In the everlasting conflict between those who fight and those who spin, Herr saw how the grunts were used and the Vietnamese defiled, and how those in charge warped language to serve the first need of those in power which is to remain in power.
Grunts could die at 300 per week in “combat without focus (23),” on search and destroy missions, invasions, pacifications, in the jungles, in the rice paddies, or “in the Highlands [which] are spooky, unbearably spooky, spooky beyond belief (93).” (“The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in nature could have been born here. It is ghost story country (94).)
Grunts died ”in the search for Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “peace with honor,” and all that time, all those years, wading through all that blood “there was also a Command that didn’t feel this, [whose] spokesman spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world (214).”
Command spoke in the vernacular of obfuscation and of concealment: “frontier sealing, census grievance, black operations, revolutionary development, armed propaganda (52).” They “called dead Vietnamese “believers,” a lost American platoon was “a black eye,” they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigor. In Saigon it never mattered what they told you, even less when they actually seemed to believe it (42).” Their “jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets (215).”
“Most of what [Command] wanted to say to the American public was a psychotic vaudeville (215).”
I’m not sure that political or official governmental language has ever recovered from these desecrations and masquerades.
Those desecrations illustrate the sickness of a mindset, a belief that we were American God Men and not wolves and that the truth of what was happening on the ground had to be created out of air. Herr saw up close that “it was axiomatic that [it] Vietnam was about ideological space, we were there to bring them the choice, bringing it to them like Sherman bringing the Jubilee through Georgia, clean through it, wall to wall with pacified indigenous and scorched earth. There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent (43-44).”
It was a “holy war, long-nose jihad like a face-off between one god who would hold the coonskin to the wall while we nailed it up, and another whose detachment would see the blood run out of ten generations, if that was how long it took for the wheel to go around (45).”
“A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed, and they looked into that with breathtaking concentration, no quarter, laying down the seeds of the disease, roundeye fever, until it reached plague proportions, taking one from every family, a family from every hamlet, a hamlet from every province, until a million had died from it and millions more were left uncentered and lost in their flight from it (59).”
“Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils (49).”
As I reread Dispatches, it felt utterly present in this new and awful moment in our history, in the renewed torrent of lies, in the enduring ugliness of the dehumanization of more unwhite people, in the sustained belief of those in power that human beings are disposable, in this present moral and economic corruption, its debasement of language, its insanity posing as sanity.
Michael Herr is dead. So is Hunter S Thompson and John Dos Passos and Joe Heller and Octavia Butler and Philip Roth and Ursula Le Guin and Christopher Hitchens and Joan Didion. They would have been able to write about this time. They were always able to see and understand what crawled around under the flags and pomp and suits and shine and the diarrhetic language. They could see through the fever to the disease.
I haven’t read anyone who has been able to do so now.
This is a great book. If you want to understand Vietnam, read it. If you want to understand America now, read it.
