Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

by Mark Bowden

Herr is one hell of a writer, but an untrustworthy reporter. When he wasn’t making things up in Dispatches, like that Persian scholar/whore-loving/Beethoven-worshipping general officer he told his editor Harold Hayes was a “composite,” he was treating the entire Vietnam war as a metaphor for his own drug addiction. His prose was electrifying and original and occasionally powerful and moving, and his descriptions of the war zones in Vietnam so haunting and fine that he deserves to be carried into the halls of black irony and high style on a gilded rococo chair, but Herr was writing about himself as much as he was writing about Vietnam. It was prose that resonated with a disillusioned, anti-war, drug-entranced generation, and it stands today as a classic of some kind. I like the book a lot, but would argue that the choices Herr made exclude him from any club of best war reporting, or any reporting for that matter, if the first test of good reporting is that it tells the truth. As it happens, what Herr was doing forty years ago was solidly in the mainstream of war literature for his time. For most of the last half of the twentieth century, we as a country forgot about war and soldiers as a legitimate subject matter for serious writing. We didn’t completely forget about them, but the only acceptable way of treating war in literary circles was to decry it, or make fun of it. Beginning with the brilliantly satiric novel Catch-22, literary writers could no longer write about batt...