THE PRESS: The Dig Book on the War

...The anger stemmed only partly from Herr's freedom to leave...

...The people talking about Herr's book did not care about all that...

...Herr went to see the war and he saw it...

...And yet, looking back on it, 1 remember how happy those tramps always seemed...

...In one marvelous scene, Clara even acts out the film's revamping of the earlier ideal of the sweetheart which Mary Pickford had embodied...

...even before Nixon left office the American people had felt all they were going to feel about Vietnam...

...I found Dispatches a week or ten days ago at the Eighth Street Bookshop in New York...

...And they got it, and you got it.'" "1 knew 1 hadn't seen anything until 1 saw his lace...

...He watched people dying, and saw more dead bodies than any man could ever have friends among the living...

...Thus the only real scandal in her life comes about as a curious case of guilt by association...

...Things can work out this way because the truth is that for all her flirting, Clara has never allowed any man to trifle with her...

...but as soon as they can choose they cross to the other side, and join those who are having the time of their lives...

...You guys are crazy," one soldier told him, trying to find words for his resentment of Herr's freedom...

...Herr set out to describe certain things about Vietnam which never got into the newspapers at the time...

...The awful paradox is that those who have to go to war would never choose to...

...Some: times we walked along the railroad track through the valley at the /oat o~ the college hill, and I remember more than once coming upon two or three tramps warming themselves by a little [ire they had built or even cooking a meal over it...

...It's a scene where Clara is remaking an old dress to wear on the first date she has ever had to go to a night club...

...He does not seem to have pretended to any such ambition himself...

...There is no better writing about war anywhere...

...She's not as raunchy as Diane in Goodbar, nor as idealistic as Vanessa Redgrave in lulia, nor as dedicated as Anne Bancroft in The Turning Point...

...Impulsive, quirky and absolutely bubbling over with energy, she truly is a bit of the libido let out to play...

...it was too late for that...

...One might argue over details of interpretation, but details are details...

...He was nearly finished with a book of his own about the war, Two ot the Missing, but there was no edge of professional competitiveness in his voice when he talked about Herr's book...

...This has been remarked before, but never so well as here...

...It" is the Americanization of the Latin pronoun id, Freud's shorthand meaning the libido...

...had I seen the new sectien called "Illumination Rounds" which appeared in New American Review...

...I remember a conversation with Perry Deane Young in the early 1970s...

...The talk about Michael Herr's book was not of the sort in which publishers engage...

...The history and politics of the war had been settled, more or less...

...Goodbar...

...It is an incident that allows her to sample the true fruits of sin and depravity without actually having to stain her own character in the process...

...The soldiers who were killed or ruined by the war still live in Dispatches, ghosts who cannot depart...

...But the time of their lives all the same...

...The war used up young Americans the way a metal stamping machine uses up sheet metal...

...Not in a giddy, giggling, silly sort of way, necessarily, although Herr ran into plenty of such grotesques...

...It was about this very independent and strong-willed young girl and how she makes her way in a hazardous world...

...This it is which authenticates Clara's innocence...

...He went to Khe Saah during the bad days of the siege, to Hue during the terrible fighting at the end of Tet, to Saigon during the battle for the Chinese section of the city in May, 1968, to fire bases and field operations all over the country...

...The residue of Mary in her is what keeps "it" from running wild...

...It made no difference that Herr ran an equal chance of death, ate the same food, was soaked by the same rains, slept on the same ground...

...But after we have been disarmed by this scene where she tries to cut the dress down, imagine our surprise when the finished re-make in which, she arrives at the night club turns out to be the proverbial little black dress, the one that every femme fatale of the thirties and forties was going to wear when she wanted to stop the show...

...It brought us to the old quarry/ram which most o/the stone /or the college buildings and /or the /arrnhouses had been taken, and brought us to Quarry Chapel, a long since deserted and "deconsecrated' chapel, standing on a hill two miles/ram the college and symbolizing there the/ailure of Episcopalianism to take root among the Ohio countrypeople...

...But the extraordinary thing about Dispatches is not the vividness of his description of the war as a war, vivid as it is...

...But the book did not appear...

...There are lots of movies about girls like that around these days...

...The unforgivable thing was that he didn't have to...

...The presence of Mary in Clara is perhaps most 9 December 1977:790...

...Besides, Big Books are commercial successes, while the best books about Vietnam inevitably leave you Commonweal: 789 feeling like hell, which is hardly the formula for commercial success...

