Book review - Dispatches, by Michael Herr

 

Another in an occasional series of book reviews, which will only be about books I suggest you read. And before I forget, thanks to my friend Zina for passing on this great, but only tangentially relevant quite:

When you see someone reading a book that you love, it's like a book recommending a person, rather than the other way round.

(I probably paraphrase，but who doesn't?)

So back to Micheal Herr. He was in his twenties when he was sent out as a Vietnam correspondent by Esquire magazine, joining the hundreds of other journalists and photographers from all over the world who were covering the war. He went in 67, returned in 69 and didn't publish Dispatches until 1977. The implication in the book is that there were other things he had to settle first, mainly what war does to you.

He describes the daily round of going out by helicopter to forward bases and talking to the soldiers there about what had happened and what they had done. Missions, ambushes, patrols, boredom, losing friends, killing other combatants, sometimes people who were not combatants.

The actual detail of a soldier's life ( or a journalist's life for that matter) is not his main interest. He is most interested, and eloquently so, in what war does to your brain, your heart, your soul. When he describes that eventually-familiar look in a 19-year-old's eyes that show he is now old and can never be young again, you feel for both of them. The soldier and the observer. 

He does not flinch from describing the terrifying things that war can bring out in someone's character, US or VC, or any of us for that matter. And when describing the other journalists out there, including himself, he does not dodge the dark fact that they enjoy it, and went there because they did.

But the book is humane and eloquent, and genuinely loving towards all the humans who are chewed up in the machinery of war. And it is a good book to have to hand when you consider any future military action that we consider unavoidable. No future war will be better than Vietnam. The music and drugs may differ, but the damage, physical and mental, will be the same. It had better be worth it.