Dispatches

by Michael Herr

At the height of the Tet Offensive alone, there were between 600 and 700 correspondents accredited to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Who all of them were and where all of them went was as much a mystery to me and to most of the correspondents I knew as it was to the gentle-tempered bull-faced Marine gunnery sergeant assigned to the department of JUSPAO which issued those little plastic-coated MACV accreditation cards. He’d hand them out and add their number to a small blackboard on the wall and then stare at the total in amused wonder, telling you that he thought it was all a fucking circus. (He’s the same man who told a television star, “Hold on to your ass awhile. You people from the electronic media don’t scare me anymore.”) There was nothing exclusive about that card or its operational match, the Bao Chi credential of the Republic of South Vietnam; thousands of them must have been issued over the years. All they did was admit you to the Vietnam press corps and tell you that you could go out and cover the war if you really wanted to. All kinds of people have held them at one time or another: feature writers for religious organs and gun magazines, summer vacationers from college newspapers (one paper sent two, a Hawk and a Dove, and we put it down because it hadn’t sent a Moderate over as well), second-string literary figures who wrote about how they hated the war more than you or I ever could, syndicated eminences who houseguested with Westmoreland or Bunker ...

... I've been awfully impressed ..."There were a lot of hacks who wrote down every word that the generals and officials told them to write, and a lot for whom Vietnam was nothing more than an important career station.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, that rough reconciliation that many of us had to look at.A few came through with the grisliest hang-ups, letting it all go every chance they got, like the one who told me that he couldn't see what all the fuss had been about, his M-16 never jammed.There were Frenchmen who'd parachuted into Dien Bien Phu during what they loved to call “the First Indochina War,” Englishmen sprung alive from Scoop (a press-corps standard because it said that if the papers didn't get it, it didn't happen),Italians whose only previous experience had been shooting fashion, Koreans who were running PX privileges into small fortunes, Japanese who trailed so many wires that transistor jokes were inevitable, Vietnamese who took up combat photography to avoid the draft, Americans who spent all their days in Saigon drinking at the barof L'Amiral Restaurant with Air America pilots.Some filed nothing but hometowners, some took the social notes of the American community, some went in the field only because they couldn't afford hotels, some never left their hotels. Taken all together, they accounted for most of the total on Gunny's blackboard, which left a number of people, as many as fifty, who were gifted or honest or especially kind and who gave journalism a better name than it deserved, particularly in Vietnam.