...But within a small circle of people for whom the war had been a personal event--some had been to see it, some not--Vietnam carried the weight of a childhood trauma...

...All that time, and here it was...

...This fact put Herr on the side of the colonels in the field, the generals in Saigon, the political leaders in Washington who started and ran and finally stopped the war for their own sweet reasons...

...Now I haven't been working up to the arrival of Herr's book with all this portentous fanfare as if it were Haley's comet just to tell you it's no good...

...This girl sets her sights on only one guy at a time, and doesn't let any of them take advantage of her, either, by murdering her or anything like that...

...In the film Clara is a sales girl at a giant department store who throws herself at the store's owner as if she were a little gold digger, and gets him...

...Michael Herr, Dispatches People were talking about it as long ago as 1969...

...There isn't going to be any big book on the war...

...Herr was not in Vietnam long before he discovered that he was one of the free...

...We got shot to pieces . . . Make that 'little pieces: We were still shaking the trees lor dog tags when we pulled back out of there.' " "'1 stood as close to them as 1 could without actually being one o/ them, and then I stood as /ar back as 1 could without leaving the planet...

...Unlike so many journalists, Herr seemed to have known from the beginning that the war was . . . a war . . . Admittedly the talk of Michael Herr's book took place within a very small circle...

...as a public event the war was over...

...Perry Young's Two o/ the Missing, Philip Caputo's A Rumor ol War, Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers...

...He had known Herr in Vietnam, the Esquire pieces were the best writing about the war, period...

...The dress really is something out of Mary's wardrobe, complete with one of those lace collars that looks like a doily...

...We were at a party...

...We were sure she couldn't do it, with the result that when we see she can, we're so impressed we forget all about how naughty she is...

...That was bad enough, but worse was the fact that he chose to come...

...If some of the people who waited for Herr's book hoped it would be the big one, well, that wasn't Herr's fault...

...It's very interesting to watch how carefully Clara preserves at least the sweet after-taste of her more demure and sheltered predecessor Mary...

...There have been other good books about Vietnam and not many people bought those either--Ward Just's To What End...

...but the bureaus couldn't use his story, they wanted Ambassador Komer's...

...She differs from Mary not by being immoral, but only by being ambitious...

...But as soon as they noticed us we would turn back and walk in the other direction, /or we pitied them and/elt that our presence was an intrusion...

...We would see them maybe a hundred yards ahead, and we would get close enough to hear them laughing and talking together...

...In truth, pretty, perky, saucy, sexy Clara Bow is still Mary Pickfordmbut a Mary Pickford who is now allowing a bit of her "it" to show...

...But Herr was magically blessed with eyes, with the time and freedom to look about him, and with the talent to find a way to describe what he saw...

...Perhaps this sounds an odd remark...

...I hadn't seen any ads, had somehow missed the early review in Publisher's Weekly...

...The open question ----open like a wound--was what it was, what it meant...

...It" is that certain something, that-je-ne-sais-quoi, which Elinor Glyn, who appears in the movie, first described in an article for Cosmopolitan...

...It was said Herr was having trouble finishing up, that he didn't know how to end it...

...But she's no slouch compared to those women, which is saying something when you consider that she's fifty years older than they are...

...Clara Bow, and the movie I recently caught up with that has her in it is called lt...

...This was not a book all America was waiting for...

...The marvelous part of the scene is that Clara attacks this dress with a scissors and hacks off the collar so crudely, the effect is laughable when she tries the dress on...

...One copy, spine out, on the third shelf of the current events section, hack against the wall...

...I don't think it's going to work...

...Michael Herr was doing a book on Vietnam...

...One copy, spine out, third shelf...

...She gets her kicks all right, but she always manages to give a few as well...

...if you read the book, you'll understand why...

...This happens when the unwed mother whom Clara supports and provides a home for is threatened by welfare workers who want to take away her baby...

...Ali's you got to do is look in his eyes, that's the whole lucking story right t h e r e . ' . . . All I ever managed was one quick look in, and that was like looking at the /loor of an ocean...

...She won't even let the store owner steal a kiss without getting slapped good and proper for it, and she has never had in her mind anything less than marrying the gentleman...

...But it never ]ound a way to report meaningluUy about d e a t h . . . " " "Oh, two hundred isn't anything...

...He was never wounded but nearly killed half a dozen times...

