Dispatches is one of the great American books of the 20th Century.
I last read it over 40 years ago, and I simply did not have the maturity and years of reading and living necessary to fully appreciate its brilliance.
Michael Herr was 28 when he spent a full year reporting from Vietnam in 1968, the year of the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive. Dispatches, published in 1977, is his record of that year.
Having reread it now, I wonder if Vietnam isn’t the key to understanding how and when the US began its 50 plus year history of cracking apart and of going mad.
I turned 16 in September of 1968. I had watched the wild Democratic and tightly controlled Republican Conventions that summer. My police officer father sat on the couch and quietly cursed the demonstrators. I sat on the floor and quietly cheered them on. I read Ramparts. He read the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (yet, because of his patience and my intuitive understanding of limits, we never had a falling out).
I watched the Chicago police beat kids who looked as I would have wanted to look. They wanted the War to stop. I had begun to read books about the history of War, but also about militarism, colonialism, the fight between young and old (as I saw it then) to make the Republic more just. My friends and I attended Teach-Ins, spoke to each other endlessly about the War and how far we might be willing to go – would we resist the Draft, go to Canada, cut school to attend a protest and perhaps be suspended, grow our hair a little longer than school proscribed length? We also talked endlessly about rock ’n roll and girls.
We did not understand the absurdity of this adolescence or its safety, but we knew that Vietnam was a horror show. That we knew in our bones.
Rereading Dispatches almost 50 years later confronted me with “…the saturating strangeness of Vietnam (13),” and how much of that War and place served as an introduction to the twisty, unpredictable, indifferent forces of power and history. At 16, its jungle was a place “Beyond (10),” a setting for which our WW II movies had done nothing to prepare our imaginations, where hundreds of Americans died every week and only God knew how many Vietnamese. To us it was a place of outer darkness we watched set on fire and napalmed, and carpet bombed every night on the news.
We barely understood that Vietnam contained “a prodigy of things to be afraid of (133):” night attacks especially for “night was the war’s truest medium (41),”, punji sticks, whole VC compounds built in tunnels, little men in black pajamas wielding guns with banana clips. We learned names: Ia Drang, Khe Sanh, Hue, the Iron Triangle, Tet and the tunnel where the light was always shining at its end or so we were told. We learned the sound of massed helicopters.
Herr broke through all the official lies and the aspirations of Empire and the nonsense about fighting for democracy for the Vietnamese and laid it out in stark terms: “There was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war, and all kinds of victims (214).”
He told us that it was the place where “everyone became a luck freak (135)” for “the roads were mined, the trails booby-trapped, satchel charges and grenades blew up jeeps and movie theaters, the VC got work inside all the camps as shoeshine boys and laundresses and honey-dippers, they’d starch your fatigues and burn your shit and then go home and mortar your area (14).”
Now it seems like Vietnam was where we Americans learned to lie to ourselves and to believe in lies in volume and then, when it all fell apart, not to believe in anything the government said. Maybe the history of the 21st century began here.
