by Stefan Schindler
Michael Herr did not have to be in Vietnam from 1967 through 1968, but he chose to go; and his memoir, Dispatches, is a scorching dispatch from death. “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.”
Bleary soldiers and sweat-stained reporters “were all studying the same thing, and if you got killed you couldn’t graduate.”
Combat soldiers in Vietnam, mostly drafted, uniformly thought that correspondents were crazy for choosing to be there. And yet, for the most part, there was enormous respect on both sides. Living and dying together, in the worst of all possible worlds, made for some mighty fine tenderness in between the horrors of combat, and often in the midst of it.
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“Oh man, you got to be kidding me. You guys asked to come here?”
“Sure”
“How long do you have to stay?”
“As long as we want.”
“Wish I could stay as long as I want,” the Marine called Love Child said. “I’d been home las’ March.”
“When did you get here?” I asked.
“Las’ March.”
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Robert “Blowtorch” Komer was chief of the rural pacification program. “If William Blake had ‘reported’ to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.”
“There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”
“Stay cool,” “good luck,” “right on,” “keep your shit together, motherfucker” – there were a thousand ways to say goodbye when parting, and it happened every time. Most muttered the words. Some just gave you the look. But it was always the same. “It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’”
1968.“The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done.” I’ll leave it to you to figure that one out. Just think race relations, then and now.
By the end of 1968, the lies and lunacy of the war fused so completely with heroin addiction and racial tension that one could not speak truthfully of an effective American fighting force. Despite President Nixon’s continuation of the war for another five years, the American army in Vietnam was disintegrating.
Nixon took credit for ending the war, but soldiers in revolt had already made that decision, no longer willing to fight and die for a parasitic nightmare conjured into being by men who thought themselves independent, invulnerable, god-like, better than the rest of us, and for whom now, even today, we must not cease to pray, in the hope that they will come down off of their throne, bring the troops home, leave others alone, and join the community of the sane and decent.
Note from KMM: What similarities do you see between circumstances in the US during the Vietnam/Indochina war and the US today? Do you get any inspiration from the glimpse Stefan has provided into America’s “Vietnam War” as seen through the eyes of Michael Herr? Do you think, as Stefan and others do, that America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute a Second Vietnam War (this time in the Middle East) — equally lie-launched, unjust, morally reprehensible, and self-defeating? For further edification, see Stefan’s short, illustrated, reader-friendly, paperback book: America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War and Nick Turse’s book: Kill Anything that Moves. Also think about what drones and nuclear weapons can do today in the wrong hands–and think very, very carefully about who the wrong hands are if what we want is a world of peace, a world of social justice, a world. Finally, ask yourself this question: “What can I do in November to help end today’s and tomorrow’s Vietnam wars?”