Dispatches

by Michael Herr

A common prayer for the overattached: You’ll let it go sooner or later, why not do it now? Memory print, voices and faces, stories like filament through a piece of time, so attached to the experience that nothing moved and nothing went away.

Saigon at night was still Vietnam at night, night was the war’s truest medium; night was when it got really interesting in the villages,

In Saigon it never mattered what they told you, even less when they actually seemed to believe it.

Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace. Saigon

There was the common failure of feeling and imagination compounded by punishing boredom, an alienation beyond tolerance and a terrible, ongoing anxiety that it might one day, any day, come closer than it had so far.

There’s nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.

By 1967 all you saw was the impaired spook reflex, prim adventurers living too long on the bloodless fringes of the action, heartbroken and memory-ruptured, working alone together toward a classified universe.

the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion.

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.

A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with breathtaking concentration,

A lot of what people called courage was only undifferentiated energy cut loose by the intensity of the moment,

There is a point of view that says that the United States got involved in the Vietnam War, commitments and interests aside, simply because we thought it would be easy.

the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.

Khe Sanh had become a passion, the false love object in the heart of the Command.

Anxiety was a luxury, a joke you had no room for once you knew the variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered.

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

Back in the World now, and a lot of us aren’t making it. The story got old or we got old,

the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly.

Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that’s a little history joke.

If you can’t find your courage in a war, you have to keep looking for it anyway, and not in another war either; in where it’s old and jammed until the rocks start moving around, a little light and air, long time no see.

“What a passionate, compassionate, brilliant book this is. With uncanny precision it summons up the very essence of that war—its