Vintage Dispatches

Git Some!!!

One of the most insightful and disturbing books written about the conflict in Vietnam

Just as powerful now as when I first read it in the late 70s, maybe more so. I thought it a bit pretentious then, but now it seems more profound. Herr’s rich fever-dream, druggy, rock-and-roll lyricism (amplified his subsequent work on ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’) still frames much of the pop culture view of the Vietnam war. The author acknowledges, “conventional journalism could more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.” Herr was a magazine journalist, hopping helicopters “like taxis” to cover hotspots, so viewing the conflict (”a war of our convenience”) simultaneously from above as well as the brutal grunt ground-level, both the “glamour” of war and its PTSD-triggering gruesomeness. Herr finds his own, and his fellow correspondents’ ambivalence deeply troubling, “I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” In the first section, ‘Breathing In’ Herr tries to capture the mesmerising sensory and cultural overload of arriving “in country”, then on to ‘Hell Sucks’ and the bloody Tet Offensive in Hue. The biggest section covers (comparatively conventionally) the futile, even “absurd” 1968 siege of Khe Sanh,” a passion, the false love object of the Command” and “Illumination Rounds”, vignettes of war’s madness. “Colleagues” affectionately describes “those crazy guys”, his fellow correspondent and photographers and is both touching and funny. In the media war, “something wasn’t answered, it wasn’t even asked”, and Herr felt a commitment of truth to the soldiers, as one said, “You tell it, man”. He does, and reminds us of the horror but also the humanity of conflict, “War stories aren’t really anything more than stories about people anyway.”

Buena edición y magnífico libro. Si no estás acostumbrado al slang americano de la época o al lingo militar, puede costar leerlo.

One of the best war relates I've ever read. Human and fully involved, never cynical, nor bombastic, nor approximate in his descriptions of context, feelings, ...and wounds. A must-read about the US in Vietnam