Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  At first, I got it all mixed up, I didn’t understand and I felt sorry for myself, misjudged. “Well fuck you too,” I’d think. “It could have been me just as easily, I take chances too, can’t you see that?” And then I realized that that was exactly what it was all about, it explained itself as easily as that, another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way.

  “You guys are crazy!” that Marine had said, and I know that when we flew off of Mutter’s Ridge that afternoon he stood there for a long time and watched us out of sight with the same native loathing he’d shown us before, turning finally to whoever was around, saying it maybe to himself, getting out what I’d actually heard said once when a jeepload of correspondents had just driven away, leaving me there alone, one rifleman turning to another and giving us all his hard, cold wish:

  “Those fucking guys,” he’d said. “I hope they die.”

  II

  Name me someone that’s not a parasite,

  And I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.

  —BOB DYLAN, “Visions of Johanna”

  I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don’t know what a media freak is until you’ve seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn’t done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn’t let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras. A lot of correspondents weren’t much better. We’d all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. The first few times that I got fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence, only moved over to another medium; some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it.

  A lot of things had to be unlearned before you could learn anything at all, and even after you knew better you couldn’t avoid the ways in which things got mixed, the war itself with those parts of the war that were just like the movies, just like The Quiet American or Catch-22 (a Nam standard because it said that in a war everybody thinks that everybody else is crazy), just like all that combat footage from television (“We’re taking fire from the treeline!” “Where?” “There!” “Where?” “Over there!” “Over WHERE?” “Over THERE!!” Flynn heard that go on for fifteen minutes once; we made it an epiphany), your vision blurring, images jumping and falling as though they were being received by a dropped camera, hearing a hundred horrible sounds at once—screams, sobs, hysterical shouting, a throbbing inside your head that threatened to take over, quavering voices trying to get the orders out, the dulls and sharps of weapons going off (Lore; When they’re near they whistle, when they’re really near they crack), the thud of helicopter rotors, the tinny, clouded voice coming over the radio, “Uh, that’s a Rog, we mark your position, over.” And out. Far out.

  That feedback stalked you all over Vietnam, it often threatened you with derangement, but somehow it always left you a little saner than you had any right to expect. Sometimes its intrusions could be subtle and ferocious. One afternoon during the battle for Hue, I was with David Greenway, a correspondent for Time, and we found it necessary to move from one Marine position to another. We were directly across from the south wall of the Citadel and airstrikes had dropped much of it down into the street, bringing with it torn, stinking portions of some North Vietnamese who had been dug in there. We had to make a run of something like 400 meters up that street, and we knew that the entire way was open to sniper fire, either from the standing sections of the wall on our right or from the rooftops on our left. When we’d run to our present position an hour earlier, David had gone first, and it was my turn now. We were crouching among some barren shrubbery with the Marines, and I turned to the guy next to me, a black Marine, and said, “Listen, we’re going to cut out now. Will you cover us?” He gave me one of those amazed, penetrating looks. “You can go out there if you want to, baby, but shee-it …” and he began putting out fire. David and I ran all doubled over, taking cover every forty meters or so behind boulder-sized chunks of smashed wall, and halfway through it I started to laugh, looking at David and shaking my head. David was the most urbane of correspondents, a Bostonian of good family and impeccable education, something of a patrician even though he didn’t care anything about it. We were pretty good friends, and he was willing to take my word for it that there was actually something funny, and he laughed too.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Oh man, do you realize that I just asked that guy back there to cover us?”

  He looked at me with one eyebrow faintly cocked. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you did. Oh, isn’t that marvelous!”

  And we would have laughed all the way up the street, except that toward the end of it we had to pass a terrible thing, a house that had been collapsed by the bombing, bringing with it a young girl who lay stretched out dead on top of some broken wood. The whole thing was burning, and the flames were moving closer and closer to her bare feet. In a few minutes they were going to reach her, and from our concealment we were going to have to watch it. We agreed that anything was better than that and we finished the run, but only after David spun around, dropped to one knee and took a picture of it.

