Dispatches

by Michael Herr

some reporters asked a door gunner, ‘How can you shoot women and children?’ and he’d answered, ‘It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.’

Officially, the complexion of the problem had changed (too many people were getting killed, for one thing), and the romance of spooking started to fall away like dead meat from a bone. As sure as heat rises, their time was over. The war passed along, this time into the hard hands of fire-power freaks out to eat the country whole,

And sometimes the only reason you didn’t panic was that you didn’t have the energy.

Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck:

The Soldier’s Prayer came in two versions: Standard, printed on a plastic-coated card by the Defense Department, and Standard Revised, impossible to convey because it got translated outside of language, into chaos – screams, begging, promises, threats, sobs, repetitions of holy names until their throats were cracked and dry,

(One day at the battalion aid station in Hue a Marine with minor shrapnel wounds in his legs was waiting to get on a helicopter, a long wait with all of the dead and badly wounded going out first, and a couple of sniper rounds snapped across the airstrip, forcing us to move behind some sandbagging. ‘I hate this movie,’ he said,

‘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.’