Above : Author pic. Credit Jane Bown
The book is a glaringly, intense, read – a personal account of being a correspondent in Vietnam, that is without doubt the quintessentially most visceral, persuasive depiction of the unearthly experience of war.
I recall the words immortalised by Tim Page on Michael Herr: the Rock’N’Roll voice of the Vietnam War. Its the best contemporary war book I have ever read. The story is powered by the slang of the period and is the reality within the story. The language is beautiful, immediate, visceral and urgent, the dark and more elegiac side of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo opus Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Firstly some context: Americans never collectively rallied around and supported this war because much of the country couldn’t bring themselves to see America as the good guys in Vietnam. The involvement began by supporting the French in their fight to hold on to their colony. After the Viet Minh defeated the French and liberated their country, America prevented free democratic elections from taking place, to protect the Catholic ruling party from collapse and because they knew Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh would win the election.
For me it was the recommendation by Tom Wolfe that tempted me in my late youth to delve into the novel. Herr was in Vietnam writing for Esquire magazine and when it was published in 1977 was the first book to write from the perspective of the average American ‘grunt’. Herr wrote some of voice -over for the Apocalypse Now and co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket.
This book is a jarring dive through the fox holes and the madness of Vietnam. The dark insanity of it all, the laughing, stoned, thousand-yard stares and ‘crazy’ humour of the soldiers and the ever-waiting violence of a jungle war. It flicks its perspectives from the War correspondent, deep amid the flying shrapnel and the men doing the fighting. The details of the locations, different phases of war, different missions and technical jargon are all there but coloured in with the endless snippets of conversations with and between soldiers.The darkness that inhabits their every waking hour. Endless recollections of dead comrades, names nearly forgotten and some ‘shit’ they got up to.
The book dives from one mission to another, through the city warscape that we see in scenes in Full Metal Jacket. The scale of the American War machine is ever present, the tonnage of bombs used to wipe the very vegetation from the side of a hill, mostly without killing actual enemies. The pointless Catch 22 stupidity of those in charge. The further up the chain of command, the less grounded they are.
The comedy element comes more into play, as the story delves into the lives of the war correspondents, of which Vietnam had more than your average war, it seems. They are everywhere and they too formed their own bond which could never be broken. But their war was punctuated with holidays and breaks and they were all volunteers. Mostly what comes across and the reason this book had such a profound influence is that these men, who may not have once been normal, will never be again. They are affected forever, even the reporters. The ghosts will follow them around for the rest of their lives, and beyond..
The New Journalism style when applied to something so horrific and vivid, really does have a strong effect. It is claustrophobic at times, simply impossible to escape the horror.
You are there with them on the LZ, bullets whizzing over your head, deep in the jungle as you are ambushed again, flying sideways in a helicopter. as you take fire from the jungle. Vietnam sounds and feels like Hell on Earth. Michael Herr’s scabrous, hallucinatory, drug- inflected , grunt’s -eyeview of the Vietnam War melded journalism with fiction to forge an account of warfare unlike any before.
In the first chapter Breathing In, Herr counterpoints the relentless mobility of a chopper-driven war, where he first observes the gruesome extraction of the dead from the combat-zone, with completely stoned periods in Saigon, where no one’s drug of choice ever seems to be in short supply.
Hell Sucks describes the gruelling combat marking the siege of the Imperial City of Hue where 70% of the city and its priceless treasures were obliterated..
The self-destructive arrogance of the Command placed the undermanned Khe Sahn Combat Base in the midst of five NVA divisions in the dangerously mist-bound highlands bordering Laos, where the Marine Corps suffered appalling losses.
For it is the horror and obscenity of these lives lost in an insane war which Herr evokes so indelibly that makes this book superlative and classic.
