Dispatches

by Michael Herr

Some journalists talked about no-story operations, but I never went on one.

Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils.

You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of tiny animals. You could sustain that sensitivity for a long time, either until the babbling and chittering and shrieking of the jungle had started up again, or until something familiar brought you out of it, a helicopter flying around above your canopy or the strangely reassuring sound next to you of one going into the chamber.

(I met a ranger-recondo who could go to sleep just like that, say, “Guess I’ll get some,” close his eyes and be there, day or night, sitting or lying down, sleeping through some things but not others; a loud radio or a 105 firing outside the tent wouldn’t wake him, but a rustle in the bushes fifty feet away would, or a stopped generator.)

Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.

The crowds on Tu Do Street looked like Ensor processioners, and there was a corruption in the air that had nothing to do with government workers on the take.

There was a joke going around that went like this: “What’s the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts?” “The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.”

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