It may come as a surprise, given what bleak associations it invariably summons now, but Michael Herr didn't really know what he was throwing himself into when he convinced an editor to send him out to cover the Vietnam War. He was a young writer, though years older than many of the grunts he writes about, with no relevant experience who harbored a desire for Hemingwayesque adventure. Within the first day of his arrival in the country he wanted to go home. But he stayed and survived and acquired a keen vision of mayhem. The book he published about 8 years after the events recounted, in 1977, unassumingly titled Dispatches, was greeted with acclaim and now appears to be widely considered a classic, not just of the war but of war writing itself. It is deserved. In less than three hundred pages, balanced perfectly between rambling and precise, feverish and lucid, Herr creates a total record of what he saw and especially what he felt during his sojourn in hell.
Why read about hell? Why now? Why ever? These questions linger like the memory of a couple of nightmares I've had since reading Herr's account. (Nightmares involving ghosts.) The first answer that comes to mind is simple: It happened. It's history. Closer: It's a major episode in the US's long history of spreading misery abroad. Which is true. Except the book isn't presented as information that can be kept at a safe distance, neatly filed away once finished. Another answer arises early on when Herr confesses to a base common impulse: You don't want to look but you want to look. So Herr commits himself to looking as much as he can at the horrific situation and rendering the diverse anecdotes and reflections he snatches back in fitting language, at once dextrous and crude. The book contains the product of the act but also the consequences and passes a trace of the whole deeply scathing experience on to the reader. That is its value. One isn't permitted a safe distance. Hell exists now. And there's no guarantee you won't be plunged into Herr's version of it someday. (If not another version of it.) Last answer: A refusal to forget those last two facts. You don't want to look yet you have to look.
Cormac McCarthy has declined, with few exceptions, all requests to discuss his work. His reason: "Everything I have to say is in the book." Strange to think of the writer of a book like Dispatches (which I suspect McCarthy would admire) going out to promote it and I can easily see why Herr would chafe at the attention and decline such requests too. It reads like the final word in a long and understandably one-sided conversation between two people, carried on late at night, at times as if the words were muttered or whispered, later the same night, when the speaker is alone with what he's dredged up. The book ends because he's collapsed.
