Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  “I mean, you know that, it just can’t be done!” We both shrugged and laughed, and Page looked very thoughtful for a moment. “The very idea!” he said. “Ohhh, what a laugh! Take the bloody glamour out of bloody war!”

  Breathing Out

  I am going home. I have seen a lot of Vietnam in 18 months.

  May Lord help this place. DEROS 10 Sept 68.

  Mendoza was here. 12 Sept 68. Texas.

  Color me gone. (Mendoza is my buddy.)

  Release graffiti on the walls at Tan Son Nhut airport, where Flynn, almost overtly serious for a second, gave me a kind of blessing (“Don’t piss it all away at cocktail parties”) and Page gave me a small ball of opium to eat on the flight back; stoned dreaming through Wake, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York and the hallucination of home. Opium space, a big round O, and time outside of time, a trip that happened in seconds and over years; Asian time, American space, not clear whether Vietnam was east or west of center, behind me or somehow still ahead. “Far’s I’m concerned, this one’s over the day I get home,” a grunt had told us a few weeks before, August 1968, we’d been sitting around after an operation talking about the end of the war. “Don’t hold your breath,” Dana said.

  Home: twenty-eight years old, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda. Mine opened out into war and loss. There’d been nothing happening there that hadn’t already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in the World. I hadn’t been anywhere, I’d performed half an act; the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly.

  It seemed now that everybody knew someone who had been in Vietnam and didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe they just didn’t know how. People I’d meet would take it for granted that I was articulate, ask me if I minded, but usually the questions were political, square, innocent, they already knew what they wanted to hear, I’d practically forgotten the language. Some people found it distasteful or confusing if I told them that, whatever else, I’d loved it there too. And if they just asked, “What was your scene there?” I wouldn’t know what to say either, so I’d say I was trying to write about it and didn’t want to dissipate it. But before you could dissipate it you had to locate it, Plant you now, dig you later: information printed on the eye, stored in the brain, coded over skin and transmitted by blood, maybe what they meant by “blood consciousness.” And transmitted over and over without letup on increasingly powerful frequencies until you either received it or blocked it out one last time, informational Death of a Thousand Cuts, each cut so precise and subtle you don’t even feel them accumulating, you just get up one morning and your ass falls off.

  There was a black grunt with the 9th Division who called himself the Entertainer. When I asked him why he said, “ ’Cause I rock and I roll,” and flipped the selector switch on his 16 back and forth between semi and full. He walked away, moving almost in two sections like his ass was stalking his chest, so that his dog tags flopped hard against him. He spun on his heel and did it backward for a few yards. Then he stopped and reached over his head. When he pulled his arm down a heavy rain came pouring in. “I been here so long I can call these motherfuckers in on the dime.” He put a lot of energy and care into his jive, it had made him a star in his unit, but he wasn’t just some feets-do-yo-stuff spade. So when he told me that he saw ghosts whenever they went on night patrol I didn’t laugh, and when he said that he’d started seeing his own out there I think I freaked a little. “Naw, that’s cool, that’s cool, motherfucker was behind me,” he said. “It’s when he goes and moves up in front that you’re livin’ in a world of hurt.” I tried to say that what he probably had seen was the phosphorescence that gathered around rotting tree trunks and sent pulsing light over the ground from one damp spot to another. “Crazy,” he said, and, “Later.”

  They were bulldozing a junction into Route 22 near Tay Ninh and the old Iron Triangle when the plows ran into some kind of VC cemetery. The bones started flying up out of the ground and forming piles beside the furrows, like one of those films from the concentration camps running backward. Instamatic City, guys racing like crazy with their cameras, taking snaps, grabbing bones for souvenirs. Maybe I should have taken one too; three hours later back in Saigon I wasn’t that sure whether I’d really seen it or not. While we were there and the war seemed separate from what we thought of as real life and normal circumstance, an aberration, we all took a bad flash sooner or later and usually more than once, like old acid backing up, residual psychotic reaction. Certain rock and roll would come in mixed with rapid fire and men screaming. Sitting over a steak in Saigon once I made nasty meat connections, rot and burning from the winter before in Hue. Worst of all, you’d see people walking around whom you’d watched die in aid stations and helicopters. The boy with the huge Adam’s apple and the wire-rimmed glasses sitting by himself at a table on the Continental terrace had seemed much more nonchalant as a dead Marine two weeks before at the Rockpile than he did now, wearing the red 1st Division patch, trying to order a Coke from the waiter while a couple of margouilla lizards chased each other up and down the white column behind his head. I thought for a second that I was going to faint when I saw him. After a fast second look I knew that he wasn’t a ghost or even a double, there actually wasn’t much resemblance at all, but by then my breath was gummed up in my throat and my face was cold and white, shake shake shake. “Nothing to worry about boy,” Page said. “Just your nineteenth nervous breakdown.”

  They were always telling you that you mustn’t forget the dead, and they were always telling you that you shouldn’t let yourself think about them too much. You couldn’t remain effective as a soldier or a reporter if you got all hung up on the dead, fell into patterns of morbid sensitivity, entered perpetual mourning. “You’ll get used to it,” people would say, but I never did, actually it got personal and went the other way.

