonderful films, a number of which I've reviewed on my blog or written about in my column for 3 Quarks Daily. And I've immersed myself in bios of Pearl Buck, Anna Leonowns (the real-life Anna of The King and I), Anna May Wong, Pierre Boulle, Somerset Maugham, along with books about classic films set in Asian locales: Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Lost Horizon, Apocalypse Now -- many of which I've reviewed here. On top of that, I've been working diligently to get my bridge game up to snuff...

Mostly, I'm aiming for a light touch with the material. This is a cruise, after all. Bob Hope's and Bing Crosby's in The Road to Singapore is entertaining in its way, as is. I can share Yunte Huang's insightful discussion of Yellowface from his marvelous book, without driving my audience into the bar for an early drink, explore stereotypes of 'Chinamen' through and featuring Rin Tin Tin, even! Work in a little commentary on The Good Earth's Depression-era message about the virtue of hard work on the land, illustrated with stills from the movie and comparing them to iconic photographs from the period.

Luise Rainer and babies during the Chinese famine Dorothea Lange's portrait of Migrant Mother in the dust bowl drought Sure, the Dust Bowl and the Chinese famine were tough times, but they're pretty remote. Not so the Vietnam war. My cousin Alan was a U.S.

Army sharpshooter in Vietnam. He was ten years older than me, and I didn't really get to know him until long after his tour of duty. I do remember him dropping by the house in the early 1980s to visit when our uncle was recuperating from a hit-and-run accident -- this uncle was a bachelor and the rest of the family took turns caring for him (it was a terrible accident). Alan was always reading about the Vietnam war, and he'd talk about it to anyone who was willing to listen, but I had the impression that he was still trying to figure it out. Why were we there?

Why was he asked to do the things he did? Was it worth it, in the end?

Vietnam damaged my cousin irreparably. He had a failed marriage behind him, troubled relationships with family members. He made a decent living, working for the Post Office, but never seemed to have enough money, was seriously in debt. In 2002, not long after the U.S.

Invaded Afghanistan, Alan shot himself. He had many problems, had cut himself from nearly everyone, but I can't help seeing a correlation. Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years.

But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review. Tim O'Brien writes exquisitely about his experience in. I recommend his book, and count it as a high point in my life as a reader, that I was able to hear him read from it and answer questions from an audience of students (my son among them) who were of draft age during the height of our involvement in Iraq. He reconstructs the shattered lives of his dead companions with poignancy and restraint. O'Brien writes from a distance of years, however. Herr writes from the thick of things and is unrestrained, angry, self-hating and self-pitying, filled with disgust and compassion, his reactions still raw, it felt to me in places: I think that those people who used to say that they only wept for the Vietnamese never really wept for anyone at all if they couldn't squeeze out at least one for these men and boys when they died or had their lives cracked open for them.

When our cruise ship docks in Vietnam and I disembark in Danang, or Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I'll be seeing those places through my cousin Alan's eyes, thanks to Michael Herr. 'It would seem fitting, ordained, that they should live in the Highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the nighttime cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time.

The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on t 'It would seem fitting, ordained, that they should live in the Highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the nighttime cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off.'

'.for the next six years I saw them all, the ones I'd really seen and the ones I'd imagined, theirs and ours, friends I'd loved and strangers, motionless figures in a dance, the old dance. Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterward you can't handle the experience. Until I felt that I was just a dancer too.'

'A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.'

Michael Herr died a couple of weeks ago, at the age of 76. He was the author of this book, Dispatches, and a magazine article about his friendship with Stanley Kubrick.

He co-wrote the screenplays for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, and from what I can tell didn't write much else. I find that surprising, only because Dispatches remains so vivid in my mind. It's like a painting. It may sound like a strange thing to praise in a book about war, but I can pick it up, read a few pages, and the English language seems renewed. It will not help you to understand the Vietnam war in a geopolitical way. But when you read it you are there, with the soldiers. You share the collision of their (and Herr's) anxiety, fear and deprivation with the half-formed legends of adolescence.

