Somewhere a soldier, or journalist, or bodyguard, or civilian contractor is writing the ultimate account of an
Iraq War in which rock ’n’ rollers with one foot in the grave come of age while killing and being killed. It may be a memoir, it may be a novel. It is likelier a screenplay, since movies are where so much of literature can be found these days.
Whatever its format, that writer has a powerful model in the Anthony Swofford’s death-haunted, heavy metal–tinged
Jarhead, which, with the film Three Kings, does the job for our first Mesopotamian war. He—or she—has an even greater model in Robert Stone’s novel
Dog Soldiers, a very nearly perfect book. That writer will find Tim O’Brien’s
Going After Cacciato and
The Things They Carried, Philip Caputo’s
A Rumor of War, and Gustav Hasford’s
The Short-Timers hard to beat.
None of those books, however, carries quite as much weight page for page, to say nothing of psychedelic weirdness, as Michael Herr’s
Dispatches, which appeared 32 years ago and almost immediately changed the way countless Americans viewed the
Vietnam War—which, for you young folk, was the Iraq of its day. It exposed the war as a cynical effort on its opening page: “The Mission was always telling us about
VC units being engaged and wiped out and then reappearing a month later in full strength, there was nothing very spooky about that, but when we went up against his terrain we usually took it definitively, and even if we didn’t keep it you could always see that we’d at least been there.” In other words, from the air and ground, that temporarily conquered territory was permanently pacified, plowed with salt and napalmed into submission: Vietnam delenda est. Yet the enemy still kept coming, incessantly.
What was spooky was the normality of strange events: of door gunners shooting down women and children, keeping careful count of their kills; of trip-wire booby traps; of explosions and screams in the night; of the transparent lies that people told one another about the war and why it was being fought. If you weren’t confused, Herr assures, if you had some idea of what was happening and where you would be when it did, “the war could cream you.” He adds, “You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement—the whole rotten deal—could come in on the freakyfluky as easily as in the so-called expected ways.” In other words, unless you had that weird light on you, as some lucky warriors did, then all bets were off on how misfortune was going to find you, as it surely would.
Dispatches is journalism, not history, and a very particular kind of journalism at that; a minor controversy roiled not long after its publication when Herr allowed that he had made up some dialogue and invented a character or two. A small matter in the age of gonzo; a smaller matter when a white lie speaks the truth. Thirty-odd years on, it has lost none of its power or urgency—and, sorry to say, none of its usefulness as a primer for how to write a book about war.
Dispatches also gave birth to parts of several Vietnam movies, the most important of which debuted 30 years ago, on August 15, 1979.
Apocalypse Now, famously, channels
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by way of the Mekong River and a cast of unforgettable characters. It is a movie of telling lines, one of them the exceedingly modest but entirely well placed, “The Ohio River, sir?”—to say nothing, of course, of “What are the charges?”
It is a pleasing game for diehard fans to argue whether the director’s-cut version Apocalypse Now Redux is an improvement over the theatrical release of 1979. I hold that it is not: the editors earned their keep on the film, reining in
Francis Ford Coppola’s obviously too-large ambitions. In whatever flavor, however, Apocalypse Now is an essential film, and well worth an anniversary viewing today—or any other day in this ever-strange time.
