Customer Reviews

Dispatches

5 star:		(91)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Certainly one of the most visceral descriptions of the Vietnam War. Herr dispenses with politics to get to the heart of the matter - the soldiers in the field. He tells so many compelling stories of the front line experience, which served as fodder for both "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket," co-writing the movie scripts. What makes the book stand out is the empathy Herr had for the soldiers' experiences, subliminating himself in the course of the narratives.

Khe Sanh is indeed the centerpiece of the book. He describes the battle from ground level, drawing comparisons to the infamous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which brought the French chapter of the Vietnam War to an end. Commanding officers bristled at the comparison, yet here were the Americans entrenched in a remote outpost, with the mysterious presence of the Viet Cong all around them. Herr gives you the perspective of a handful of soldiers he was in closest contact with, following up on their fates in later chapters.

Herr doesn't try to make sense of the war, simply presenting it as the maelstrom it was. Chaos reigned. All you could do was keep your head down. He ties you in to some of the other reporters covering the war, including the flambouyant Sean Flynn, who would ride into most any situation with the aplomb of his legendary father, Errol Flynn. It is such a fantastic range of dispatches giving the reader a real feel for what went on in Vietnam.

A classmate gave me this book in 1980, when I was a 13 year old girl with a voracious reading appetite. Strange as it may seem, girls do like war books and this one still stands out in my mind as one of the best written from a nitty-gritty, no-holds-barred point of view. Our history classes never quite made it to an in-depth look at Vietnam even though we were born of an era that witnessed Vets coming home, injured, despondent and forever changed. This book gave me my first understanding of what it was like to be a "grunt" in that war, which the antiseptic history books would never do. It also gave me respect for all who were stuck in that quagmire and how war could make anyone go quite loony. It's very compelling and hard to put down, even for a 13 year old.

Maybe it's because Michael Herr wrote the narration for the film, but reading Dispatches, you can't help but feel that you're getting another peek into the thoughts of Martin Sheen's character Captain Willard, from Apocalypse Now. Willard if he was wimpier, actually; Herr makes no bones about the fact that he was scared out of his wits throughout most of his stay in Vietnam. One of the pieces in Dispatches, "Illumination Rounds," really slams this point home; Herr comes off like a paranoid wreck in it.

Beyond that, Herr's writing is almost poetic. His descriptions of the war and the men who fought in it are impressive, borderline masterly. In addition he throws off gems of impromptu character studies, almost throw-away sentences that describe the very core of the soldiers he met. One of my favorite lines that Herr wrote for Apocalypse Now is when Willard meets the PBR crew; he says they're "rock and rollers, with one foot in their graves." Dispatches is filled to the brim with such lines, and if you enjoyed Martin Sheen's voice-over in the Coppola film, you'll really enjoy this book.

I've read Dispatches a few times, and each time I've taken something new from it. The "Khe Sanh" section is obviously the centerpiece of the book; it dwarfs all of the other stories. Stuck in the bombed-out, besieged base, Herr effectively conveys the sense of doom and paranoia that gripped the Marines trapped inside. This section features one of the more memorable soldiers in the book, the black Marine Day Tripper, as well as a mysterious grenade launcher who provided the inspiration for the character Roach in Apocalypse Now. In fact, the "Khe Sanh" article, as it originally appeared in magazine form, was a prime source of inspiration for John Milius, when he was writing the Apocalypse Now script in 1969.

There are a host of intriguing characters in this book. My favorite is cast aside quickly, however: a drugged-out LURP who appears briefly in the opening chapter, "Breathing In." Herr apparently was too frightened of this guy to get closer to him, so all we get in Dispatches is an intriguing glimpse. We do get to see more of Herr's colleagues, though, such as Errol Flynn's son Sean, who treats the war like a day at the park, riding to and from battles on a motorcycle.

Readers looking for detailed combat description are out of luck. In fact, it appears that Herr didn't see much fighting at all. At least, if he did, he doesn't mention it. Instead, what you find in Dispatches are illuminating reports from the front lines, insightful character studies of the men who fought and died. You also get a heavy dose of the pop culture of the time: the spirit of Morrison and Hendrix and Zappa so permeate every page that you can almost hear their music blaring in the background.

So, just as Apocalypse Now rises above being just another "war" film by mostly not being about the war at all, Dispatches rises above your average combat journalism. Instead, it comes off as a moment in time, caught and contained forever in text. It is to be read first and foremost by those who wish to understand Vietnam, the mindset of the men who fought there. It's also just a plain engrossing read.

A warts-and-all account of the Vietnam War. Possibly the best book on this subject in the last thirty years, Michael Herr gives us an objective look into the horror of combat without looking through the eyes of rose-tainted patriotism. He invokes the dread and chaos of the battlefield and weighs out the whims of human behaviour, bravery and insanity, meekness and humanity, without the judgement or condemnation that might be meted out by a loftier author.

Herr's use of brutal imagery absorbed me into his savage surroundings. From the soldier who can't stop drooling as a result of a particularly dreadful gun battle, to the scenes of the dead, American and Vietnamese, adult and infant, on eclectic battlefields and village streets.

