Dispatches

Product Information

If you want a traditional historical context for the war, read something like Stanley Karnow's Vietnam first. If you want to understand the mentality that led us there, read Graham Greene's lovely novel, The Quiet American. But, if you want a poetic, impeccably crafted, heartfelt, passionately wrought, deeply thoughtful, uncompromising, and complex emotional prismatic canvas of war and its mad surreality, this is your first stop. The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War” ( The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. Corrispondente di guerra per Esquire al seguito delle truppe americane durante la guerra in Vietnam, Michael Herr racconta in questo libro dalle dimensioni tutto sommato contenute (poco più di 250 pagine) ciò che ha visto, che ha condiviso, che ha provato in un anno e mezzo trascorso al fronte (dal 1967 al 1969).

Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. After the publication of Dispatches in 1977, Herr worked on the legendary film Apocalypse Nowin 1979. Both the film and novel offer a unique and valuable portrayal of the Vietnam War that differs greatly from traditional accounts. For these contributions, Dispatches remains an essential work of the Vietnam era. Update this section!After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories...where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information." The short book is filled with “you can’t make this shit up” moments that are too numerous and too spot-on to recite, but I’ll throw out one or two, starting with this gem: 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. Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language.

The whole book was supposed to help the Marines – the ones that were going to be forgotten as soon as the war ended – to live in the memory of others. Herr’s stories were not about heroes, they were about every guy – either good or bad – he met on his long way. Sometimes sad, sometimes disturbing, sometimes optimistic, sometimes absolutely mad and heartless, those men couldn’t be deluded into believing that everything was going to be fine. They found themselves trapped in Hell and there was no one to help them. Michael Herr: ‘Sitting in Saigon,’ he wrote ‘was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.’ Photograph: Jane Bown A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary. In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words. At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon. Dispatches is a litany of horrible, terrible things written about gorgeously. It is immediately immersive and stays that way unwaveringly to the last word. It is un-putdownable, a masterpiece, even in those moments were some of the jaded periodisms now come off as slightly precious. I can't imagine there being a better book affording an on-the-ground feel for the war and the cross-sections of perceptions and the disconnects between the regular grunts and the euphemism-spewing generals, the kind who called a typhoon "an advantageous change in the weather."Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country. Join the former Guardian columnist for a wide-ranging conversation - from his frontline view if these big political moments, to his memories of getting drunk with Maya Angelou in her limousine and discussing politics with Stormzy, to why he believes all statues of historical figures – from Rosa Parks to Cecil Rhodes – should be taken down. He will be talking to Guardian writer Nesrine Malik. After publishing Dispatches, Herr disclosed that parts of the book were invented, and that it would be better for it not to be regarded as journalism. In a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Times, he admitted that the characters Day Tripper and Mayhew in the book are "totally fictional characters" and went on to say: After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and the images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you’d hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they’d died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, “Put yourself in my place.”

The book roars out of the gate with a great opening. The longest section, on Khe Sanh, is classic Vietnam lit. Sometimes it's tough to even read in bed at night. Disturbing shit. And the commanders. My God. George McGovern had them right: "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in." Which is why George McGovern won a sum total of one state when he ran for president. The Republic of Massachusetts. Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine.It all happened so fast, as they say, as everyone who has ever been through it has always said; we were sitting around listening to what we thought were Tet fireworks coming from the town, and then coming closer until we weren't stoned anymore, until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet...telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn't remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy. Whoa. That brings up two more words. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)? Many extremist groups looked on western journalists as legitimate targets, for kidnapping at least, and at one point Walsh is saved by the man he has hired a car from. Overhearing a group of men discussing the logistics of grabbing Walsh, the rental man bundled the Irish journalist into the vehicle and sped away. Islam or the army were supposed to be the glue holding the place together. Yet both seemed to be tearing it apart Declan Walsh First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. Dispatches is a New Journalism book by Michael Herr that describes the author's experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the first pieces of American literature that portrayed the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War for American readers.