“I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.”
At the center of Michael Herr’s Dispatches is this: to experience war. The immense question, of course, is how exactly to get at that. And that is the action of this work: getting at. Dispatches is mostly made up of short vignettes of the Vietnam War, from the momentous events to the grainy details of soldiers’ daily lives. The reader slowly submerges into Herr’s experience as she accumulates these snapshots, adding pieces: the overload of information, the war names and mottos on flak jackets and helmets (AVENGER V, BORN TO LOSE, BORN TO KILL, BORN TO DIE…), the pressure to frame events positively, the joints smoked back in the hotel, sinking from the day’s exhaust of experience.
The challenge with describing war experience is that so much of it is submerged beneath ordinary perception. It is that great psychic iceberg, and those who write about it must express that. The fear, the death, the grief, the horror, and even the war itself (after all, without our mental and emotional luggage, what is war?) Dispatches is a wondrous work because of its constant, courageous, and quite successful struggle to get at all of that. In an illustrative passage, speaking of the experience of being caught in action, Herr writes: “dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling all the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rush to focus… reaching in at the point of calm and springing all the joy and all the dread ever known, ever known by everyone who ever lived”.
To me, the evocative determination of that very struggle to describe renders this a truly ethical work. Herr recognizes he himself is implicated in this description. He constantly questions, examines, and bares himself open, keenly aware of his parasitic position as a war correspondent, and the voluntary nature of this post. It is, moreover, a struggle to describe that cannot escape Herr’s great feeling for those around him. His descriptions of the soldiers he accompanies are always bare and straightforward, yet imbued with a tenderness that doesn’t fail to note their generous actions. This is a work that succeeds because in its acute, pained attempt at getting at a complex, in many ways horrifying experience, it reveals the author’s sensitive, deep humanity.