Dispatches

Product Information

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.”

Michael Herr: ‘Sitting in Saigon,’ he wrote ‘was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.’ Photograph: Jane Bown Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine. GROSS: So did you have to figure out, like, how much of your life you were leading in some kind of pose?

Abstract

Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. John le Carré called Dispatches "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." [1] It was featured in the journalism section of The Guardian 's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011. [2] There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’” A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary. Maybe the lesson is that experience can't always be sought out, utilized, and then walked away from. But what choice did Herr have, and what choice do any of us have? Because maybe we are just dancers, too.

Dispatches was published in 1977 to great acclaim; the New York Times deemed it the best book “to have been written about the Vietnam war”, while gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson said: “We have all spent 10 years 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.” If it were only unconventional journalism, it would stand with the best there is - but it's a good deal more than that . . . I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, about any war, that any writer has ever accomplished Michael Herr left us one of the best accounts of men at war in his book, “Dispatches.” A reporter, he had gone to Vietnam to find a story, but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life.After publishing Dispatches, Herr disclosed that parts of the book were invented, and that it would be better for it not to be regarded as journalism. In a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Times, he admitted that the characters Day Tripper and Mayhew in the book are "totally fictional characters" and went on to say: