VERSE

...These are among the ineradicable images of the war...

...And with all due respect for the dangers he endured, he was, and at all times knew himself and was known to be, a noncombatant, a civilian in drag—albeit fatigues in this instance...

...the antiwar Movement was by then mature...

...Gone are the grunts, dead or dispersed...

...they are inescapable...

...When Herr went to Vietnam in 1967, he was in his twenties, hardly older than the grunts who were his companions and subjects—his "character...

...This dread, this terror, seeping into the book, gives it its edge, point, tension, its prevailing tone...

...What can Cain say to those who can't stand the sight of blood...

...and it's generally that, or from a distance looks like that, for the man up front, as action, typically, is sporadic, intermittent, coming in brief bursts and sudden encounters, there one minute and gone the next, sometimes long, long gone...

...Dispatches (Knopf, $8.95) is a misleading title...

...the naked little girl, her skin scorched, screaming her terror and hurling her 3 February 1978: 84 body at us as though we who ignited the torch could put out the fire, while the ARVN troops, her gallant countrymen, gaze blankly or amble unnoticingly on...

...That is exactly Michael Herr's ambition: by imaginative recall, to recreate the war, to live and suffer it...

...I hadn't been anywhere, I'd performed half an act...

...Chasms...

...By now only, the obsessed remember let...

...of their generation he knew their allusions, references, music, totems, spoke (or, in any case, could mimic) their language...

...But that other book, the one that lies alongside it, and submerged in it, is a requiem for himself, a lament for lost love, painful and moving in it« very odd way, but we had better s<*" it for what it is, and make of it wb»* we will...

...to take note of himself in extreme situations, and he did...

...There was another difference: Herr didn't have to be there, as they kept reminding him...

...Now the "heavy shit" was the very element in which the grunts lived their lives...

...they strike us with the force of art...

...Jimi Hendrix was a representative figure for him as he was for the black grunt who carried the cassette into combat, and so was Aretha (referred to familiarly by first name only...

...Of course there were some exceptions, images and events that momentarily froze the flow of bilge and in an instant caught in a brilliant light the truth we murkily knew: the body bags gathered for evacuation, lumps of clay decently out of our sight...

...the Viet Cong "suspect" taking with his face the killing impact of a bullet fired at arm's length by his petulant executioner...

...We kept staring but not seeing, so that the pictures entered the retina but not the consciousness and got sucked into some sinkhole of the mind which returns muffled echoes though no audible signifying words...

...they present themselves to us as irreducible truth...

...only instead of returning the wayfarer to the common fold, it sets him apart and encircles him with fire which none but the initiated may enter...

...and such a person may cover himself with exactly the same muck and still the difference will show, immediately, unmistakably...

...With the difference for the men up front: they can get killed there...

...That he liked and admired and was rather awed by them is evident, sometimes to an embarrassing degree, in every line...

...I'm desisting with difficulty for reasons of space and in the hope that SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic whose most recent book was Heartland, is now working on a political memoir of the Fifties, the darkest side...

...In finding it—in seeminr to come endowed with it, at least inupiently, so that first impact of the war released it, on the evidence of "Khe San" and other portions written in the late 60s—in mastering the voice of the book, Herr has performed no less a feat than to give us some of the best writing on war, any war by any writer, and what will likely stand as incomparably the most accomplished American writing on the Vietnam war...

...The book, I hope I've made clear, cries out for quotation...

...The condition of pariah is an exalted state, a lonely eminence...

...Don't theologize, we are highhandedly admonished, to a man who has known hell...

...Herr witnessed, lived, and was inoperably wounded by the horror—no one who has written of Vietnam has caught it as powerfully as he in that book...

...he went to the war—as a man, out of private motives, and as a writer with the well-known hope of getting a book out of it...

...but who, we may ask, stands in direr need...

...There'd been nothing happening there that hadn't already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in the World...

...Sections making up the larger part of the book appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone and The New American Review long after the generating events—Khe San, Tet, Cholon...

...and he was not, apparently, displeased by what he saw of himself —with, I'm sure, good reason...

...Envied them: pitied them, but in an odd way and for private reasons envied them...

...And: "I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods...

...and to tell the deep story behind those final images of desperate rout, as Frank Snepp has done (a mystery which we all knew anyway—there was nothing about that war, from Kennedy's advisors to Tonkin Gulf to Cambodia and Laos and Mayaguez— there was nothing we didn't know, possessing as we did an infallible apparatus for intelligence-gathering: our nerve-endings), to resurrect ancient history so long after the corpse was buried, more than two calendar years after the event—well, who wants to know...

...I went there to cover the war," he writes, "and the war covered me...