The characters are real people in a situation that most of them neither like nor understand. They are young men who invoke the same shortcomings we all have. But they are a step above the common reader. They are professional soldiers and act that way despite their misgivings. They push past the boundaries of fear and into the realms of heroism or insanity or death. Everyone that he introduces is individual. There are no carbon copy soldiers here. They are funny or musical or religious or delusional, whatever their idiosyncrasy may be. I felt as though I was being introduced to people I knew throughout the book.

Most books on the topic of war that I have read tend to stay with one platoon. Herr constantly shifts places and battalions and makes the reader feel as though he/she is part of something bigger. There is no single climax in the book. An honest reflection of that war perhaps. Each chapter is as horrific and exhilarating as the next.

The length of it, in particular, displays an author who wants to show us the bare bones: no hyperbolic descriptions that eventually desensitise us to the events, no ivory-tower pensive soliloquies to the tragedy of war. Michael Herr gives us the facts and trusts the reader's intelligence to decide.

Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam during the months of the Hill Fights of `67 through the winter to the Tet Offensive and on past the spring months of '68. In his memoir, "Dispatches", he focuses primarily upon the Battle for Hue and the Siege of Khe Shan but there are glimpses of other battles. He covers Vietnam reflecting upon everything from the bar scenes of the large cities to the terror of incoming while in trenches of firebases in an outpouring of confused and conflicted memories. Like a rock skimming across a pond he touches upon the drugs, the blaring of rock and roll, the freaks and the street-talking young toughs. In a few well-written sentences he eviscerates the information officers and the official line but spends several introspective pages exploring the parasitic nature of war correspondents. He rarely offers an opinion; he just tells in a stream of consciousness what he saw and heard. But this is not a book of great battles and heroic deeds. It is a book about average troops and a handful of war correspondents, for whom he held deep affection, and what they had to cope with and how some of them died.

"I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old."

Reading this book you feel and are touched by Vietnam and several excellent passage leave you feeling empty. Hard for a book to evoke that kind of response but this one does. Excellent writing, a damn good book.

My hat's off to anyone who can sum up this book in a customer review. It is beyond anything I've ever read in its portrayal of men at war as witnessed by the war correspondents who accompany them on the front lines. Unlike the embedded journalists of our own time, the writers and photographers who covered Vietnam were much closer to being free agents, restricted only by their ingenuity and fearlessness to seek out the action that would represent the essence of America's military presence in southeast Asia ("There it is . . .), while the evidence everywhere was of an irrationality raised to such a pitch that it had become something driven only bit itself.

Unable to remain objective or even conceive of objectivity, Herr and his colleagues yield to a kind of hallucinatory experience, depicting the war as a phantasmagoria, a really bad trip that also seduced them with what one of them insists is a compelling glamour. To read this book is to experience Vietnam not as a historical record or analysis, or even a personal memoir, but as a kind of hypnotic nightmare from which many, including survivors, never wake.

This tiny book packs an incredible punch. Herr wasn't just in Vietnam, Herr lived Vietnam. He breathed it and drank it in and it consumed him and devoured him in turn and this remarkable writing is a spectacular expression of that experience and, as mentioned, a direct influence of two signature Vietnam War movies, and arguably, two of the greatest war movies ever committed to film. Among Vietnam novels I have read, Dispatches stands alone without equal.

The current crop of Iraq books are one-after-the-other being compared to Dispatches which is not only an insufferable insult to the original, but a revelation of modern book marketing. Empty shrill hype pimping pulp flotsam. IF an equal to Dispatches ever ever emerges from this current mess, it will be several years after the war and by a participant skilled in the beauty of our language, and not some bureaucrat adrenaline junky.

I'm on my third copy. a habit that comes with this book. You will read it tote it and quote it at an unimaginable frequency. Its more than THE WAR,its the people as well as the feeling of the times. What a gift of prose he has. This book made me come to respect Michael Herr as the most articulate writer i have ever come across.

A tour guide through a seductive hell, Michael Herr describes his Vietnam, a place equally nightmarish and exhilerating. Helicopters are ubiquitous, the style and organization often surreal. Herr leaves you with burning images of a colonel who will pound the enemy with meat, Hendrix blaring out of a transistor radio in a rice paddy, or (worst of all) ponchos that fail to conceal the dead like body bags do. Their humanity restored, the grunts speak volumes in clipped phrases. In the end you wonder what happened to the flamboyant Sean Flynn (inspiration for the Clash song on "Combat Rock"). Or what that soldier returning from Hill 875 said to the fat girl in the Peanuts sweatshirt to make her cry. If you count yourself among those who have what Joseph Conrad termed "a fascination with the abomination," this book will blow you away. It's an astonishing read.

This book is not an easy read. Its stream of conscuiusness writing and wandering storyline are both its strongest qualities and sharpest point for criticism.

But even upon reading it multiple times all these years later, I still find it a compelling read. In a sense no wrtiing style has better captured the madness that apparently was the war as seen by the boys on the ground who fought it. The fast pace and jumpy storyline can leave the reader breathless and confused. Sounds like the author captured it pretty well.