Or as Herr puts it, “somewhere all the mythic tracks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of us there a true volunteer.”. My hat's off to anyone who can sum up this book in a review. It is beyond anything I've ever read in its portrayal of men at war as witnessed by the war correspondents who accompany them on the front lines.

Unlike the embedded journalists of our own time, the writers and photographers who covered Vietnam were much closer to being free agents, restricted only by their ingenuity and fearlessness to seek out the action that would represent the essence of America's military presence in southeast Asi My hat's off to anyone who can sum up this book in a review. It is beyond anything I've ever read in its portrayal of men at war as witnessed by the war correspondents who accompany them on the front lines.

Unlike the embedded journalists of our own time, the writers and photographers who covered Vietnam were much closer to being free agents, restricted only by their ingenuity and fearlessness to seek out the action that would represent the essence of America's military presence in southeast Asia ('There it is...' ), while the evidence everywhere was of an irrationality raised to such a pitch that it had become something driven only by itself. Unable to remain objective or even conceive of objectivity, Herr and his colleagues yield to a kind of hallucinatory experience, depicting the war as a phantasmagoria, a really bad trip that also seduced them with what one of them insists is a compelling glamour. To read this book is to experience Vietnam not as a historical record or analysis, or even a personal memoir, but as a kind of hypnotic nightmare from which many, including survivors, never wake. Beautifully, vividly, outrageously, grotesquely renderd account of tagging along as a journalist in the peak years of Vietnam.

The writing is fierce, hallocinogenic, searing, and very subjective. Herr is an Emersonsian transparent eyeball in this book, recording his impressions and imaginative reactions to the chaos and strange beauty surrounding him everywhere. Some very interesting characters: Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who does war photography because he wants to truly see the world. Tim Page, Beautifully, vividly, outrageously, grotesquely renderd account of tagging along as a journalist in the peak years of Vietnam. The writing is fierce, hallocinogenic, searing, and very subjective.

Herr is an Emersonsian transparent eyeball in this book, recording his impressions and imaginative reactions to the chaos and strange beauty surrounding him everywhere. Some very interesting characters: Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who does war photography because he wants to truly see the world.

Tim Page, who can't be summed up here let alone in the dozen or some-odd pages Herr gives him. He's worth a novel of his own. There's all the brutality of war stuff (I hate to be so blase about it but we all have gotten some of that before haven't we, as readers?) which is persuasively set down. Cinematic prose for a situation where no one seemed to know which way was up- politically, militarily, mentally. Herr did this in a series of articles for Esquire in the mid sixities. I only wish war reporting was this trenchat and true now. It is, if you check out George Packer's magisterial 'The Assassin's Gate' but Herr is right in the middle of the shit.freaked-out, doped-up, awed and disgusted and exhilerated by what he's seen.

If you like your journalism (and for that matter, your politics, not that this is an ideological text in any way) just shy of Gonzo and heavy on the symbolic imagery- if you want to FEEL what it was like to be there- this book delivers the goods. Fun fact: the heilcopter scene in 'Full Metal Jacket' was taken from this book, and the film is half-based on it.

Herr also wrote the Martin Sheen voice over material in 'Apocalypse Now'.so there's some pretty impressive pedigree for you. I hope to dig into his 'Walter Winchell' someday. Βαθμολογία: 9/10 Ο Μάικλ Χερ κάλυψε τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ σαν ανταποκριτής του περιοδικού Esquire, από κάποια στιγμή μέσα στο 1967, μέχρι το 1969. Έκατσε στο Βιετνάμ δεκαοχτώ ολόκληρους μήνες και είδε τα πάντα. Έδωσε παρών σε μικρές και μεγάλες μάχες, είδε πτώματα στρατιωτών, πεζοναυτών και αμάχων, είδε σοβαρά τραυματισμένους, είδε απίστευτα τοπία κατεστραμμένα από τόννους εμπρηστικών βομβών, είδε διαλυμένες πόλεις και εγκαταλελειμμένα χωριά, γνώρισε ένα κάρο τρελαμένους τύπους, που είτε ήταν τρ Βαθμολογία: 9/10 Ο Μάικλ Χερ κάλυψε τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ σαν ανταποκριτής του περιοδικού Esquire, από κάποια στιγμή μέσα στο 1967, μέχρι το 1969. Έκατσε στο Βιετνάμ δεκαοχτώ ολόκληρους μήνες και είδε τα πάντα.