...a book that would not settle for reporting truly how it went and was there (a noble enterprise in itself) but one that would gamble against the odds, leap the divide between reportage and art and find the voices suitable for rendering lived experience and recovered emotion—-the actual feel of the war to those who endured it...

...Herr is white, well-educated, an accredited correspondent—a writer, that awesome, mysterious person...

...and what's more striking, he envied them...

...Mai du monde, Weltschmertz, Byronism: if I permit myself a measure of cruelty I do so the more severely to score a blighting tone of selfindulgent sentimental lyricism which derives from bad war movies and adolescent ballads and too often discolors scenes and vignettes with excessive splashes of blue and purple (however expertly the strokes are applied...

...Home: twenty-eight years old, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those 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...

...Now the void itself is charged with significance...

...it lights up and makes vibrant the space and confers a new meaning on time...

...they are not moments among others in a stream of time—they are selfisolating and consummating, burned permanently into the memory traces, absorbing into themselves essential human meaning inviolable by official euphemism and lies...

...When you can name the day you've had enough, and have enough for your book, and can board a helicopter, and get your ass out of there, it's something else again...

...Rightly so: however faithfully the experienced events adhere to reality, they are transformed into other magnitudes and are not what we attend to...

...But when is shit not shit...

...A romantic boy, his head stuffed with books, he wanted to get very close to the heart of it, and did...

...Correspondents got and get killed in wars, of course they do...

...This is not intended as negative criticism: Herr didn't go to "cover" the war...

...the massive bombing of the North had begun two years earlier...

...that's what grunts are, men who live in shit...

...In short, the journalist's war had been written...

...This, sad to say, is possible in an unjust war as it is in a just one, if there is such a thing, and I'm afraid there is— though Herr did not raise such questions with his companions, as to do so would have been indelicate, intrusive and further estranging, though by then peace symbols were standard emblems throughout Vietnam and peace sentiments were by no means unknown...

...Coldly put (a bearable temperature for distant observers), a firefight is a firefight, a night patrol a patrol, napalm and defoliation, torture, murder, Phoenix, pacification, carpet bombing, free fire zones, searchand-destroy, body bags . . . beyond the point of saturation where the senses were flooded and could absorb no more, we stopped seeing, responding, feeling...

...To write well about war one must be half in love with war and enthralled by easeful death...

...Some people found it distasteful or confusing if I told them that, whatever else, I'd loved it there too...

...Dispatches is essentially an autobiographical "novel," full of dazzling writing that will take the top of your head off, about the protagonist-narrator, Michael Herr, a greatly gifted young writer who, turning his back on the good things, to the amazement, admiration, or chagrin of his friends and no doubt the despair of his mother, went to war, not to serve in it but to cover it and discover himself...

...For the likes of them he doesn't have the time of day...

...By general consent and in public view we conspired to forget: if not amnesty, at least amnesia...

...Herr's eye and ear, educated by war movies and novels, tend naturally to fictionalize, to create characters out of ordinary, even uninteresting, boys...

...the bodies, so many of them, in the ditch at My Lai, children, their mothers, the aged, not a young man or woman among them...

...By 1967, when Henarrived in Vietnam, the journalist's war had been reported...

...they are in effect imagined—composed as fictions...

...In fact, whether or not by inadvertence, the current and final number of the American Review lists in the cumulative Index "Illumination Rounds," one of the early portions of the book, under Fiction...

...to impart shape, color candescence, highly charged atmospherics to the grinding dailiness of the war...

...In the mode of the Bildungsroman, the novel of "sentimental education," the rites of passage...

...if you have any stomach left for reading about war in general and aspects of Vietnam in particular, you'll expend it on Dispatches and be done with it...

...Can Ahab, the marked man, take tea in the parlor with landlubbers...

...The daily briefing was called, by the barflies who reported the war, the Five O'Clock Follies, a transparent conspiracy to defraud us in which we ourselves were co-conspirators...

...He could, and did, get out when he willed...

...The events of war are limited in scope and number, like all things in nature...

...I'f he was to live among them, earn their respect, confidence, comradeship, it was important to narrow gaps...

...which is to say Herr's voice at its truest assaults us as inevitable, the only possible one: that is, as a work of art...

...And it is therefore as art—as fiction —that Herr's book must be judged...

...Back in the World now," Herr plaintively writes, "and a lot of us aren't making it...

...but that doesn't tell the whole story or perhaps even the real one...

...Suffered it, as Whitman grandiloquently said of his own experience as a nurse in the Civil War...

...Homer Bigart, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, Charles Mohr and others had been reporting the war since the early 60s...

