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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
If you're looking to fully get a grasp at the strange terribleness of the Vietnam War, Herr's work is a masterpiece. When reading this book you get an uncanny association with characters and moods exhibited in Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. This makes sense: Herr co-wrote the former and this book inspired the latter.
If you don't know a lot about the Vietnam war you should do some research prior to reading this book... It will definitely make the book easier to understand. This is one of the best books I've read ever, and certainly one of the best about Vietnam.
Really powerful nonfiction account of the Vietnam War. Intense.
Though by no means the central point or theme of this book (which was something like war is hell) the problems of the free press struggling against direction from business, government leadership, and military is notable particularly because of our current political problems.
Though by no means the central point or theme of this book (which was something like war is hell) the problems of the free press struggling against direction from business, government leadership, and military is notable particularly because of our current political problems.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
"I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."
Michael Herr takes a complicated, fucked up war and tells of something both more and less than what anyone could imagine, let alone write. In the same way the The Things They Carried tells us that all war stories are true and none are true, Dispatches speaks of the impossible mingling of beauty and horror, love and hate that characterizes any telling of Vietnam that goes beyond dry history. Perhaps of any war.
Michael Herr takes a complicated, fucked up war and tells of something both more and less than what anyone could imagine, let alone write. In the same way the The Things They Carried tells us that all war stories are true and none are true, Dispatches speaks of the impossible mingling of beauty and horror, love and hate that characterizes any telling of Vietnam that goes beyond dry history. Perhaps of any war.
I could say this is one of the best memoirs I've read. I could also say it is one of the most brilliant books on war I've ever read. It would probably be easier, however, for me to just acknowledge I haven't read many books that have the power, the poetry, the intensity, the vividness, the bathos and the pathos that Herr pushes through every single page of this amazing book. This is a book that haunts you hard while you read it and resonates both the horror of war and the surreal qualities of war and the men who fight it.
I think this book gave us the narrative of Vietnam as green hell full of invisible enemies. It's good and evocative, although we've all heard the story many times now. I'd give it 3.5 stars if I could.
"The moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit."
Full of detail, intense detail, detail that you don't want, that comes at you harshly with poetic vigour. You read "Dispatches" with your chest tight, getting lost in this theory of mind, appreciating the pain in attempting to reconcile contempt for the war with a correspondent's longing to be out there in the havoc, a soldier's love for the service. It's surreal ("we'd stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights"), there's humour you read not with a grin but in horror. Even if it makes you uncomfortable, you can't stop, because the prose is endless, thrilling, the ink spilt as if it paints the scene of some emotionally fuelled, gangster massacre, which I suppose is exactly what it does.
"Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace ... Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like a toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere."
"It would seem fitting, ordained, that they would live in the highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the night-time cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off."
Michael Herr met an English photographer. He scavenges from scenes the right compositions, turning to subjects who by now are so exhausted that they barely see him standing there, shooting for the Sunday Times back home.
"'Sometimes one feels like such a bastard,' he said."
Full of detail, intense detail, detail that you don't want, that comes at you harshly with poetic vigour. You read "Dispatches" with your chest tight, getting lost in this theory of mind, appreciating the pain in attempting to reconcile contempt for the war with a correspondent's longing to be out there in the havoc, a soldier's love for the service. It's surreal ("we'd stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights"), there's humour you read not with a grin but in horror. Even if it makes you uncomfortable, you can't stop, because the prose is endless, thrilling, the ink spilt as if it paints the scene of some emotionally fuelled, gangster massacre, which I suppose is exactly what it does.
"Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace ... Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like a toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere."
"It would seem fitting, ordained, that they would live in the highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the night-time cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off."
Michael Herr met an English photographer. He scavenges from scenes the right compositions, turning to subjects who by now are so exhausted that they barely see him standing there, shooting for the Sunday Times back home.
"'Sometimes one feels like such a bastard,' he said."
An excellent book, but hard to know how to recommend it. It's horrifying in it's abstractness. Even when he's describing specific people and events, you realize it's all part of the way the war affected people, deadened them, zoned them out.
Here are a few quotes to close this out.
"There were more young, apolitically radical, wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam than anybody ever realized; between all of the grunts turning on and tripping out on the war and the substantial number of correspondents who were doing the same thing, it was an authentic subculture."
"You honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Few people ever cried more than once there, and if you’d used that up, you laughed; the young ones were so innocent and violent, so sweet and so brutal, beautiful killers."
"During my first month back I woke up one night and knew that my living room was full of dead Marines. It actually happened three or four times, after a dream I was having those nights (the kind of dream one never had in Vietnam), and that first time it wasn’t just some holding dread left by the dream, I knew they were there, so that after I’d turned on the light by my bed and smoked a cigarette I lay there for a moment thinking that I’d have to go out soon and cover them."
Here are a few quotes to close this out.
"There were more young, apolitically radical, wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam than anybody ever realized; between all of the grunts turning on and tripping out on the war and the substantial number of correspondents who were doing the same thing, it was an authentic subculture."
"You honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Few people ever cried more than once there, and if you’d used that up, you laughed; the young ones were so innocent and violent, so sweet and so brutal, beautiful killers."
"During my first month back I woke up one night and knew that my living room was full of dead Marines. It actually happened three or four times, after a dream I was having those nights (the kind of dream one never had in Vietnam), and that first time it wasn’t just some holding dread left by the dream, I knew they were there, so that after I’d turned on the light by my bed and smoked a cigarette I lay there for a moment thinking that I’d have to go out soon and cover them."