Έδωσε παρών σε μικρές και μεγάλες μάχες, είδε πτώματα στρατιωτών, πεζοναυτών και αμάχων, είδε σοβαρά τραυματισμένους, είδε απίστευτα τοπία κατεστραμμένα από τόννους εμπρηστικών βομβών, είδε διαλυμένες πόλεις και εγκαταλελειμμένα χωριά, γνώρισε ένα κάρο τρελαμένους τύπους, που είτε ήταν τρελαμένοι πριν καν πατήσουν στο Βιετνάμ είτε ήταν μια χαρά παιδιά που τρελάθηκαν από την παράνοια και το χάος του πολέμου. Τέλος πάντων, είδε όλα αυτά που μπορεί να δει κανείς σ'έναν πόλεμο τέτοιου μεγέθους. Ο Χερ δεν ήταν ένας δημοσιογράφος σαν όλους τους άλλους, δεν έγραφε αυτά που του έλεγαν οι υπεύθυνοι τύπου του στρατού, δεν ωραιοποιούσε καταστάσεις και πρόσωπα. Και αυτό το βιβλίο είναι όσο ωμό, ρεαλιστικό και παρανοϊκό θα περίμενε κανείς από ένα βιβλίο που περιγράφει την τρέλα και το χάος του πολέμου του Βιετνάμ. Ο συγγραφέας μας περιγράφει πολλές κουλές καταστάσεις, μας παρουσιάζει μερικούς πραγματικά αξιομνημόνευτους τύπους - απλούς φαντάρους, πεζοναύτες, άλλους ανταποκριτές, τρελαμένους φωτογράφους-, μας ταξιδεύει στις ζούγκλες, τις πόλεις, τα χωριά και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, μας βάζει στην μέση των μαχών, ανάμεσα στις σφαίρες, τις βόμβες ναπάλμ, τους όλμους και τα σράπνελ. Δεν υπάρχει αρχή, μέση και τέλος, παρά το απόλυτο χάος.

Μην περιμένετε, δηλαδή, μια ιστορία με απόλυτη συνοχή. Αυτό το βιβλίο είναι το Βιετνάμ του '60, το Βιετνάμ του πολέμου. Δεν υπάρχει συνοχή σ'αυτό. Αλλά δεν είναι μόνο αυτά που περιγράφει, οι καταστάσεις, τα τοπία και τα πρόσωπα που μας παρουσιάζει, οι ιστορίες που μας εξιστορεί, είναι και ο τρόπος του, το στιλ γραφής του, που είναι σαν ένα καλό τριπάρισμα. Αυτή η γραφή ταιριάζει απόλυτα με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ, έτσι καταφέρνει και περνάει στον αναγνώστη το χάος, την παράνοια και την τρέλα του πολέμου. Και αυτό μου άρεσε πολύ. Σίγουρα η γραφή δεν είναι για όλα τα γούστα, σε σημεία είναι ίσως και περίεργη, αλλά προσωπικά θα έλεγα ότι έτσι έπρεπε να είναι.