...gone his innocence and youth...

...it radically alters— and may even dislodge, disorient, reverse—'behavior, attitudes, values, feeling, everything...

...and he also learned what he must have sensed: that it is, I profoundly regret to say, an experience like no other and it may tell you things about yourself you might otherwise never learn, including things you'd rather not know...

...though it has not forgotten us...

...The experience of war, as of grand passion, is distancing, alienating, in the romantic mode...

...What further evidence do we need to document the moral depravity of the likes of Graham Martin and Kissinger...

...He learned what he knew: that war is ugly, very ugly...

...Arriving late in the day, having read all the books and periodicals, equipped with what may be called Movement knowledge, politics and moral attitudes, filled moreover with the literature of war in a writer's general culture (he cites Stendhal, Hemingway, Stevens among others) and the corresponding general outlook, Herr needed, not a plot (he had that: we were losing a dirty war, piecemeal, day by day, unchangingly and irreversibly, and with Tet we lost it) and not characters (he had them: the "grunts" who were mired in the "heavy shit") but a vantage point, a method of narration, a voice—above all a voice at once particular and general that in recording this war would give voice to others, past and future...

...No great prophesy: the best pages, and there are many of them, make most of the other voices sound tinny, banal, derivative, stale— faded echoes of other wars...

...to mention the Christmas bombing seems bad form, spiteful, a breach of promise, dirty linen...

...And the final chords, a slow organ roll: "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...

...The best passages in the book, and they are formidably fine, come not when Herr speaks directly of his own terror in actually or potentially dangerous situations (indeed at such moments the tone is self-serving) but rather when we sense the dread driving the voice, infusing its reflections and reveries, selecting the memories, the moments and occasions it arrests, isolates and plucks up out of the clamor and drift of experience...

...After the war, everything seems flat...

...Jules Roy, Bernard Fall, Jacques Lacouture and others had written their books...

...The differences in state of mind—of receptivity and aspiration i. —are decisive...

...War (though, as the hilarious old joke put it, "you can get killed there," first uttered, no doubt by the civilized world's first infantryman)—war, between rounds and even amidst them, is a numbing bore, take it from an old soldier who's seen them all...

...to make scenes out of routine events...

...At this stage of our forgetting, routine war reportage, yet another collection of dispatches puffed up to look like a book, would be altogether beside the point...

...Fortunately I can answer that question for you: When you can step clear of it whenever you like and get to where there are hot showers, lovely meals, clean sheets, dry socks and underwear, flush toilets, air-conditioned hotels, girls (in approximately that order)—then it's the stuff that dreams are made on, the tales you tell the folks back home...

...We agreed we had made a mistake, which, because it was committed out ot golden intentions, required no explanation or apologies, and was best forgotten: we therefore forgot it...

...The book remained to be written...

...In that thicket of lies which was the official version of Vietnam, not even the corpses were real, still lifes in an unimaginable landscape...

...It's always that for the eighteen men behind the lines for every man up front (the ratio in my most recent war), whatever they may say in the beerhalls of the American Legion...

...gone the comrades of the press corps—not of course the multitude of seedy hacks who peddled the official lies but the few good men and true...

...and so after a while each report was like every other, give or take some figures in a body count that we knew to be fake in any case...

...language of pathology seemed inevitable, given the nature of the malignancy: it's been said so often it may even be true that as the Vietnam war ground to its sordid, ambiguous end, the American people, having failed all along, mostly by a queer sort of inattention, to bring the war to a point of focus, of moral clarity, abruptly forgot it, as one forgets intolerable pain, other people's catastrophes, or the lurid imagery and obscure, unsettling motifs of a recurrent dream...

...But Herr went to Vietnam to cover a war and look into himself...

...but in order to do so they have to be, generally speaking, awfully unlucky or they have to try very hard...

...the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly...

...it was already a scholar's war...

...O, the difference, the difference...

...the Pentagon Papers provided footnotes...

...Afterward, his past seemed to him a foreign country, barely recognizable, and its inhabitants another breed...

...they must live with the imminent possibility of the great surprise, and this interesting condition changes everything, including the long gaps between bursts, or even the single round which was never intended for you but contains all the meaning in the world for you...

...Living with that knowledge can make of its formerly nondescript bearers, actors in a high drama...

...and Herr, a subtle man, disarms us by saying that he knows better than we that such recognitions were, among other things, peace offerings, "credentials," a bid for acceptance...

...What could they possibly know, these moral3 Fcu*uary 1978: 86 izers, their heads stuffed with doctrine and slogans, and their questions "political, square, innocent, they already knew what they wanted to hear, I'd practically forgotten the language...