...The war had too many stages, involved too many belligerents, lasted too long, hurt too many people in too many ways...

...That's already a clich6, like the Great American Novel...

...And how sad and serious we were...

...When publishers talked about the big book on the war they meant something which would land like a bombshell, major ad promo and national author's tour, Book-of-the-Month and a million dollar paperback contract, front-page review in the Times and a Time or Newsweek cover, all America talking and stacks a hundred high in the book section of every department store in the land...

...Americans know next to nothing about the Vietnamese side of the war, not only the sufferings of the people in the South, but the crazy determination of the North to see it through...

...It would be an act of arrogance to try to capture it all...

...This assures the audience that inside the aggressiveness and desire for experience, there is still a little girl like Mary...

...But Herr could write, his eyes had been open, his early pieces on Khe Sanh and Hue in Esquire in no way resembled the flat, grey reports which appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post...

...The war was too huge an event to be contained within a single book...

...and the thoroughly modern message is clear that in this unsuppressed, unsubtle form, the libido is a rather wholesome and appealing character...

...He saw it in the eyes of the soldiers he came to write about...

...presumably all those other reporters went to see it, too...

...They were not expecting a book which would finally make America Wake Up...

...She's not really brazen So much as just brash...

...Herr went to see the war, and he saw it, and Dispatches is the book of a man whose eyes hurt from looking...

...Herr put his years of work to good purpose, and trumpets and cymbals would be in order if Dispatches were the sort of book that needed trumpets and cymbals to live, which it does not...

...But this girl isn't like that Diane Keaton girl in Looking /or Mr...

...Sometimes they looked at him with extraordinary hatred, for choosing to share the danger when he did not have to...

...Her sexiness is exceeded only by her moxie-ness, which is what keeps us off our guard with her...

...The people waiting for Herr's book had something narrower in mind: something which would do justice to the war's reality, something which would capture what it was like...

...I was literally shocked...

...Both as a strategy for getting a man and a moral for a movie, such brazenness can succeed because Clara is not only forward, but straight-forward...

...It was/lushed and mottled and twisted like he had his lace skin on inside o u t . . . " ""What the luck do you think happened...

...But the really extraordinary thing about Herr's book is his perception that in war there are two classes: the free who can come and go, and the unfree who are in it...

...Clara saves the day somehow by claiming the baby is really hers, but then this deception gets back to the store owner, who has just begun to take a shine to Clara, as i f it were true...

...It was Herr's peculiar agony to see what the war was like for those who had to go, and yet to know that he was on the other side...

...you should have heard them when the dead were Vietnamese...

...Of course, what is a moral tragedy for another girl leads to a comedy of errors with Clara, and the whole confusion is happily cleared up in the end...

...THOMAS POWERS LIBERATED LADY 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN Gosh, I saw a swell movie the other day, just swell...

...Journalists by legion had passed through the country...

...The lady I'm talking about is a Ms...

...which sank almost without a trace back in the '60s...

...We lost more than that in an hour on Guadalcanal.' . . . And those were 9 December 1977:788 American dead they were talking about...

...Some of the reviews I've seen of D/spatches have an impassioned, exhortatory quality, as if the national honor somehow depended on the number of Americans who rush out to buy Herr's book...

...The press got all the facts . . . it got too many of them...

...as many as 600 had been there at one time in late 1967 and early 1968...

...The thing which Herr discovered was that war is funma sickening, exhilarating sort of funmfor those who don't have to be in it...

...I had not, but later an American journalist living in Jerusalem, John Broder--he was waiting for Herr's book, too---sent me a Xerox copy, and it was just as good as Perry had said...

...There was no end of things one might say about it, in the manner of people discussing a divorce, or a falling out among friends, or a death in the family...

...It's not so much the fact she could wear such a scandalous dress that has floored us now, but the fact she could make one...

...Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win i t . . . ' " "Hearts and minds, People o/the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium o~ the Ding-dong by containing the ever-encroaching Doodah . . .'" "How do you /eel when a 19-year-old kid tells you /ram "the bottom o~ his heart that he's gotten too old/or this kind o/ shit...

...Oh, I know...

...Not just another book on Vietnam--there were already dozens of those--but the big book on the war people felt had to be there, waiting to be written...

...Dispatches is one of that company...

...He spent a lot of time with soldiers in the field, and obviously vowed himself to say something of what the war was like for them, so that anyone who cared to know would have a place to look...

...It's very good...