Dispatches

by Michael Herr

“What the fuck do you think happened? We got shot to pieces.” The correspondent started to write that down and the paratrooper said, “Make that ‘little pieces.’

“We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.”

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.

A suave black grunt, identified on his helmet cover as LOVE CHILD, was studying an exhausted copy of Playboy, pausing to say, “Oh … man! She can sure come sit on my face anytime. Any … time … at … all.”

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.