Dispatches

by Michael Herr

Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they’d been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they asked you, “Are you a Dove or a Hawk?” and “Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?” Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I’d think, but I wouldn’t say it, especially not here where they knew that I knew that they really weren’t fighting anybody anywhere anyway, it made them pretty touchy. That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, “Colonel, you’re insane”? It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines. I only jumped in once, spontaneous as shock, during Tet when I heard a doctor bragging that he’d refused to allow wounded Vietnamese into his ward. “But Jesus Christ,” I said, “didn’t you take the Hippocratic Oath?” but he was ready for me. “Yeah,” he said, “I took it in America.” Doomsday celebs, technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, “right here in-country.” Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranh...