Dispatches

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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. I will say that Dispatches is not an easy book to summarize or to draw cheap lessons from. It is about the war in Vietnam, of course, and it is a condemnation of the war, but like all excellent nonfiction, it is not a solution but a complication. There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’”

Ao descrever o que sentia durante um bombardeamento ou tiroteio, Herr diz-nos que era um sentimento confuso e torrencial, e que, depois de muito pensar, percebeu que era o mesmo que tinha sentido da primeira vez que despira uma rapariga. «A guerra nunca era aborrecida.»I’d been talking to Sergeant Dang about the Palace and about the line of emperors. When we stalled one last time at the foot of the moat bridge, I’d been asking him the name of the last emperor to occupy the throne. He smiled and shrugged, not so much because he didn’t know, more like it didn’t matter. “Major Trong is emperor now,” he said, and gunned the jeep into the Palace grounds. That all changed when a pious general, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, seized power in 1977, hanging the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and opening the door to a “harsh unyeielding brand of Islam” imported from Saudi Arabia, whose princes and clerics Zia allowed to seed his country with madrassas. 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.

Some of Herr’s best and most quotable passages read like hallucinations, and some simply are just that: descriptions of being stoned on the front line, like a character in Apocalypse Now, a film classic whose script Herr also contributed to:There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, “How can you shoot women and children?” and he’d answered, “It’s easy, you just don’t lead ’em so much.” You were there in a place where you didn't belong, where things were glimpsed for which you would have to pay and where things went unglimpsed for which you would also have to pay, a place where they didn't play with the mystery but killed you straight off for trespassing.” Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo.

And, one more: casualties. It has at the root of the word “casual,” but what could be less casual than asking young people to die for the sake of stupid wars?Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar. A cominciare dall’assoluta consapevolezza che nessuno sa contro chi e per cosa sta combattendo, dalla completa coscienza che sia tutto inutile e folle. We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher. 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. 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.