"Two hundred meters away, facing the Marine trenches, there was an NVA (North Vietnamese) sniper with a .50 caliber machine gun who shot at the Khe Sanh Marines from a tiny spider hole. During the day he fired at anything that rose above the sandbags, and at night he fired at any lights he could see. You could see him clearly from the trench, and if you were looking through the scope of a Marine sniper's rifle you could even see his face. The Marines fired on his position with mortars and recoilless rifles, and he would drop into his hole and wait. Gunships fired rockets at him, and when they were through he would come up again and fire. Finally napalm was called in, and for ten minutes the air above the spider hole was black and orange from the strike, while the ground around it was galvanized clean of every living thing. When all of it cleared, the sniper popped up and fired off a single round, and the Marines in the trenches cheered loudly. They called him Luke the Gook, and after that no one wanted anything to happen to him."
Imagine not wanting anything to happen to someone who is trying to kill you day and night, trying to give you some. There is nothing simple or straightforward about being a soldier at war. Pick up a copy of Herr's war correspondence to catch a glimpse.
I must admit I am not the first to trumpet this underappreciated text. In the words of John Le Carre, it is "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time". And no less of a trubadour for the 60s than Hunter S Thomspon admits: "We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived -- but Michael Herr's Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."
Read about Daytripper and lucky Orrin, Mayhew and the standoff against 40,000 invisible VC, lots of tracks going in, none coming out. Spend three weeks trying to take a hill where you believe 4,000 enemy are battling, take the hill and find four spooky bodies on the top. I'll let you read the rest.
Warning: Not for the feint of heart or the easily indignant.
Labels: film, literature
