Thu 12 Sep 2024
MICHAEL HERR – Dispatches. Knopf, hardcover, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1978, 1981. Several other reprint editions.
Esquire dispatched Michael Herr to Vietnam at the height of the conflict. He got carte blanche to write whatever he wanted however he wanted.
So Herr embedded himself on dangerous missions, hung out at Khe Sanh with the enlisted men. Befriending Errol Flynn’s son Sean, a war photographer, taking all the drugs the enlisted men took. Matching them drink for drink. Dangerous mission by dangerous mission. Digging the adrenaline rush of danger, the truth brisk tearing against your face in the crosswinds of bullshit pontifications by headquarters. Painting a version of reality for the TV audiences back home that had nothing to do with the experience of the men on the ground. And that was the only truth Herr and Flynn were interested in.
Herr contributed to both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. And if you ‘enjoyed’ those, I’d recommend Dispatches for some more of the same thing. But a bit more intense, if anything. At least for me. A book is about as direct as you can get to actually sharing another’s thoughts and experiences. A movie has to go thru a kagillion producers, a director, other writers, editors, etc, only then to be further interpreted by actors and cinematographers and lighting and makeup artists and projectionists and laddyladdydoodledah. So you get a mediated experience from what the author really went thru or imagined.
So yeah. If you wanna see and hear what it was like for ordinary American infantrymen in Vietnam, scribbled down in a notebook at the very moment when the shit was going down, this is it. Unfiltered, fully caffeinated, and 200 proof.
September 12th, 2024 at 4:25 pm
Michael Herr’s Wikipedia page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Herr
The first paragraph says:
Michael David Herr (April 13, 1940 – June 23, 2016) was an American writer and war correspondent, known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called “the best book to have been written about the Vietnam War” by fellow author C.D.B. Bryan in his review for The New York Times Book Review. Novelist John le Carré called it “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.”
September 12th, 2024 at 10:22 pm
Herr’s voice and the psychedelic, nearly stream-of-consciousness manner in which he reports his experiences to the reader do make a singular reading experience.
Still …surprising book to find reviewed on MysteryFile? Oh well.
I’ve always ranked it somewhere in my “best-hundred-books-of-all-time” list (a shelf for any title of any kind ever published, no ranking by genre). Pretty impressive feat.
It also boasts a spot somewhere in my “top-twentyfive-fave-nonfiction” shelf.
In terms of Vietnam fiction, I vote for O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato”.
Nothing else comes to mind at the moment.
September 13th, 2024 at 3:11 am
Lazy,
To me, ‘hardboiled’ lit transcends genre limitations. What’s interesting to me is to see how the hardboiled style of writing has found its way beyond the detective story into mainstream fiction (Hemingway, O’Hara, Steinbeck), hobo lit (Tully, Jack black, Kromer), proletarian lit, war memoirs, jazz autobiographies, westerns, poetry, prison memoirs, etc. Give me hardboiled prose in any genre and you’ll be seeing me reviewing it here as long as Steve allows it while I keep plummeting deeper down this particular rabbit hole I’ve grown rather fond of. There’s only so much Hammett and Chandler out there. At some point the hardboiled reader either faces dilution of quality writing within the detective genre or branches out to hardboiled masterpieces beyond the genre. Like Dispatches, for instance.
September 13th, 2024 at 6:42 am
Lotta treasures hidden in these reviews. Hope they continue.
This is where I first heard about B. Traven’s ‘Death Ship’, which went straight into my dozen-fave-novels tier. Finds like that are getting rarer and rarer.
September 13th, 2024 at 6:57 am
Definitely one of the top 3 or 5 Vietnam-related books I’ve ever read. Yeah, I was surprised – but not disappointed – to see it here too.
September 13th, 2024 at 7:35 pm
“Phantom Over Vietnam” by John Trotti. Another must-read nonfict memoir. Less sweeping in scope than Herr but the writing itself has that same razor fineness. Donno if one would say ‘hard-boiled’ but you are in the seat of that machine with him. My fave work of ‘aeronautical’ writing. Similar to Elleston Trevor (in fict).
September 13th, 2024 at 9:51 pm
Superb book written in what became the American voice so often copied around the globe today. Herr and O’Brien probably wrote the best books to come out of the conflict.
Sean Flynn, or at least a fictional stand in, also features in a novel by Jean Larteguy (author of THE LOST COMMAND).
September 14th, 2024 at 11:52 am
For anyone drawn to this kind of thing, the primary source novel for FULL METAL JACKET, THE SHORT-TIMERS by Gustav Hasford, is worth the look…Robert Mason (not my father, also a RM)’s Vietnam War memoir CHICKENHAWK (and perhaps his military sf novel SOLO) might also be within one’s remit. For that matter, Frederik Pohl was apparently integral to getting THE SHORT-TIMERS into print, as Hasford went through the Clarion workshop primarily for sf/fantasy writers.
September 15th, 2024 at 5:36 am
@7: Really? What novel? His most famous novel about Indochina, “Les Centurions”, was set in the 1950s, and written in 1960, long before Flynn went to Vietnam.
September 15th, 2024 at 10:49 am
@9: Presumed Dead. https://archive.org/details/presumeddeadnove00lart