DISPATCHES (1977)Michael Herr

Media War

“There were officers and a lot of seemingly naïve troops who believed that if it were not for us, there would be no war now, and I was never able to argue with any of them on that point.” (230)

Sean Flynn, Time photojournalist

“An epiphany of Hue appeared in John Olson’s great photograph for Life, the wounded from Delta Company hurriedly piled on a tank.”

-Dispatches, 80

The Vietnam War, 1964-75

• Domino Effect• Proxy War• Gulf of Tonkin

Resolution (1964)• Tet Offensive (1968)• Vietnamization

“Not that you didn’t hear some overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and Minds, Peoples of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah. . .” (20)

“Life-as-movie, war-as-(war-)movie”

The Green Berets (1968) Apocalypse Now (1979)

Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. (261)

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it. . . (220)