Ένα στεγνό, δημοσιογραφικό στιλ γραφής θα έκανε την ιστορία να μοιάζει μ'ένα δελτίο τύπου του στρατού ή με μια περιγραφή ενός ιατροδικαστή που εξετάζει ένα πτώμα. Βαρεμάρα εις την δευτέρα. Τώρα το κείμενο είναι ζωντανό, διαβάζεται γρήγορα και δίχως ανάσα, αγχώνει τον αναγνώστη με τις περιγραφές, τον κάνει να δένεται με τους τρελαμένους τύπους που γνώρισε ο συγγραφέας στο Βιετνάμ. Θα βάλω πέντε αστεράκια στο βιβλίο. Όχι απαραίτητα γιατί σαν λογοτεχνικό κείμενο είναι καλύτερο από ορισμένα άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα τέσσερα αστεράκια ή είναι εξίσου καλό με άλλα βιβλία που τους έβαλα επίσης πέντε αστεράκια, αλλά γιατί πολύ απλά με άρπαξε από τον γιακά και δεν με άφησε σε ησυχία παρά μέχρι που έφτασα στο τέλος. Με έσυρε στα ορύγματα, τα χαντάκια, τους ορυζώνες, τα δασώδη βουνά, τα καταφύγια και τα στρατόπεδα του Βιετνάμ, και μου έδειξε το σκληρό και παρανοϊκό πρόσωπο του πολέμου, που καταστρέφει κτίρια και τοπία αλλά κυρίως καταστρέφει ανθρώπινες ψυχές.

Επίσης, είναι από τα ελάχιστα βιβλία σχετικά με τον πόλεμο του Βιετνάμ που βρίσκει κανείς στα ελληνικά. Έχω μια σχετική λίστα non fiction βιβλίων που θα ήθελα να διαβάσω (The Things They Carried, If I Die In A Combat Zone: Box Me Up And Ship Me Home, A Rumor Of War, Chickenhawk κ.α.), και δυστυχώς όλα τους είναι αμετάφραστα. Έχω σκοπό να τα διαβάσω, ακόμα και στ'αγγλικά. Η ελληνική έκδοση (εκδ.

Θεωρία, 1984) δείχνει λιγάκι τα 30+ χρόνια της, τουλάχιστον όσον αφορά την παρουσίαση του κειμένου και την επιμέλεια. Η μετάφραση μου φάνηκε ικανοποιητική για τα χρόνια της. This book is very special. I wouldn't recommend it to any newbie as introduction to Vietnam War.

It's raw, biased, consisting of handpicked mosaic of worst insanity. Herr doesn't care about analyses, he doesn't go to archives, he even admits that he doesn't give a fuck about politicians, diplomats, or other stakeholders – he can't even speak to them as they use “different language”. Also, the book almost completely avoid topic that mattered the most – ordinary Vietnamese, their faith, struggle, This book is very special.

I wouldn't recommend it to any newbie as introduction to Vietnam War. It's raw, biased, consisting of handpicked mosaic of worst insanity. Herr doesn't care about analyses, he doesn't go to archives, he even admits that he doesn't give a fuck about politicians, diplomats, or other stakeholders – he can't even speak to them as they use “different language”. Also, the book almost completely avoid topic that mattered the most – ordinary Vietnamese, their faith, struggle, culture or history. Dispatches are solely limited to narrow view of the scared observer who experience brutality of war side by side with the ordinary soldiers – the “grunts”. And Herr excels in this role – he see things that others don't see, he is fascinated by morbid details that others would rather forget in order to keep sanity.

What goes to Herr's credit is, that as a reporter, he is far from glorifying war reporters. He openly admits that “press corps in Vietnam was as diffuse and faceless as any army regiment” and that “some people thought we were nothing more than glorified war profiteers. And perhaps we were.” I can't assess if this is true, but I'm sure that from all books about Vietnam or war in general, the Dispatches are different, original and will always have special place in my library. A class for itself. I'd kind of heard of this, but didn't know its significance and avoided reading about it while reading it. Turns out he later wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which makes sense because Vietnam film is 100% rooted in the language and stories of this book. I'm conflicted because it tells things as horribly as they were and yet within this book is the seed for the romanticism of the Vietnam war.

All those movies and all those people I always felt were enjoying them for I'd kind of heard of this, but didn't know its significance and avoided reading about it while reading it. Turns out he later wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which makes sense because Vietnam film is 100% rooted in the language and stories of this book. I'm conflicted because it tells things as horribly as they were and yet within this book is the seed for the romanticism of the Vietnam war. All those movies and all those people I always felt were enjoying them for all the wrong reasons.

