Dispatches

by Michael Herr

Combat spared far more men than it wasted, but everyone suffered the time between contact, especially when they were going out every day looking for it; bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC’s, awful in helicopters, the worst, traveling so fast toward something so frightening.

He had one of those faces, 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.

it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.

In war more than in other life you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time, you’re just behaving, and afterward you can make up any kind of bullshit you want to about it, say you felt good or bad, loved it or hated it, did this or that, the right thing or the wrong thing; still, what happened happened.

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.

There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

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,

It was on one of those days that I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see.

The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off. It is ghost-story country, and for Americans it had been the scene of some of the war’s vilest surprises.

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.

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.

One day a letter came from a British publisher, asking him to do a book whose working title would be “Through with War” and whose purpose would be to once and for all “take the glamour out of war.” Page couldn’t get over it. “Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan.… Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra or getting stoned at China Beach? It’s like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn.” He pointed to a picture he’d taken, Flynn laughing maniacally (“We’re winning,” he’d said), triumphantly. “Nothing the matter with that boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can’t take the glamour out of that. It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.” He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it. “I mean, you know that, it just can’t be done!” We both shrugged and laughed, and Page looked very thoughtful for a moment. “The very idea!” he said. “Ohhh, what a laugh! Take the bloody glamour out of bloody war!”

I loved the door, loved it when the ship would turn a little and tilt me toward the earth, flying at a hundred feet. A lot of people thought it opened you to some kind of extra danger, like ground fire spilling in on you instead of just severing the hydraulic system or cutting off the Jesus nut that held the rotor on. A friend of mine said he couldn’t do it, it put him close to rapture of the deep, he was afraid he’d flip the latch on his seat belt and just float out there. But I was afraid anyway, more afraid closed in, better to see, I didn’t go through all of that not to see.

In the Special Forces A Camp at Me Phuc Tay there was a sign that read, “If you kill for money you’re a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you’re a sadist. If you kill for both you’re a Green Beret.”

Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don’t know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.

My life and my death got mixed up with their lives and deaths, doing the Survivor Shuffle between the two, testing the pull of each and not wanting either very much.