Michael Herr (born in 1940) was an Esquire corespondent in Vietnam in 1967-69, a time in which Esquire was in the vanguard of the "new journalism" and when the oft-proclaimed "light at the end of the tunnel" (like "turning points" in Iraq) had lost credibility despite the deployment of half a million Americans to a war into which Congress authorized a president from Texas to prosecute on the basis of lies.

Many consider Herr's book Dispatches the best book about the war on the ground in Vietnam. Like Philip Caputo's memoir of hell in the jungle from the beginning of American fighting in Vietnam, A Rumor of War, Dispatches was first published in 1977. Like Larry Heinemann's path-breaking 1974 novel Close Quarters, Dispatches chronicled the "Tet Offensive" along with forays aiming not to take and hold ground but to try to find enemies to kill.

Herr was under very heavy fire, and in a major battle as well as along on many of the very dangerous patrols in the jungle that led to maiming or killing so many American troops. Khe Sanh was not the decisive defeat for the US that Dienbenphu (Hell in a Small Place) was for the French. It was similar in that westerners were entrenched and surrounded by far larger enemy forces (a ratio of roughly 8:1 in both instances) and subjected to unrelenting bombardment (77 days in the instance of the marines holding Khe Sanh). The "enemy horde" vanished without overrunning the beleaguered Marine outpost before Operation Pegasus which

"soon came to look more like a military spectacle than a military operation, a non-operation devised to non-relieve the non-siege of Khe Sanh. When I told General Tolson [commander of the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division] that I had no real grasp of what the Cav was doing, he laughed and told me... Pegasus was objectiveless. Its purpose was to engage (p. 157)--

but as so often, in what the Vietnamese call the "American War" (following the "French War" and the "Japanese War"), the enemy could not be found and "engaged." (Yet, the insurgency in Iraq seems to have come as a surprise to those sent to bring democracy to Arabs who would be appreciative of the gift of infidel soldiers...)

(BTW, The Marine command never saw any reason to hold Khe Sanh and refused to classify being pinned down there as a "siege" [cf. "civil war" in regard to Iraq]. Within a week of replacing Gen. Westmoreland, his replacement, Gen. Creighton Abrams ordered the destruction of the Khe Sanh base. Four months after its "relief" the outpost was destroyed and abandoned. So it went in the Vietnam war (see "Go Tell the Spartans" for a small-scale analog). General Rathvon M. Tompkins, commander of the 3rd Marine Division (in The Hill Fights by Edward F. Murphy), like Herr, saw the most compelling evidence that the People's Army of Vietnam never planned to take Khe Sanh was that they did even threaten the base's sole source of water, a stream 500 meters outside the perimeter of the base. Had they contaminated the stream, the airlift of supplies to Khe Sanh would never have been able to provide enough water to the Marines. There is continued controversy about the North Vietnamese plans, though what seems most likely to me was that it was a feint to mesmerize Gen. Westmoreland with the specter of another Dienbenphu and take him by surprise with the Tet Offensive. His obsession with holding a seemingly tactically meaningless position seems also to have had some nebulous relation to his intentions to attack PAVN on the other side of the nearby border, in Laos.)

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Although far more structured than any of Jack Kerouac's rambling writings, Herr clearly was influenced by the Kerouac matter-of-fact narrative voice... and drug-intake (though Kerouac was more an alcoholic, as well as being a speed-freak, and the reality Herr found himself in the midst of was hallucinatory even without drugs). Like A Rumor of War, Dispatches is a book of witnessing what happened to Americans in Vietnam. It is also like Caputo's memoir in having a very novelistic structure and dialogue that has to have been reconstructed rather than recorded at the time. Dispatches is less analytical than A Rumor of War, but both immerse the reader in overloads of discomforts and lethal dangers even (or especially) when nothing is happening. (The next Vietnam survivor's book I'll be writing about, Bao Dinh's The Sorrows of War also conveys the simultaneous dread, discomfort, and boredom from the other side. Without drugs, Bao's book is even more hallucinatory; Herr's and Bao's are more run-on stream-of-consciousness than Caputo's chronological account of his own unraveling in Vietnam in 1965-55. All three spoke of young men turning old early and quickly in the insurgency and counterinsurgency of Vietnam.)

