Dispatches

by Michael Herr

I was living too close to my bones as it was,

“It used to put my folks real uptight,” he said. But he put people uptight here too, even here.

the more you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that the more you would have to let go of one day as a “survivor.”

you could fly up and into hot tropic sunsets that would change the way you thought about light forever. You could also fly out of places that were so grim they turned to black and white in your head five minutes after you’d gone.

standing at the edge of a clearing watching the chopper you’d just come in on taking off again, leaving you there to think about what it was going to be for you now: if this was a bad place, the wrong place, maybe even the last place, and whether you’d made a terrible mistake this time.

All you could do was look around at the other people on board and see if they were as scared and numbed out as you were. If it looked like they weren’t you thought they were insane, if it looked like they were it made you feel a lot worse.

he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself.

(How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this kind of shit?)

A common prayer for the overattached: You’ll let it go sooner or later, why not do it now?

Not much chance anymore for history to go on unselfconsciously.

By the time that Westmoreland came home that fall to cheerlead and request-beg another quarter of a million men, with his light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel collateral, there were people leaning so far out to hear good news that a lot of them slipped over the edge and said that they could see it too.

Maybe nothing’s so unfunny as an omen read wrong.

They seemed like the saddest casualties of the Sixties, all the promise of good service on the New Frontier either gone or surviving like the vaguest salvages of a dream, still in love with their dead leader, blown away in his prime and theirs; left now with the lonely gift they had of trusting no one,

And sometimes the only reason you didn’t panic was that you didn’t have the energy.

Every day people were dying there because of some small detail that they couldn’t be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind that exhaustion.

no atheists in foxholes like you wouldn’t believe. Even bitter refracted faith was better than none at all,

And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years.

Once your body was safe your problems weren’t exactly over.

So you learned about fear, it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice? What about those acts that didn’t require courage to perform, but made you a coward if you didn’t?

From outside we say that crazy people think they hear voices, but of course inside they really hear them.

We took a huge collective nervous breakdown,

“I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.”

There were choices everywhere, but they were never choices that you could hope to make.

wouldn’t matter that you were young and had plans, that you were loved, that you were a noncombatant, an observer. Because if it came, it would be in a bloodswarm of killing, and credentials would not be examined.

There were some who couldn’t make it and left after a few days, some who couldn’t make it the other way, staying year after year, trying to piece together their very real hatred of the war with their great love for it,

even some tourists, people who wanted to go somewhere to screw around for a while and happened to choose the war.

“Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? Go