The last great boy's club. The last conscripted war. The first modern war.

Two-hundred pages and it took a long time to read. Because it crammed, and true. It's all true, so it hits hard, and if you skim you are missing real, harrowing stories. What a fucked up thing, a clearly defined period of time where a life is worth less than usual. A half-price sale on lives. It's laced with contradictions, probably the most honest way to talk about war, especially war as murky as the Vietnam one. Herr takes all his internal mess and dumps it on the page.

That is not a criticism. (It's purely from an American point of view. Is it impossible for us to understand the East at war?

That film Eastwood made, the Japanese side of the Iwo Jima story, Letters from Iwo Jima. It was admirable, but the only clearly drawn characters in it were a general who'd spent a lot of time in the states and adopted a western mode of thinking and another young character who went against his orders.). The thing about war books is how timeless they are, from Homer to Homs. So it's odd reading a 'dated' book about Vietnam to find that it's Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever grunts shoot and get shot. The blood, the fear, the thrill, the sarcasm, the black humor, the superstition, the body bags, the music, the enemy, the drugs, the killing, the being killed. The book roars out of the gate with a great opening. The longest section, on Khe Sanh, is classic Vietnam lit.

Sometimes it's toug The thing about war books is how timeless they are, from Homer to Homs. So it's odd reading a 'dated' book about Vietnam to find that it's Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever grunts shoot and get shot. The blood, the fear, the thrill, the sarcasm, the black humor, the superstition, the body bags, the music, the enemy, the drugs, the killing, the being killed. The book roars out of the gate with a great opening. The longest section, on Khe Sanh, is classic Vietnam lit. Sometimes it's tough to even read in bed at night.

Disturbing shit. And the commanders. George McGovern had them right: 'I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.' Which is why George McGovern won a sum total of one state when he ran for president. The Republic of Massachusetts. After the Khe Sanh chapter, it loses a bit of air. The sketches become shorter, sketchier, though still powerful.

Herr befriended the son of actor Errol Flynn -- Sean Flynn, who finally went missing on a bike ride into Cambodia in 70. Death, meet wish. And I hear that Herr himself is now a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas or something.

That's a lot of meditation, cleaning all this off. As war books go, one of the better written ones. Only it took me back to places I did not want to go. Mary Karr's rec (from The Art of Memoir). ('Proud Mary keeps on burnin'.' I read this book completely high!

And I loved it. Well not exactly as much as I loved 'The things they carried', but I loved it. I have no idea if being high had anything to do with how much I enjoyed listening to the guy describe a brutal fire-fight, but it was good anyways. It's amazing that someone can tell a story about death and filth and bullets so beautifully, and at the same time with so much useful detail. Never a dull moment in this book.

Oh, and just FYI, the movie 'Full Me I read this book completely high! And I loved it.

Well not exactly as much as I loved 'The things they carried', but I loved it. I have no idea if being high had anything to do with how much I enjoyed listening to the guy describe a brutal fire-fight, but it was good anyways. It's amazing that someone can tell a story about death and filth and bullets so beautifully, and at the same time with so much useful detail.

Never a dull moment in this book. Oh, and just FYI, the movie 'Full Metal Jacket' is loosely based on this book. Overall a very good book, that sits up there with any Vietnam story ever told. I think I expected a little more from the book that was the basis for the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but.

When it came down to it, all that was taken from this book for those films were very minor details, short anecdotes and characters. There was so much of the book that was left untouched by Hollywood. But the stories were good, and Herr's experience was very unique. There were angles on t Overall a very good book, that sits up there with any Vietnam story ever told. I think I expected a little more from the book that was the basis for the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but. When it came down to it, all that was taken from this book for those films were very minor details, short anecdotes and characters. There was so much of the book that was left untouched by Hollywood.

