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msand3 's review for:
Dispatches
by Michael Herr
This is the kind of book written by and for insiders, while claiming to be just the opposite. The loosely-connected sections offer some occasionally interesting (if brief) profiles of people or places, interspaced with rambling essays on what it was like to be embedded in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the vignettes don’t reveal much depth or insight about either the soldiers, the correspondents, or the political quagmire (although the latter is strongly revealed when Herr describes his surreal -- and once again, very brief -- encounters with military brass and Westmoreland).
The one moment that struck me as a microcosm of this book is when the correspondents are listening to the Mothers of Invention song “Trouble Comin’ Everyday” with an ironic detachment that suggests they were “hip” enough (Herr’s word) to get the critique while simultaneously claiming that the song wasn’t really about people like them. Of course, it was precisely about them, and on some level they knew this. Herr attempts to walk this line in his reporting: he’s not just in the muck, but a part of it. And somehow he must then translate that into reportage. The problem is that he’s not in deep enough to have a true grunt’s insight, but he’s in too deep for the clarity of an outsider’s perspective. And so I was left with a hazy view of both perspectives. Perhaps one could argue that it was this “hazy” view that has made Dispatches a definitive book on Vietnam. But it seems to me that just such a conflict necessitated a work with more focus and clarity.
The one moment that struck me as a microcosm of this book is when the correspondents are listening to the Mothers of Invention song “Trouble Comin’ Everyday” with an ironic detachment that suggests they were “hip” enough (Herr’s word) to get the critique while simultaneously claiming that the song wasn’t really about people like them. Of course, it was precisely about them, and on some level they knew this. Herr attempts to walk this line in his reporting: he’s not just in the muck, but a part of it. And somehow he must then translate that into reportage. The problem is that he’s not in deep enough to have a true grunt’s insight, but he’s in too deep for the clarity of an outsider’s perspective. And so I was left with a hazy view of both perspectives. Perhaps one could argue that it was this “hazy” view that has made Dispatches a definitive book on Vietnam. But it seems to me that just such a conflict necessitated a work with more focus and clarity.