Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  In any other war, they would have made movies about us too, Dateline: Hell!, Dispatch from Dong Ha, maybe even A Scrambler to the Front, about Tim Page, Sean Flynn and Rick Merron, three young photographers who used to ride in and out of combat on Hondas. But Vietnam is awkward, everybody knows how awkward, and if people don’t even want to hear about it, you know they’re not going to pay money to sit there in the dark and have it brought up. (The Green Berets doesn’t count. That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.) So we have all been compelled to make our own movies, as many movies as there are correspondents, and this one is mine. (One day at the battalion aid station in Hue a Marine with minor shrapnel wounds in his legs was waiting to get on a helicopter, a long wait with all of the dead and badly wounded going out first, and a couple of sniper rounds snapped across the airstrip, forcing us to move behind some sandbagging. “I hate this movie,” he said, and I thought, “Why not?”) My movie, my friends, my colleagues. But meet them in context:

  There was a ridge called Mutter’s Ridge that ran the crest of one of those DMZ hills which the Americans usually named according to height in meters, Hill Three Hundred Whatever. The Marines had been up there since early morning, when Kilo Company and four correspondents were choppered into a sparse landing zone on the highest rise of the ridge. If this had been an Army operation, we would have been digging now, correspondents too, but the Marines didn’t do that, their training taught them more about fatal gesture than it did about survival. Everyone was saying that Charlie was probably just over there on the next hill scoping on us, but the grunts were keeping it all in the open, walking out along the ridge “coordinating,” setting up positions and cutting out a proper lz with battery-powered saws and chunks of explosive. Every few minutes one or another of them would shag down to the spot below the lz where the correspondents were sitting and warn us indifferently about the next blast, saying, “Uh, listen, there’s fire in the hole, so you guys wanna just turn your backs and sort of cover over your heads?” He’d hang in there for a moment to give us a good look, and then run back up to the lz site to tell the others about us.

  “Hey, see them four guys there? Them’re reporters.”

  “Bullshit, reporters.”

  “Okay, motherfucker, go on down and see. Next time we blast.”

  There were some Marines stretched out a few feet from us, passing around war comics and talking, calling each other Dude and Jive, Lifer and Shitkick and Motherfucker, touching this last with a special grace, as though it were the tenderest word in their language. A suave black grunt, identified on his helmet cover as LOVE CHILD, was studying an exhausted copy of Playboy, pausing to say, “Oh … man! She can sure come sit on my face anytime. Any … time … at … all.” But none of them were talking to us yet, they were sort of talking for us, trying to make us out, maintaining that odd delicacy of theirs that always broke down sooner or later. It was like a ritual, all the preliminary forms had to be observed and satisfied, and it wasn’t simply because they were shy. As far as any of them knew, we were crazy, maybe even dangerous. It made sense: They had to be here, they knew that. We did not have to be here, and they were sure enough of that too. (The part that they never realized until later was that our freedom of movement was a door that swung both ways; at that very moment, the four of us were giving each other that Nothing Happening look and talking about getting out.) A GI would walk clear across a firebase for a look at you if he’d never seen a correspondent before because it was like going to see the Geek, and worth the walk.