But the stories were good, and Herr's experience was very unique. There were angles on that war that were very new to me after reading the book, but. I think with all the time he was there, and all the missions he experienced first-hand, I expected a little more in the book. It is told in a very technical way, and not in any kind of narrative thread so it can get a little jumbled or confusing at times, but then again, perhaps that was what the Vietnam war was all about. Here are three things that will be very helpful to you should you decide to read the book (they came in handy for me, and I wish I had looked at all this stuff before reading(: - First.

A good glossary of terms and slang used during the war. Here is a link to one,, though there are several if you just google it. A map of Vietnam during the war. Is a good one. Pay special attention to the geographical locations of Saigon, Hanoi, Dak To, Danang, Pleiku, Hue, and Khe Sahn. There is actually a sort of track listing in the front (actually credits for publishing rights).

This along with other songs mentioned during the book provide a t soundtrack to the book. Make a playlist for yourself in Grooveshark or iTunes, it actually accompanies the book very well. I have provided the track listing below, in the order they appear in the book.

It really added to the experience for me. Tighten Up by Archie Bell & The Drells 2.

Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash 3. Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs 4. Magical Mystery Tour by the BEatles 5. San Francisco by Scott McKenzie 6. For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield 7. Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding 8.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone by the Kingston Trio 9. Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix 10.

Ode to Billy Joe by Bobbie Gentry 11. Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan 12.

Trouble Everyday by Frank Zappa 13. 2000 Light Years from Home by the Rolling Stones 14. Citadel by the Rolling Stones 15.

Good Morning Little Schoolgirl by the Yardbirds 16. Galveston by Glen Campbell 17. Black is Black by Los Bravos 18. Hungry by Paul Revere & The Raiders 19. We Gotta Get Out of this Place by The Animals 20.

Shotgun by Junior Walker & the Allstars. Riveting and brilliant account of the chaotic and stressed out world of the soldier in Vietnam as digested by an embedded journalist. From nearly 10 years of hindsight, Herr writes from his experience as a correspondent for Esquire for a one year period from 1967 to 1968, a time of major escalation in the war, including the Tet Offensive and major sieges of Hue and Khe Sahn. The quality of the writing is solid and renders a great balance between the visceral experiences of combat (the terror, me Riveting and brilliant account of the chaotic and stressed out world of the soldier in Vietnam as digested by an embedded journalist. From nearly 10 years of hindsight, Herr writes from his experience as a correspondent for Esquire for a one year period from 1967 to 1968, a time of major escalation in the war, including the Tet Offensive and major sieges of Hue and Khe Sahn. The quality of the writing is solid and renders a great balance between the visceral experiences of combat (the terror, mental erosion, and core of endurance) and reflections on the moral bankrupcy of this unfortunate war.

Although he can�t speak directly on being a participant in combat, he shared enough of the dangers and miseries of the soldiers to render a vision that lies somewhere between the subjective and objective perspectives. The mix between first, second, and third person narrative kept a great dynamic. Michael Herr captures the feelings, the violence, and the insanity of the late 1960s. In 1969 I went to college instead of Vietnam and I graduated the year it all came crashing down. A significant portion of my youth was spent trying to understand from journalism what was happening in Southeast Asia; only later would I realize that the understanding I sought was not and could not be available from file-at-five journalism. Herr was accredited to Esquire and was free of that pressure.

He explains Michael Herr captures the feelings, the violence, and the insanity of the late 1960s. In 1969 I went to college instead of Vietnam and I graduated the year it all came crashing down. A significant portion of my youth was spent trying to understand from journalism what was happening in Southeast Asia; only later would I realize that the understanding I sought was not and could not be available from file-at-five journalism. Herr was accredited to Esquire and was free of that pressure. He explains why he went to Vietnam: “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 went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.” Herr does a great job of capturing the brutal jargon of the U.S. Administration when it spoke of the war. Kill ratios, right there in the paper on the dining table (I saw this in high school). But of course we were intimate, I'll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it. I wrote a poem to a coworker last Friday--long story--and in part of it, I tried to tell her how much I admired Dispatches and how deeply I responded to it: I said that the book itself felt like poetry, that it had that kind of density of insight. With any other form of journalism, this level of beauty would be condensation that fogged up the glass and made it harder to see the subjects, but wit But of course we were intimate, I'll tell you how intimate: they were my guns, and I let them do it.

