Literary Detours: "Dispatches" by Michael Herr (re-read)

The first time I came to know this book I was still serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.  I was at the main library in Camp LeJuene reading Colonel David Hackworth's "About Face" when a young 2nd lieutenant came over and asked me what I was reading.  He was friendly and motioned me to remain seated (my propensity to follow military courtesy bordered on the ridiculous), a welcome gesture to me as I'm not very fond of being interrupted when I am reading.  To make a short conversation even shorter, the 2nd lieutenant complimented me in the choice of title yet recommended various titles but was insistent in asking me to write down the title "Dispatches" by Michael Herr.  I folded the piece of paper I used to write the title down and slipped it into Colonel Hackworth's book.  In 1994, while in the process of researching a paper as a college student, and a year after leaving the U.S. Marine Corps, I found the piece of paper and decided to finally pick up Herr's classic.  It was a decision I regretted because then I couldn't put down the book despite being in the middle of the semester and short on time for just about everything, let alone non-required reading.

What struck me early on about "Dispatches" is the fact that for as brutal as the book reads, it is actually written by a war correspondent.  The book details in part the attack on the walled city of Hue, otherwise known as the citadel.  The writing is honest and carries with it the right amount of detachment for objective thought, reasoning and judgment that fails in most combat writing by the actual participants.  For example, the narrator depicts the voice of men from their own perspective, and even when he is rephasing it, the honesty comes out clear and truthful.  For example, “Amazing, unbelievable, guys who’d played a lot of hard sports said they’d never felt anything like it, the sudden adrenaline you could make available to yourself, pumping it up and putting it out until you were lost floating in it, not afraid, almost open to clear orgasmic death-by-drowning in it, actually relaxed... Unless of course you’d shit your pants or were screaming or praying or giving anything at all to the hundred-channel panic that blew word salad all around you and sometimes clean through you. Maybe you couldn’t love war and hate it inside the same instant, but sometimes those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High On War, like it said on the helmet covers. Coming off a jag like that could really make a mess of you.”  I remember underlining this passage and knowing it made an impact on me back then.  Re-reading it now, and after 13 years of a war that has not been my experience directly, I can see it reflected on the young veterans I share time with today.  Theirs is a war for younger Marines, not like the conflicts I fought in which a large number of top senior NCOs were men who had seen heavy action in Vietnam; men who were coming to the end of their tenure as active military and still had to put one more experience under their belts before calling it quits.  From the "outside," I see the young veterans of today taking about being under fire and see the universality of what Michael Herr put down on paper so eloquently... that war in its many incarnations will have a similar effect on the men who fight it.  It's nearly impossible to describe the rush of combat and its many emotions, but Herr's description comes to a near-perfect account.

The book is filled with criticism of the "high command" and its decisions.  Of particular interest is Herr's account of the siege of the fire-base at Khe Sanh.  Herr's accounts of being under fire while waiting for a ferry out, laying down so close to the ground hoping the airplane or helicopter coming in didn't get shot down as it made its approach, and the wounded and dead laid out at the edge of the runway really make a mental image of the insanity of it all.  Then, almost as fast as it began, the four North Vietnamese Army division surrounding the base disappeared into the jungle and Khe Sanh disappeared from the headlines with a quick "high-command" briefing to the correspondents.

There are accounts about Michael Herr's colleagues, most interesting the story of Sean Flynn, photojournalist and son of the famous actor Errol Flynn.  Flynn is featured in the book at length, depicted as a jovial and intense photojournalist with a sensitive touch to both his work and his relationships with others.  The tragedy remains painful to Herr and he writes consolingly about the memories he shared with his friend.  Of all the people covered in the book, Flynn was the one that most attracted my attention--not simply because of his famous father but because of the circumstances behind his disappearance.  He was reported missing in Cambodia and was never found.  In 1984, he was officially declared dead.

I enjoyed taking a literary detour from this year's reading list to read "Dispatches."  It is a book that intoxicates with its accounts of brutality while at the same time reigniting the desire to come to terms with all that has been seen and done in combat.  It is books like "Dispatches" that fill the great void between those who experience and those who yearn to appropriate the experience through the great vehicle that is literature.