Status Updates From Dispacci. L'orrore del Viet...

Page is a crazy dude.

Book is amazing but so unlike anything I’ve read before. Reminds me a little of All Quiet.

"ale pech, ale pech, kulka w łeb, synuś zdechł, no i chuj, bo to był piechociarz gnój"

The chapter on Khe Sanh is REALLY heavy on the historical and military language. probably helps to watch a video on I-IV Corps, how they were divided up, and the types of fighting that took place in each before this one.

Nie mam kiedy czytac musze jutro rano

Najpierw napalm potem nakarm

Just realized I never updated, oops

Also this quote on page 38 that I can’t stop rereading: Flynn said and laughts while Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain.

Maybe I’ll start finding quotes I like and putting them in my updates. Here’s one on the page I stopped at: It was one of those days that I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see.”

Some of the best nonfiction I’ve ever read. No spoilers, but Herr’s story on 64 is some of the most haunting things I’ve ever read. I was reading on my plane ride home from Durran’s Bachelor Party trip in New Orleans, and and I shed tears sitting between two strangers. Hours later, it still sits so heavily on your shoulders.

Dude this book is so interesting. His writing is amazing.

Really descriptive. I am in awe of Herr’s ability to notice stuff. Pretty remarkable.
I like how he simultaneously caps off and leads some paragraphs with double entendres.

So much of Vietnam is tied into the music of the period. An escapism that never (?) worked. I feel so terrible for everyone involved. This should be read in high schools.

Everything about Vietnam is just plain terrifying.

January 28, 2026. Book of the year to date.
Five bold stars for a nearly 50 year old book.

Full disclosure, I’ve had this book with me since grade 11. We were required to write a report on a book of our choosing, picked from a list. I picked Dispatches. Its synopsis intrigued me the most from all the other titles, which included classics. I did not read it at all. I Sparknotes’d the paper. This book resurfaced recently as it was described to me as “the most poetic book written about modern war.”

"Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that's a little history joke."

"I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity... "

"Like every American in Vietnam, he had his obsession with Time."

"Going crazy was built into the tour... "

"... existential crunch... "

Perfect prose, dripping with style

The book is eye-opening. I was born in 1965, and I had a brother who served during Vietnam, so I thought I had heard the worst of the stories. I was mistaken.
Michael Here’s time as a correspondent on the front line in Viet Nam was well-spent. History is well-served by the stories he shares in this book.

So far it lives up to its reviews

Summer uni reading. So glad I did the Vietnam war for history coursework otherwise I would be so confused

Difficult to read

‘i keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to vietnam to get wiped out for good’

‘i saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes […] how do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he's gotten too old for this kind of shit? […] they'd be a few feet away but they'd be looking back at you over a distance you knew you'd never really cross’

Wou dat ik dit in het Nederlands had gekocht, want volgens mij gaat er veel te veel langs me heen. Ik had het echt even zwaar in het begin. MAAR zit er nu wel in en ben begonnen met legertermen en steden te googlen tijdens het lezen, dat helpt ook.

Herr’s account truly reflects the unrestricted access of correspondents to the front that was both unprecedented in earlier conflicts and unmatched in later ones. This dynamic is interesting to see in his interactions with grunts, his fear, and his intimate understanding of both.