  Besides, there were four of us sitting there in a loose professional knot, there was another one flying in the command helicopter trying to get a long view of the operation, and a sixth, AP photographer Dana Stone, was walking up the hill now with a platoon that had been chosen to scout the trail. It was one thing for a lone reporter to join an outfit before an operation because the outfit, if it was a company or larger, could absorb him and the curiosity that his presence always set working, and when the operation was over most of the troops would never even know that he’d been along. But when six correspondents turned up on the eve of an operation, especially when it fell during a long period of light contact, the effect was so complicated that the abiding ambivalence of all troops and commanders toward all reporters didn’t even begin to explain it. Everyone from the colonel to the lowest-ranking grunt felt a new importance about what he was going into, and to all appearances, as far as they were in touch with it, they were glad to see you. But our presence was also unnerving, picking at layers of fear that they might never have known about otherwise. (“Why us? I mean, six of those bastards, where the hell are we going?”) When it came all the way down to this, even the poorest-connected freelancer had the power on him, a power which only the most pompous and unfeeling journalists ever really wanted, throwing weird career scares into the staff and laying a cutting edge against each Marine’s gut estimates of his own survival. Then, it didn’t matter that we were dressed exactly as they were and would be going exactly where they were going; we were as exotic and as fearsome as black magic, coming on with cameras and questions, and if we promised to take the anonymity off of what was about to happen, we were also there to watchdog the day. The very fact that we had chosen them seemed to promise the most awful kind of engagement, because they were all certain that war correspondents never wasted time. It was a joke we all dug.

  It was August now, when the heat in I Corps forgave nothing. That year the northern monsoons had been almost dry (so many stories had run the phrase “grim reminders of a rainless monsoon” that it became a standard, always good for a laugh), and across the raw spaces between hills you could see only the faintest traces of green in the valleys and draws, the hills rising from pale brown to sunbleached yellow and gaping like dark, dried sores wherever the winter airstrikes had torn their sides out. Very little had happened in this sector since early spring, when an odd disengagement had been effected at Khe Sanh and when a multi-division operation into the A Shau Valley had ended abruptly after two weeks, like a speech cut at mid-sentence. The A Shau held the North’s great supply depot, they had tanks and trucks and heavy anti-aircraft guns dug in there, and while the American Mission had made its reflexive claims of success for the operation, they were made for once without much enthusiasm, indicating that even the Command had to acknowledge the inviolability of that place. It was admitted at the time that a lot of our helicopters had been shot down, but this was spoken of as an expensive equipment loss, as though our choppers were crewless entities that held to the sky by themselves, spilling nothing more precious than fuel when they crashed.

  Between then and now, nothing larger than company-size sweeps had worked the western Z, generally without contact. Like all of the war’s quieter passages, the spring-summer lull had left everyone badly strung out, and a lot of spooky stories began going around, like the ones about NVA helicopters (a Marine patrol supposedly saw one touch down on the abandoned Marine base at Khe Sanh and wait while a dozen men got out and walked around the perimeter, “like they was just checking things out”). It had been a mild season for Vietnam correspondents too (the lull aside, home offices were beginning to make it clear to their Saigon bureaus that the story was losing the old bite, what with Johnson’s abdication, the spring assassinations and the coming elections), and we were either talking about how the Vietnam thing was really finished or bitching about getting shot at only to wind up on page nine. It was a good time to cruise the country, a day here and a week there, just hanging out with troops; a good time to make leisurely investigations into the smaller, darker pockets of the war. Now word had come down that a large mass of NVA was moving across the DMZ, possibly building for a new offensive against Hue, and battalions of the 5th Marines were deploying in rough conjunction with battalions of the 9th to find and kill them. It had the feel of what we always called a “good operation,” and the six of us had gone up for it.

  But there was nothin
g here now, no dreaded Cong, no shelling, no pictures for the wires, no stories for the files, no sign that anyone had been on this scalding ridge for at least six months. (A few miles north and a little east, a company of the 9th was in the middle of an evil firefight that would last until nightfall, leaving eleven of them dead and nearly thirty wounded, but we knew nothing about that now. If we had, we might possibly have made an effort at getting to it, some of us at least, explaining it later in cold professional terms and leaving all the other reasons unspoken, understood between us. If a Marine had ever expressed a similar impulse, we would probably have called him psychotic.) The only violence on Mutter’s Ridge was in the heat and whatever associations with that terrible winter you could take from the view, from Cam Lo, Route 9 into Khe Sanh, the Rockpile. A few more Marines had joined the group around us, but they were being cool, pausing to read the tags sewn on our fatigue shirts as though to themselves, but out loud, just to show us that they knew we were here.

