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A review by paul_cornelius
Dispatches by Michael Herr
4.0
Because Herr and Gus Hasford both contributed to the scripting of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, their two works on the Vietnam War, Hasford's The Short-Timers and Herr's Dispatches, will always be linked and compared. And there are a great many similarities, although Hasford's novel is fiction and and Herr's an imaginative example of New Journalism. Both books, for example, track the story of war correspondents from Hue to Khe Sanh in 1968. And both writers experiment with the formal nature of their works, Hasford's prose poem and Herr's poetry-filled recreation of the turning point of the war, Tet in 1968.
But there is a significant difference. As a work of fiction, The Short-Timers erases the boundary between the reader and the subject. The essence of all becomes reflected in the point of view of Hasford's Joker. Herr never does that. He comes so very close to it but never makes the final leap. The journalist always remains there, a thin film, sometimes just a vapor, separating readers from the war, from the dead, the dying, the living-dying. It's a club whose membership requirements are all too strict for a mere reader to attain. And sometimes we need the distance in order to take it all in, in order to keep from being trapped in Hasford's "world of shit."
The sections on the battles for Hue and Khe Sanh are some of the best journalism ever written on those major turning points in the (perception) of the war. But the best section is that which deals with Herr's colleagues, his fellow journalists and war photographers. And of those, three stick out. The descriptions of Sean Flynn, Dana Stone, and Tim Page are haunting. Literally. For Flynn, the son of Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn, along with Stone, simply disappeared one day while motorcycling Phnom Penh in Cambodia back to Saigon in 1970. Fellow photojournalist Tim Page, Flynn's close friend, has since made it something of a lifelong mission to discover their fate. As late as 2010, Page was still chasing their ghosts.
But there is a significant difference. As a work of fiction, The Short-Timers erases the boundary between the reader and the subject. The essence of all becomes reflected in the point of view of Hasford's Joker. Herr never does that. He comes so very close to it but never makes the final leap. The journalist always remains there, a thin film, sometimes just a vapor, separating readers from the war, from the dead, the dying, the living-dying. It's a club whose membership requirements are all too strict for a mere reader to attain. And sometimes we need the distance in order to take it all in, in order to keep from being trapped in Hasford's "world of shit."
The sections on the battles for Hue and Khe Sanh are some of the best journalism ever written on those major turning points in the (perception) of the war. But the best section is that which deals with Herr's colleagues, his fellow journalists and war photographers. And of those, three stick out. The descriptions of Sean Flynn, Dana Stone, and Tim Page are haunting. Literally. For Flynn, the son of Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn, along with Stone, simply disappeared one day while motorcycling Phnom Penh in Cambodia back to Saigon in 1970. Fellow photojournalist Tim Page, Flynn's close friend, has since made it something of a lifelong mission to discover their fate. As late as 2010, Page was still chasing their ghosts.