  Dana used to do a far-out thing, he’d take pictures of us under fire and give them to us as presents. There’s one of me on the ramp of a Chinook at Cam Lo, only the blur of my right foot to show that I’m not totally paralyzed, twenty-seven pushing fifty, reaching back for my helmet and the delusion of cover. Behind me inside the chopper there’s a door gunner in a huge dark helmet, a corpse is laid out on the seat, and in front of me there’s a black Marine, leaning in and staring with raw raving fear toward the incoming rounds; all four of us caught there together while Dana crouched down behind the camera, laughing. “You fuck,” I said to him when he gave me the print, and he said, “I thought you ought to know what you look like.”

  I don’t have any pictures of Dana, but there’s not much chance I’ll forget what he looked like, that front-line face, he never got anything on film that he didn’t get on himself, after three years he’d turned into the thing he came to photograph. I have pictures of Flynn but none by him, he was in so deep he hardly bothered to take them after a while. Definitely off of media, Flynn; a war behind him already where he’d confronted and cleaned the wasting movie-star karma that had burned down his father. In so far as Sean had been acting out, he was a great actor. He said that the movies just swallowed you up, so he did it on the ground, and the ground swallowed him up (no one I ever knew could have dug it like you, Sean), he and Dana had gone off somewhere together since April 1970, biking into Cambodia, “presumed captured,” rumors and long silence, MIA to say the least.

  There it is, the grunts said, like this: sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back. The tailgate was half lowered as a platform to hold their legs and the boots that seemed to weigh a hundred pounds apiece now. Everyone was completely quiet as the truck hit a bad bump and the legs jerked up high and landed hard on the gate. “How about that shit,” someone said, and “Just like the motherfucker,” and “There it is.” Pure essence of Vietnam, not even stepped on once, you could spi
n it out into visions of laughing lucent skulls or call it just another body in a bag, say that it cut you in half for the harvest or came and took you under like a lover, nothing ever made the taste less strong; the moment of initiation where you get down and bite off the tongue of a corpse. “Good for your work,” Flynn would say.

  Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that’s a little history joke. Shove it along, dissolve your souvenirs: a pair of fatigues that started to fit about a week before I left, an ashtray from the Continental, a pile of snaps, like one of me on the top of a hill called Nui Kto, one of the Seven Sisters in the Delta, standing around with some Cambodian mercenaries (bandits actually, every squad carried pliers for pulling gold teeth), all looking like we’re having a great time waiting for the choppers to come and take us off, only way out; we had the entire base and the top, but everything in between was all full up with Viet Cong. A National Geographic map of Indochina with about a hundred pencil marks, every place I ever went there, dots and crosses and big crosses even, wherever I’d been in or near combat and my vanity had told me I’d pulled through, not “scathed”; attached to every mark and the complex of faces, voices and movements that gathered around each one. Real places, then real only in the distance behind me, faces and places sustaining serious dislocation, mind slip and memory play. When the map fell apart along the fold lines its spirit held together, it landed in safe but shaky hands and one mark was enough, the one at LZ Loon.

  At dark they finished the perimeter, doubled the guard and sent half the company out on patrols; a brand-new no-name Marine lz in the heart of Indian country. I slept like a morphine sleeper that night, not knowing which was awake or asleep, clocking the black triangle of the raised tent flap as it turned dark blue, fog white, sun yellow, and it felt okay to get up. Just before I flew back to Danang they named it LZ Loon, and Flynn said, “That’s what they ought to call the whole country,” a more particular name than Vietnam to describe the death space and the life you found inside it. When we rebuilt Loon on China Beach that day we laughed so hard we couldn’t sit up.

  I loved the door, loved it when the ship would turn a little and tilt me toward the earth, flying at a hundred feet. A lot of people thought it opened you to some kind of extra danger, like ground fire spilling in on you instead of just severing the hydraulic system or cutting off the Jesus nut that held the rotor on. A friend of mine said he couldn’t do it, it put him close to rapture of the deep, he was afraid he’d flip the latch on his seat belt and just float out there. But I was afraid anyway, more afraid closed in, better to see, I didn’t go through all of that not to see.

  At midnight over Vinh Long, the gunship made seven or eight low runs above a company of Viet Cong on the eastern edge of the city. At first the tracers just snapped away into the dark, spending themselves out in sparks or skipping once or twice on the ground. Then flares showed a lot of men running out in the open, and our tracer lights began disappearing abruptly. The smoke from white phosphorus was so bright against the darkness that you had to squint a little to look at it. By four, half the city was on fire. Reporters weren’t allowed on gunships, but this was the second night of the Tet Offensive, total hysteria and no rules. I never got to ride in one again.

  A gunship flew on either side of us going into Hue, escorting a Chinook that carried a slingload of ammunition. We followed the river and headed into the Citadel through a narrow slot with heavy trees on the right and a cemetery on the left. At a hundred feet we began drawing fire. Ground-fire reflex, clench your ass and rise up in your seat a few inches. Pucker, motherfucker; you used muscles you didn’t even know you had.