  “Associated Press, yeah, and UPI, uh-huh, and Esquire, wow, they got a guy over here, what the fuck for, you tell ’em what we’re wearing? And—hey, man, what’s that supposed to be?” (Sean Flynn had only the words “Bao Chi” on his tags, Vietnamese for “journalist.”) “That’s pretty far out, what’s that, in case you’re captured or something?”

  Actually, Bao Chi was all the affiliation that Flynn needed or wanted in Vietnam, but he didn’t go into that. Instead, he explained that when he had first begun taking pictures here in 1965, most operations had been conducted by the South Vietnamese, and reporters would identify themselves this way so that they would not be mistaken for American advisors and shot by the ARVN during the routine hysteria of routine retreats.

  “Boy, if that ain’t just like the Slopes,” one of the Marines said, walking away from us.

  Flynn was cleaning his camera lens with a length of Australian sweat scarf that he always wore into the field, but the least movement sent up a fine-grained dust that seemed to hang there without resettling, giving the light a greasy quality and caking in the corners of your eyes. The Marines were looking hard at Flynn and you could see that he was blowing their minds, the way he blew minds all over Vietnam.

  He was (indeed) the Son of Captain Blood, but that didn’t mean much to the grunts since most of them, the young ones, had barely even heard of Errol Flynn. It was just apparent to anyone who looked at him that he was what the Marines would call “a dude who definitely had his shit together.” All four of us on the ridge looked more or less as though we belonged there; the AP’s John Lengle had covered every major Marine operation of the past eighteen months, Nick Wheeler of UPI had been around for two years, I’d had the better part of a year in now, we were all nearly young enough to be mistaken for grunts ourselves, but Flynn was special. We all had our movie-fed war fantasies, the Marines too, and it could be totally disorienting to have this outrageously glamorous figure intrude on them, really unhinging, like looking up to see that you’ve been sharing a slit trench with John Wayne or William Bendix. But you got used to that part of Flynn quickly.

  When he’d first arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1965, he had been considered news himself, and a lot of stories were written about his early trips into combat. Most of them managed to include all the clichés, all of them called him “swashbuckling.” There were still a lot of easy things to say about him, and a lot of people around who were more than willing to say them, but after you knew him all of that talk just depressed you. There were a number of serious (heavy) journalists who could not afford to admit that anyone who looked as good as Flynn looked could possibly have anything more going for him. They chose not to take him as seriously as they took themselves (which was fine with Sean), and they accused him of coming to Vietnam to play, as though the war was like Africa had been for him, or the South of France or one of the places he’d gone to make those movies that people were always judging him by. But there were a lot of people in Vietnam who were playing, more than the heavies cared to admit, and Flynn’s playing was done only on the most earnest levels. He wasn’t much different from the rest; he was deeply fascinated by war, by this war, but he admitted it, knew where he stood in it, and he behaved as though it was nothing to be ashamed of. It gave him a vision of Vietnam that was profound, black and definitive, a knowledge of its wildness that very few of his detractors would have understood. All of this was very obvious in his face, particularly the wildness, but those people only saw it as handsome, making you realize that, as a group, newspapermen were not necessarily any more observant or imaginative than accountants. Flynn moved on and found his friends among those who never asked him to explain himself, among the GI’s and the Apaches of the press corps, and he established his own celebrity there. (There would be occasional intrusions: embarrassingly deferential information officers, or a run-in with Colonel George Patton, Jr., who put him through one of those my-father-knew-your-father trials.) The grunts were always glad to see him. They’d call him “Seen,” a lot of them, and tell him that they’d caught one of his flicks on R&R in Singapore or Taiwan, something that only a grunt could bring up and get away with, since all of that was finished for Flynn, the dues-paying and the accommodations, and he didn’t like to talk about it. Sometime during his years in Vietnam, he realized that there really were people whom he cared for and could trust, it must have been a gift he’d never expected to have, and it made him someone who his father, on the best day he ever had, could have envied.

