The Cruellest Deadline Of All

The war in Indochina presented an entirely new set of challenges to the American army. Trained in the conventional tactics of warfare, the American strategists could not understand the methods of an opposing army that was supported by and mingled with the civilian population of South Vietnam; their response to the frustration of being unable to locate enemy soldiers was large-scale destruction of the countryside.

The American media also faced new challenges in the Indochina war: the issues were even fuzzier than the battle lines, because the official American position--which war correspondents had always accepted in the past--was built on a series of obviously false assumptions.

In many ways, the war in Vietnam marked a turning point in reporters' visions of war. Before Vietnam, as Nora Ephron once wrote, the war correspondent's job was considered "the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risks without public disapproval and the awful truth that for correspondents, war is not hell. It is fun." Reporters arrived in Vietnam expecting--as they had been taught to expect from the war movies they grew up on--adventure, glamor, and excitement. What they found instead was a brutal war, a war that drew no lines between civilian and enemy, a war that denied compassion both for Vietnamese and American soldiers.

"I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods," Michael Herr writes in one of the essays in Dispatches. And indeed, for many of the journalists who covered the war, the assignment became a cruel kind of identity crisis, forcing them to reevaluate their methods of information gathering, and even their definitions of truth. In Vietnam, it was no longer enough for war correspondents to attend daily briefings in American forces' headquarters; it became apparent that the officers were lying outright about the number of American victories, in an effort to drum up support for the war back home.

It took a little longer for correspondents to realize that the Americans were also lying about South Vietnamese support for the American war effort. U.S. officers falsely billed the war as an invasion of a peaceful country by an aggressive North Vietnam because only a war against aggressors would satisfy the American public. Gradually correspondents realized that their army was lying, that the guerrilla war could only be fought with a supportive population. But it took a while for them to reveal the lies. Even if they had spoken the language and could have asked the Vietnamese how they felt about the war, it would have taken a while for the correspondents to begin doubting the army's statements. It was one thing to report how we were doing in Vietnam; it was another to question why we were doing it.

In The First Casualty, Phillip Knightly suggests an important reason for the slowness with which reporters began to question U.S. tactics: most of the correspondents who went to Indochina had never covered a war before, and had no basis on which to conclude that the U.S. forces' brutality toward the civilian population was not common to all wars. They saw the racism toward the Vietnamese, the army's official refusal to acknowledge the damage the army was inflicting on a civilization. But it took correspondents a while to understand the size of the gap between official doublespeak and reality.

In such a situation, Michael Herr was lucky, and he knew it. Writing for Esquire meant that he could ignore the canons of establishment journalism; he could forget the official interviews with generals who spouted obvious lies, he could forget the press briefings. Vietnam didn't fit into the regular news style, but it fit Herr's. He was able to write long, first-person essays that were much more likely to capture the reality of the war than descriptions of troop movements. He could relate what the war was like from the troops' point of view, rather than the generals'; he could use the kind of language necessary to describe a horrifying war. The real story of Vietnam, Herr says, was lost amid the statistics, the jargon, the officials' optimistic statements. Herr writes: "The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was what it was really all about."

From where Herr watched, the war was insanity. Nothing made sense; things moved too fast, in a kaleidoscope of killing and death. Generals lied to the public, to their men, to themselves. The press was trapped into disseminating lies, under the guise of objective reporting. Soldiers--young men drafted from America's working and middle classes at 18--had to repress compassion in the face of the war's brutality. The man who handed around a bag of dried ears was only a little more extreme than many others.

"It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines," Herr writes; even he found himself caught up in the chaos, unable to separate himself from the action. "It was that joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear, and you could die laughing."

Herr's essays concentrate on the troops, on the soldiers' reactions to the war in which they found themselves. Because he had no need to pass along official statements to his readers, he could describe the soldiers' lives in detail, describe the kind of tension and privation that brutalized them. And he could show how the higher command failed miserably to provide adequate support for their troops, because the officers believed their own lies about kill ratios, retreats, urbanization, and a friendly civilian population. At Khe San, for instance, the "grunts" knew they were being placed in a death trap that the generals refused to acknowledge. And, like Herr, the "grunts" realized the insanity of the war, and could only deal with it by developing a sick humor. Herr reports their conversations, tucked in among the strains of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan:

"Tell me you ain't scared shit!"

"You'll never see me scared, motherfucker."

"Oh no. Three nights ago you was callin' out for your momma while them fuckers was hittin' our wire."

"Boo-sheeit! I ain't never gettin' hit in Vietnam."

"Oh no? Okay, motherfucker, why not?"

"'Cause," Mayhew said, "it don't exist." It was an old joke, but this time he wasn't laughing.

But even while he lived intimately with these young men--at 23, Herr was older than most of the Americans in Vietnam--Herr was conscious of the tension between them and himself. In "Colleagues," one of the essays in Dispatches, he examines a thought that he describes in less detail in several other essays. Unlike the draftees, the correspondents in Vietnam were volunteers, making their careers off the soldiers' battles, and the soldiers were always aware of it. In the back of their minds, Herr writes, all the correspondents were looking for the ultimate war movie, and it took them some time to discover that glamor wasn't going to be found in Vietnam. "I went to cover the war," he writes, "and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it."

There is one major gap in Dispatches: Herr never makes any attempt to examine the lives of the Vietnamese, never relates any interviews, never gauges the extent to which they supported the South Vietnamese government. Unlike, say, Gloria Emerson, who recently published Winners and Losers, he is interested in how Americans were fighting it, what it was like for the U.S. soldiers whose experiences were so warped by the vocabulary of the public relations people. There was a whole other reality in Indochina, but Herr leaves it to other writers who had more contact with the Vietnamese and Cambodians. And he offers no analysis of why the U.S. was there in the first place. This is a book about Americans, for Americans who experienced the war vicariously. Above all, Dispatches is an effort to bring the real war into the living rooms of middle America--the war that lay underneath the technocratic camoflauge. It is not a comfortable book, but it rings true, down to the very last image of a body wrapped in green plastic, tied to a helicopter pontoon.