Hunter Thompson said "We have all spent ten years [now over 40!] trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived -- but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."
This is one instance where the critics were right on. It's a harrowing, heartbreaking, honest, enlightening book. The theme of youth destroyed runs throughout: "I realized later that, however childish I might remain [Herr was in his mid-20's when he was a Vietnam War correspondent] actual youth had been pressed out of me in just the three days that it took me to cross the sixty miles between Can Tho and Saigon." He is meticulous about his word choice: "pressed out of me" is perfect, encompassing the weight of many things, among them the heat, death, constant danger. Or what about this:
". . . it was never easy to guess the ages of Marines at Keh Sanh since nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long. It was the eyes: because they were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank, they never had anything to do with what the rest of the face was doing, and it gave everyone the look of extreme fatigue or even a glancing madness. (And age: If you take one of those platoon photographs from the Civil War and cover everything but the eyes, there is no difference between a man of fifty and a boy of thirteen.)"
What's changed? War destroys youth, and the war we're involved in now is no different in that respect from Vietnam. That destruction of youth, of innocence, of life itself - for what? - eats at Herr. All becomes meaningless, a dream, a longing to escape hell. "How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?" Think about that. Bravura has morphed into indifference, a desire for the ultimate escape.
This is the kind of book where each sentence is so striking I could have underlined entire chapters. "Colleagues" is just what it says, what it felt like for Herr and his fellow reporters. It is also an indictment of the military elite who worked in concert (a different type of collegialism) to lie to the American people - and the world - through their distortion of facts on the ground. Herr and his friends saw the war firsthand and struggled against that hardened elite to reveal the extent and many levels of destruction. Other "reporters" bought into the "cross-fertilization of ignorance", the "psychotic vaudeville" that disgusted Herr and his friends.
The second part of this chapter could be subtitled "War As Movie". Herr begins by saying "I kept 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." Growing up on war movies made the war initially seem unreal - you were in your own movie -- and it quickly became a horror movie. This chapter also contains the crux of the problems faced by the reporters, "what we knew together, that in back of every column of print you read about Vietnam there was a dripping, laughing death-face; it hid there in the newspapers and magazines and held to your television screens for hours after the set was turned off for the night, an after-image that simply wanted to tell you at last what somehow had not been told."
He talks about an older correspondent who blew off the numbers in Khe Sanh (200 dead, 1000 wounded) by saying, "Oh, two hundred isn't anything. We lost more than that in an hour on Guadalcanal." This so disturbs Herr and his friends that they leave the table, but they "heard that kind of talk all the time, as though it could invalidate the deaths at Keh Sanh, render them somehow less dead than the dead from Guadalcanal, as though light losses didn't lie as still as moderate losses or heavy losses. And these were American dead they were talking about; you should have heard them when the dead were Vietnamese." This passage reminded me of a poem I wrote years ago:
Significant Losses
(Madeline Albright stated that “significant losses”
were not expected in a war with Iraq)
What makes a loss “significant”?
What is the magic number that
crosses the border into “significance”?
One death reverberates.
One death is significant
to the mother,
the father, wife, children,
sisters, brothers,
grandmothers, grandfathers,
aunts, uncles, cousins,
not to mention to
the one killed.
And what of the innocents gone?
The many children maimed, dead?
Those who were in the line of fire,
losing their arms, legs, heads?
Are they significant?
Those who calculate loss
as significant
only when the numbers climb
until the death toll reaches
a particular thousand
and the screams and protests of
the survivors grow to a blood-red
river’s roar –
then, and only then, say
it’s time to stop,
to pull out.
After they’ve proven their guns
still work,
their bombs still kill,
that they’re still significantly
effective.
Your mother and my mother,
your sister and my sister
say
One death –
one –
is not slight.
One death is a
significant
loss.
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