I wrote a poem to a coworker last Friday--long story--and in part of it, I tried to tell her how much I admired Dispatches and how deeply I responded to it: I said that the book itself felt like poetry, that it had that kind of density of insight. With any other form of journalism, this level of beauty would be condensation that fogged up the glass and made it harder to see the subjects, but with Herr's writing, the style itself is the window, or rather something less clear and more visceral. Dispatches tattoos the Vietnam War on your mind. I had trouble reading too much of this at a time, in part it's more experience-driven than narrative-driven and in part because of the aforementioned weight, with the end result that this is a short book that nonetheless feels bottomless.

Herr talks about the atrocities of the war and his love for the men who committed them. He never flinches and he never backs away--his successors in fiction, for our more recent wars, are probably and --and as a result, he finds and tells incredible stories. He mentions jouranlists who referrd to 'no-story operations,' and talks about how foreign he finds that concept: 'Those were the same journalists who would ask us what the fuck we ever found to talk to grunts about, who said they never heard a grunt talk about anything except cars, football and chone. But they all had a story, and in the war they were driven to tell it.' The mix was so amazing: incipient saints and realized homicidals, unconscious lyric poets and mean dumb motherfuckers with their brains all down in their necks; and even by the time I left I knew where all the stories came from and where thy were going, I was never bored, never even unsurprised. The stories are here: the grunt who keeps an actual calendar drawn on the back of his helmet, the guy who checks Stars and Stripes religiously for a death from his hometown because he figures it's such a podunk place two people from it won't die in Vietnam, the space blanket that gets forced on Herr because he mentions being cold, the journalist who is incredulous about the charge to take the glamour out of war, the soldier who keeps wandering away from the airstrip and the plane that's supposed to take him home. The effect here is of the illumination rounds he mentions--arcs of clarity with real impact.

But I should emphasize, because this is rare for me, that the stories here, though memorable, significant, haunting, funny, varied, and pretty much everything else under the sun, stood out less than the remarkable clarity of Herr's style and philosophy. It's strange to read a book and come away effectively wanting the author as your biographer, which of course can't happen now--RIP, Michael Herr, another victim of 2016--but that's the feeling I had here, because Herr is such an intelligent, unsentimental, loving interpreter of what he witnesses, because he feels the weight of it all and records it in such a way that I felt it too. 'We all had roughly the same position on the war: we were in it, and that was a position.' Dude can write!!! The first full chapter, “Breathing In”, is a breathless masterpiece putting you right in the swirling mess of it, reaching out to all aspects of the war and pulling them in as it sucks you in with it.

But this is not all. In “Khe Sanh” Herr changes pace for a slower, more sparsely populated narrative, which despite the lower octave does not let up in intensity or observation, and finally breaks out of the surrounded marine base and shifts to a series of grimly funny scenes with Dude can write!!! The first full chapter, “Breathing In”, is a breathless masterpiece putting you right in the swirling mess of it, reaching out to all aspects of the war and pulling them in as it sucks you in with it. But this is not all. In “Khe Sanh” Herr changes pace for a slower, more sparsely populated narrative, which despite the lower octave does not let up in intensity or observation, and finally breaks out of the surrounded marine base and shifts to a series of grimly funny scenes with the military managers of the war. “Illumination Rounds” opens with one of the most terribly realistic scenes in the book and continues to strobe individual scenes to create an overall picture of joyous horror, the joy being primarily that one can read about it as if it had just occurred from the distant, though not moral, safety of time. In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words.

At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon. The impact of this book is stronger for the fact that it is all straight reporting, and in my view overtakes fiction on the war such as “The Things They Carried” because it is pure fact and because it is able to contrast the statements and positions of military officers and government agents against the perspectives of the foot soldiers. If you read no other book about Vietnam, read this book.

It is a brutal, good read. --thanks Parenthetical! “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good.

You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them.

Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.” —.