  It was still a little too soon for the Marines to just sit down and start talking, they would have to probe a little more first, and we were getting bored. By the time they had finished cutting the lz there was no cover left from the sun, and we were all anxious for the scouting platoon to reach the top so that we could get together with Dana Stone, put a little pressure on for a helicopter and get out. The trip back to the press center in Danang could take two hours or two days, depending on what was flying, but it was certain to go faster with Stone along because he had friends at every airfield and chopper pad in I Corps. Danang was Soul City for many of us, it had showers and drinks, flash-frozen air-freighted steaks, air-conditioned rooms and China Beach and, for Stone, a real home—a wife, a dog, a small house full of familiar possessions. Mutter’s Ridge had sickening heat, a rapidly vanishing water supply and boredom, so there really wasn’t any choice. Judging by the weathered, blackened bits of ammunition casing (theirs and ours) that littered the ground around us, the ridge also had a history, and Dana had told us something about it.

  Stone was a lapsed logger from Vermont (he always spoke about going back to that, especially after a bad day in the field, screw all this bullshit), twenty-five years old with sixty-year-old eyes set in deep behind wire-rimmed glasses, their shrewdness and experience almost lost in the lean anglings of his face. We knew for certain that he would be walking well ahead of the rest of the platoon on the trail, standard Dana and a break for the Marines, since he was easily the best-equipped man in the party for spotting booby traps or ambushes. But that had nothing to do with his being on point. Dana was the man in motion, he just couldn’t slow himself down; he was the smallest man on the trail, but his engines would drive him up it as though the incline ran the other way. GI’s who had forgotten his name would describe him for you as “that wiry little red-headed cat, crazy motherfucker, funny as a bastard,” and Stone was funny, making you pay for every laugh he gave you. Hard mischief was his specialty—a thumb stuck abruptly into your egg yolk at breakfast or your brandy at dinner, rocks lobbed onto the metal roof of your room at the press center, flaming trails of lighter fluid rampaging across the floor toward you, a can of ham and limas substituted for peaches in syrup when you were practically dying of thirst—all Dana’s way of saying hello, doing you good by doing you in. He’d wake you at dawn, shaking you violently and saying, “Listen, I need your glasses for just a minute, it’s really important,” splitting with them for an hour. He also took beautiful pictures (he cal
led them “snaps” in accordance with the wire-service ethic which said you must never reveal your pride in good work) and in almost three years as a combat photographer he’d spent more time on operations than anyone else I knew, getting his cameras literally blown off his back more than once but keeping otherwise unhurt. By now, there was nothing that could happen around him in the field that he hadn’t seen before, and if his joking was belligerent and even ghastly, you knew at least where it came from, saw the health that it carried. And that morning, waiting by the base-camp airstrip for the assault to begin, he started to tell us about the other time he’d been up on Mutter’s Ridge, in the days before it even had a name. It had been, in fact, two years ago to the day, he’d said, on that exact same ridge. He’d gone up there with the 9th that time, and they’d really stepped in deep shit. (It was true, we all knew it was true, he was doing it to us again, and a smile showed for just an instant on his face.) They had been pinned down on the ridge all night long without support or re-supply or medevac, and the casualties had been unbelievable, running somewhere around 70 percent. Flynn laughed and said, “Dana, you bastard,” but Stone would have gone on like that in his flat Vermont voice, telling it to those of us about to go up there as though it were nothing more than the history of a racehorse, except that he looked up and saw that we weren’t alone; a few of the guys from Kilo Company had come over to ask questions about our cameras or something, and they’d heard some of it. Stone turned a deep red, as he always did when he realized that he’d gone a little too far. “Aw, that was just a bunch of shit, I never even been near that ridge,” he said, and he pointed to me. “I was just trying to get him uptight because this is his last operation, and he’s already fucked up about it.” He laughed, but he was looking at the ground.