  A few days after that, David’s file from Hue appeared in Time, worked over into that uni-prose which all news magazines and papers maintained, placed somewhere among five or six other Vietnam stories that had come in that week from the five or six other reporters Time kept in Vietnam. About five months after that, a piece I’d written about the battle appeared in Esquire, turning up like some lost dispatch from the Crimea. I saw it in print for the first time on the day that we returned from Mutter’s Ridge, while the issue of Time which carried David’s story was on sale in Saigon and Danang within a week of the events described. (I remember that issue in particular because General Giap was on the cover and the South Vietnamese would not allow it to be sold until a black X was scrawled over each copy, disfiguring but hardly concealing Giap’s face. People were doing weird things that Tet.) What all of this means is that, no matter how much I love the sound of it, there’s no way that I can think of myself as a war correspondent without stopping to acknowledge the degree to which it’s pure affectation. I never had to run back to any bureau office to file (or, worse, call it in from Danang over the knotted clot of military wires, “Working, operator, I said working, hello, working.… Oh, you moron, working!”). I never had to race out to the Danang airfield to get my film on the eight-o’clock scatback to Saigon; there wasn’t any bureau, there wasn’t any film, my ties to New York were as slight as my assignment was vague. I wasn’t really an oddity in the press corps, but I was a peculiarity, an extremely privileged one. (An oddity was someone like the photographer John Schneider, who fixed a white flag to his handlebars and took a bike from the top of Hill 881 North over to Hill 881 South during a terrible battle, in what came to be known as Schneider’s Ride; or the Korean cameraman who had spent four years in Spain as a matador, who spoke exquisite, limpid Castilian and whom we called El Taikwando; or the Portuguese novelist who arrived at Khe Sanh in sports clothes, carrying a plaid sui
tcase, under the impression that field gear could be bought there.)

  I’d run into Bernie Weinraub in Saigon, on his way to The New York Times bureau carrying a bunch of papers in his hand. He’d be coming back from a meeting with some of “the beautiful people” of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office, and he’d say, “I’m having a low-grade nervous breakdown right now. You can’t really see it, but it’s there. After you’ve been here awhile, you’ll start having them too,” laughing at the little bit of it that was true as much as at the part of it that had become our running joke. Between the heat and the ugliness and the pressures of filing, the war out there and the JUSPAO flacks right here, Saigon could be overwhelmingly depressing, and Bernie often looked possessed by it, so gaunt and tired and underfed that he could have brought out the Jewish mother in a Palestinian guerrilla.

  “Let’s have a drink,” I’d say.

  “No, no, I can’t. You know how it is, we on the Times …” He’d start to laugh. “I mean, we have to file every day. It’s a terrible responsibility, there’s so little time.… I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  But it was fine for me to laugh; he was going back to work, to write a story that would be published in New York hours later, and I was going across the street to the terrace bar of the Continental Hotel for a drink, possibly to write a few leisurely notes, probably not. I was spared a great deal, and except for a small handful of men who took their professional responsibilities very solemnly, no one ever held that against me. Whatever they came to know about the war was one thing; I know how they tried to get it into their stories, how generous they were as teachers and how embittering it all could become.

  Because they worked in the news media, for organizations that were ultimately reverential toward the institutions involved: the Office of the President, the Military, America at war and, most of all, the empty technology that characterized Vietnam. There is no way of remembering good friends without remembering the incredible demands put on them from offices thousands of miles away. (Whenever the news chiefs and network vice-presidents and foreign editors would dress up in their Abercrombie & Fitch combat gear and come by for a firsthand look, a real story would develop, Snow In The Tropics, and after three days of high-level briefings and helicopter rides, they’d go home convinced that the war was over, that their men in the field were damned good men but a little too close to the story.) Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a Command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an Administration that believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space. It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them. The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air. The jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive. And after enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GI’s had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.

  If you ever saw stories written by Peter Kann, William Touhy, Tom Buckley, Bernie Weinraub, Peter Arnett, Lee Lescaze, Peter Braestrup, Charles Mohr, Ward Just or a few others, you’d know that most of what the Mission wanted to say to the American public was a psychotic vaudeville; that Pacification, for example, was hardly anything more than a swollen, computerized tit being forced upon an already violated population, a costly, valueless program that worked only in press conferences. Yet in the year leading up to the Tet Offensive (“1967—Year of Progress” was the name of an official year-end report) there were more stories about Pacification than there were about combat—front page, prime time, just as though it was really happening.

