2010/9

Michael Herr: Dispatches (260p. in the first edition, second print)

Michael Herr’s Dispatches is reputed to be Vietnam’s best book. It could very well be true. The peculiars are Nam, the absurdity is of any war. On par with Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (WWI) and Malaparte’s Kaputt (WWII).

Sometimes the chopper you were riding in would top a hill and all the ground in front of you as far as the next hill would be charred and pitted and still smoking, and something between your chest and your stomach would turn over. Frail gray smoke where they’d burned off the rice fields around a free-strike zone, brilliant white smoke from phosphorus (“Willy Peter/make you a buh liever”), deep black smoke from ‘palm, they said that if you stood at the base of a column of napalm smoke it would suck the air right out of your lungs. Once we fanned over a little vile that had just been airstruck and the words of a song by Wingy Manone that I’d heard when I was a few years old snapped into my head, “Stop the War, These Cats Is Killing Themselves.” Then we dropped, hovered, settled down into purple lz smoke, dozens of children broke from their hootches to run in toward the focus of our landing, the pilot laughing and saying, “Vietnam, man. Bomb ‘em and feed ‘em, bomb ‘em and feed ‘em.”