  Once I was in a chopper that took a hit and dropped about 300 feet until the pilot pumped his pedals into auto-rotate, restoring us to the air and the living. Dragging back to base camp, we passed over three ships shot down close together, two of them completely smashed and the third almost intact, surrounded by the bodies of the crew and the brigade commander, all killed after they’d reached the ground.

  Later that day I went out on a joypop in a Loach with the Cav’s star flier. We flew fast and close to the ground, contour flying, a couple of feet between the treads and the ground, treetops, hootch roofs. Then we came to the river where it ran through a twisting ravine, the sides very steep, almost a canyon, and he flew the river, taking us through blind turns like a master. When we cleared the ravine he sped straight toward the jungle, dipping where I’d been sure he would rise, and I felt the sharp freezing moment of certain death. Right in there under the canopy, a wild ship-shaking U turn in the jungle, I couldn’t even smile when we broke clear, I couldn’t move, everything looked like images caught in a flash with all the hard shadows left in. “That dude can fly ’em right up his own ass,” someone said back at the lz, and the pilot came over and said, “Too bad we didn’t get shot at. I’d like to’ve shown you my evade.”

  In the Special Forces A Camp at Me Phuc Tay there was a sign that read, “If you kill for money you’re a mercenary. If you kill for pleasure you’re a sadist. If you kill for both you’re a Green Beret.” Great sounds at Me Phuc Tay, the commander dug the Stones. At An Hoa we heard “Hungry for those good things baby, Hungry through and through,” on the radio while we tried to talk to an actual hero, a Marine who’d just pulled his whole squad back in from deep serious, but he was sobbing so hard he couldn’t get anything out. “Galveston oh Galveston I’m so afraid of dying,” at LZ Stud, two kids from Graves having a quarrel. “He’s all haired off ’cause they won’t let him sew Cav patches on the bags,” one said, and the other, pouting heavily, said, “Fuck you. I mean it man, fuck you. I think it looks real sharp.” Only one song from Hue, “We gotta get out of this place if it’s the last thing we ever do”; a reporter friend looking totally mind-blown, he woke up that morning and heard two Marines lying near him making love. “Black is black I want my baby back,” at China Beach with IGOR FROM THE NORTH, every card in his deck an ace of spades. He wore a sombrero and a serape and his face went through about as many changes as a rock when a cloud passes over it. He almost lived on the beach, every time he added to the count they’d send him down as reward. He spoke twice in an hour in a spooky clipped language of his own like slow rounds, finally he got up and said, “Got to go Dong Ha kill more,” and went. “I said shot-gun, shoot ’em ’fore they run now,” at Nha Trang, talking to a man just starting his second tour. “When I come home I seen how scared you all was. I mean it wasn’t no damn combat situation or nothing like that, but believe you me, you was scared. I seen it here and I seen it there, so what the fuck? I come back.” No sounds at all on the road out of Can Tho, twenty of us in a straight line that suddenly ballooned out into a curve, wide berth around a Vietnamese man who stood without a word and held his dead baby out to us. We made tracks and we made dust in our tracks, I swore to God I’d get out soonest, all it took was eight more months.

  Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don’t know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.

  That December I got a Christmas card from a Marine I’d known in Hue. It showed a psychotic-art Snoopy in battered jungle fatigues, a cigarette clenched in his teeth, blasting away with an M-16. “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men,” it read, “and Best Wishes for a Happy One-Niner-Six-Niner.”

  Maybe it was classic, maybe it was my twenties I was missing and not the Sixties, but I began missing them both before either had reall
y been played out. The year had been so hot that I think it shorted out the whole decade, what followed was mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X. It wasn’t just that I was growing older, I was leaking time, like I’d taken a frag from one of those anti-personnel weapons we had that were so small they could kill a man and never show up on X-rays. Hemingway once described the glimpse he’d had of his soul after being wounded, it looked like a fine white handkerchief drawing out of his body, floating away and then returning. What floated out of me was more like a huge gray ’chute, I hung there for a long time waiting for it to open. Or not. My life and my death got mixed up with their lives and deaths, doing the Survivor Shuffle between the two, testing the pull of each and not wanting either very much. I was once in such a bad head about it that I thought the dead had only been spared a great deal of pain.

  Debriefed by dreams, friends coming in from the other side to see that I was still alive. Sometimes they looked 500 years old and sometimes they looked exactly as I’d known them, but standing in a strange light; the light told the story, and it didn’t end like any war story I’d ever imagined. If you can’t find your courage in a war, you have to keep looking for it anyway, and not in another war either; in where it’s old and jammed until the rocks start moving around, a little light and air, long time no see. Another frequency, another information, and death no deterrent to receiving it. The war ended, and then it really ended, the cities “fell,” I watched the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea as their Vietnamese pilots jumped clear, and one last chopper revved it up, lifted off and flew out of my chest.

  I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press center had been, where we’d sat smoking and joking and going, “Too much!” and “Far out!” and “Oh my God it gets so freaky out there!” He looked so unbelievably peaceful, I knew that somewhere that night and every night there’d be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and that one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too. And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.