  This was all part of a process which everyone I knew came grudgingly to think of as routine, and I was free of it. What an incredible hassle it would have been, having to run out to the airport to watch the Mayor of Los Angeles embrace Mayor Cua of Saigon. (L.A. had declared Saigon its Sister City, dig it, and Yorty was in town to collect. If there had been no newspapers or television, Cua and Yorty never would have met.) I never had to cover luncheons given for members of the Philippine Civic Action Group or laugh woodenly while the Polish delegate to the International Control Commission lobbed a joke on me. I never had to follow the Command to the field for those interminable get-togethers with the troops. (“Where are you from, son?” “Macon, Georgia, Sir.” “Real fine. Are you getting your mail okay, plenty of hot meals?” “Yes, Sir.” “That’s fine, where you from, son?” “Oh, I don’t know, God, I don’t know, I don’t know!” “That’s fine, real fine, where you from, son?”) I never had to become familiar with that maze of government agencies and sub-agencies, I never had to deal with the Spooks. (They were from the real Agency, the CIA. There was an endless Vietnam game played between the grunts and the Spooks, and the grunts always lost.) Except to pick up my mail and get my accreditation renewed, I never had to frequent JUSPAO unless I wanted to. (That office had been created to handle press relations and psychological warfare, and I never met anyone there who seemed to realize that there was a difference.) I could skip the daily briefings, I never had to cultivate Sources. In fact, my concerns were so rarefied that I had to ask other correspondents what they ever found to ask Westmoreland, Bunker, Komer and Zorthian. (Barry Zorthian was the head of JUSPAO; for more than five years he was Information.) What did anybody ever expect those people to say? No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews? (My own interview with General Westmoreland had been hopelessly awkward. He’d noticed that I was accredited to Esquire and asked me if I planned to be doing “humoristical” pieces. Beyond that, very little was really said. I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, and the interview didn’t happen.) I honestly wanted to know what the form was for those interviews, but some of the reporters I’d ask would get very officious, saying something about “Command postures,” and look at me as though I was insane. It was probably the kind of look that I gave one of them when he asked me once what I found to talk about with the grunts all the time, expecting me to confide (I think) that I found them as boring as he did.

  And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work,
met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter. If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they’d go out and get it. (“Would you have voted for him?” “Yeah, he was a real good man, a real good man. He was, uh, young.” “Who will you vote for now?” “Wallace, I guess.”) They’d even gather troop reflections on the choice of Paris as the site of the peace talks. (“Paris? I dunno, sure, why not? I mean, they ain’t gonna hold ’em in Hanoi, now are they?”), but they’d know how funny that was, how wasteful, how profane. They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

  There was a song by the Mothers of Invention called “Trouble Comin’ Every Day” that became a kind of anthem among a group of around twenty young correspondents. We’d play it often during those long night gatherings in Saigon, the ashtrays heaped over, ice buckets full of warm water, bottles empty, the grass all gone, the words running, “You know I watch that rotten box until my head begin to hurt, From checkin’ out the way the newsmen say they get the dirt” (bitter funny looks passing around the room), “And if another woman driver gets machine-gunned from her seat, They’ll send some joker with a Brownie and you’ll see it all complete” (lip-biting, flinching, nervous laughter), “And if the place blows up, we’ll be the first to tell, ’Cause the boys we got downtown are workin’ hard and doin’ swell …” That wasn’t really about us, no, we were so hip, and we’d laugh and wince every time we heard it, all of us, wire-service photographers and senior correspondents from the networks and special-assignment types like myself, all grinning together because of what we knew together, that in back of every column of print you read about Vietnam there was a dripping, laughing death-face; it hid there in the newspapers and magazines and held to your television screens for hours after the set was turned off for the night, an afterimage that simply wanted to tell you at last what somehow had not been told.