The rock music of the day, particularly Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Mothers of Invention, provides more than a mental soundtrack for the book. The music is often mentioned and the zeitgeist of the book is very much the zeitgeist of the "acid rock" the anguish and the counterfeit infinities of the music of the late-1960s.

An example of the style of the book (albeit in a far more generalizing mode than most of it) the content of which dovetails particularly well with Caputo's):

"Maybe you couldn't love the 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.... Some people retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair; some saw the action and declared for it--only heavy killing could make them feel so alive. And some just went instance, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them.... Every time there was combat you had a license to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again." (p. 58)

Also:

"The ground was always in play, always being swept. Under the ground was his [the Viet Cong's], above it was ours. We had the air, we could always get up in it but not disappear in to it, we could run, but we couldn't hide, and he could do each so well that sometimes it looked like he was doing both at once.... It was always going on, rock around the clock, we had the days and he had the nights. You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional" (p. 14)

and

"They killed a lot of communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing," (p. 96)

The dialogue is generally more laconic, for instance:
Herr: How can you shoot women and children?
Helicopter gunner: Easy, you just don't lead them as much [as adult male targets]. (p. 65)
and
"What's the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership." (p. 101; on the next page he quotes the assessment that the Marine "Corps came to be called the finest instrument ever devised for killing young Americans")

Anyone who can read stuff like this is not going to be bothered by the "street language" of the jarheads.

Caputo disclaimed any attempt to create "protest literature." Herr wrote that his position and that of those he was with on the ground was: We all had roughly the same position on the war: we were in it, and that was a position" (p. 226, though a few pages earlier, he wrote that "conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it" (p. 218) and scoffed at "syndicated eminences who houseguested with [Gen.} Westmoreland or [US Ambassador] Bunker and covered operations in the presence of Staff, privileges which permitted them to chronicle fully our great victory at Tet, and to publish evidence year after year that the back of the Cong had been broken" (p. 220)).

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Herr, Caputo, and Heinemann all derided the Hollywood heroics specifically of John Wayne (who, like Ronald Reagan, made sure that he fought in the Second World War only on screen). There is, however, a movie starring John Wayne, John Ford's (1948) "Fort Apache" that prefigured at least something of rushing into disaster, though the officer seeking to make a name for himself without due consideration of the likely costs and likely prognosis was played therein by Henry Fonda, as Col. Owen Thursday, ignoring the advice of Wayne's character (Cap. Kirby York) who knew something about the terrain and the enemy (can I resist the Iraq analogs? I doubt that anyone reading Dispatches now can!). Herr knew the movie, 'cause he quotes an exchange from it:
Col. Thursday: We saw some Apaches as we neared the fort.
Capt. York: If you saw them, sir, they weren't Apache. (p. 46)

Moreover, there is a swashbuckler portrayed in Dispatches, one who was direct from Hollywood, the star of "Son of Captain Blood," Sean Flynn (son of Errol, the screen swashbuckler of the 1930s).

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I have not reread In Cold Blood or any of Tom Wolfe's or of Hunter Thompson's forays into "new journalism," but having reread Dispatches, I still think that it is the masterpiece of the genre, recapturing the bad acid (mixed with amphetamines) trip experiences of the American ground war in Vietnam.

Herr had an even larger part in building the vision of hell in the jungle cowriting the script of "Full Metal Jacket" (with Stanley Kubrick and novelist Gustav Hasford whose Short-Timers was the original basis for the movie) and supplying the narration that pulled together (more or less) Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (the original "Apocalypse" screenplay by John Milius drew on Herr's magazine article account of Khe San, in particular the character of "Roach.") Herr's 1990 novel about gossip king Walter Winchell is not unrelated to the climate that produced the American Vietnam venture, and screenplay adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road by Herr, directed by Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries) and produced by Francis Ford Coppola is reportedly in production.

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© 2007, Stephen O. Murray


My second round of "reading Vietnam" as inscribed by those who were on the ground there began with Philip Caputo's Rumor of War (or Robert Stone's memoir Prime Green?).

The first round was the three Vietnam books by Larry Heinemann:
Close Quarters,
the National Book Award-winning Paco's Story,
and Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam.



Recommended: Yes