Dispatches

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I don't mean to insult anyone who has served in the military or is serving now. I mean to insult every leader who has ever flippantly involved their country, or their youth, in an unnecessary war. If you're reading this right now, you know: it's happening right now, again. It was at this point that I began to recognise every casualty, remember conversations we'd had days or even hours earlier, and that's when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He'd been hit in both legs, both arms the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to take a picture of him like this to send to his wife.

When I think of this word, I can't help but picture someone typing out a telegram to someone: “Heavy casualties. Need more young bodies. Stop.” HERR: Normally, I got as close to the ground as I possibly could with my head down. There were one or two occasions where there was no choice but to take a weapon. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Colleagues" discusses life amongst Herr's fellow war correspondents, including more detailed profiles of those he knew best: Flynn, the son of the Golden Age movie star, and Stone. Both ultimately disappeared in Cambodia and were declared MIA. He recounts the amazement of the grunts that these journalists have actually chosen to risk their lives covering the war when they could have done otherwise. He is moved by the stories they tell him and even more so by their intense desire to have them reach the public; many of them fill this book. Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971Herr produced little else in the decades that followed the publication of Dispatches. Then again he didn’t have to. With that book alone, his reputation was secure. He had gone to Vietnam to find a story but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life. As he says near the beginning of the book, he went looking for a war and it found him. And, if truth be told, it never left him.

It was while he was 'famous' that Herr decided to 'look the other way' once again. This time towards Tibetan Buddhism. His commitment is absolute. He meditates; he thinks; he is immersed. He gets up at six in the morning, but is unavailable to anyone until 10.30. 'I am not qualified to talk about this,' he insists, infuriatingly. 'I am not a Lama, I am a novice. But I know this: that whatever you are dealing with is real all right, but what you do with it is in your mind. That is the upside to the attachment, to not being detached. You take responsibility in your own mind, and that is how I cleaned it all out. It all happens in your own mind.' And he pulls the peak of his baseball cap down over his forehead. HERR: That's - yeah, that did have a lot to do with it and a great deal to do with it. And - to get away from and to get away from the sort of persistence of popularity of that book, the peculiar kind of popularity it had. GROSS: We're listening to a 1990 interview with writer Michael Herr. He died Thursday at the age of 76. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR. Vietnam, man. Bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em and feed ’em”—a chopper pilot summarized the war strategy for Herr.Dispatches was published in 1977 to great acclaim; the New York Times deemed it the best book “to have been written about the Vietnam war”, while gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson said: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade.” Herr is not anti-war, or, for that matter, pro-war. In some ways, he dodges the political controversy around the Vietnam War. What he is interested in is the ordeal of war and the individuals who are caught up it. And that includes Herr, mesmerized by what is taking place around him as much as anyone. Perhaps there is always an element of an adventurer in a correspondent who heads to a war zone. One of the recurring themes in the book is, indeed, the question why he is there at all. He did not have to go to Vietnam, unlike the vast majority of combatants about whom he writes. Maybe it is fairer to say that Herr, like some of the other Press Corps mentioned in the book, needed to go to a war zone for reasons that were not altogether clear to him. The adventure that Herr underwent there, in the end, proved to be as existential as it was bloody.

Herr senses continuity only in Saigon, that “unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia,” a Babylon of discotheque whoredom and American civilian contractors who rev their Harleys up the steps of Buddhist shrines. By contrast, Huế and Da Nang, seats of the vanished Nguyễn and Champa kingdoms, are like “remote closed societies, mute and intractable.” In Huế after the battle that demolished so much of the city, bouncing over debris in a jeep with a South Vietnamese major and his driver, Herr gets curious about the old Imperial Palace:

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After the Khe Sanh chapter, it loses a bit of air. The sketches become shorter, sketchier, though still powerful. Herr befriended the son of actor Errol Flynn -- Sean Flynn, who finally went missing on a bike ride into Cambodia in 70. Death, meet wish. And I hear that Herr himself is now a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas or something. That's a lot of meditation, cleaning all this off. A lifetime.

MICHAEL HERR: You know, I'm a writer so I have a prejudice. You know, I mean, I went to Vietnam in the first place because the assumption that this was television's war and that was the medium that was going to tell the story. And I believed it wasn't telling the story that it required writing to tell the story. So I don't know, there sure are a lot of Vietnam films. But very few of them have moved me.Herr, a titan of New Journalism, died last week, at the age of seventy-six. He made his name in Vietnam as a young Esquire correspondent who shunned official briefings for infantry patrols in the jungle and helo assaults with the air cav. He sometimes carried a rifle to gain access, and once told the Boston Globe, “I only had to use a weapon twice. And I had to, I had to. It was impossible not to.” HERR: I think he had a lot to do with my going to Vietnam, you know? I think I bought that sort of public version of who he was. Splendid . . . he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front Some of Herr’s best and most quotable passages read like hallucinations, and some simply are just that: descriptions of being stoned on the front line, like a character in Apocalypse Now, a film classic whose script Herr also contributed to: