Dispatches

by Michael Herr

  On an afternoon shortly before the New Year, a few weeks before Tet, a special briefing was held in Saigon to announce the latest revisions in the hamlet-rating system of the Pacification program, the A-B-C-D profiling of the country’s security and, by heavy inference, of the government’s popular support “in the countryside,” which meant any place outside of Saigon, the boonies. A lot of correspondents went, many because they had to, and I spent the time with a couple of photographers in one of the bars on Tu Do, talking to some soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division who had come down from their headquarters at Lai Khe for the day. One of them was saying that Americans treated the Vietnamese like animals.

  “How’s that?” someone asked.

  “Well, you know what we do to animals … kill ’em and hurt ’em and beat on ’em so’s we can train ’em. Shit, we don’t treat the Dinks no different than that.”

  And we knew that he was telling the truth. You only had to look at his face to see that he really knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t judging it, I don’t think that he was even particularly upset about it, it was just something he’d observed. We mentioned it later to some people who’d been at the Pacification briefing, someone from the Times and someone from the AP, and they both agreed that the kid from the Big Red One had said more about the Hearts-and-Minds program than they’d heard in over an hour of statistics, but their bureaus couldn’t use his story, they wanted Ambassador Komer’s. And they got it and you got it.

  I could let you go on thinking that we were all brave, witty, attractive and vaguely tragic, that we were like some incomparable commando team, some hot-shit squadron, the Dreaded Chi, danger-loving, tender and wise. I could use it myself, it would certainly make for a prettier movie, but all of this talk about “we” and “us” has got to get straightened out.

  At the height of the Tet Offensive alone, there were between 600 and 700 correspondents accredited to the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Who all of them were and where all of them went was as much a mystery to me and to most of the correspondents I knew as it was to the gentle-tempered bull-faced Marine gunnery sergeant assigned to the department of JUSPAO which issued those little plastic-coated MACV accreditation cards. He’d hand them out and add their number to a small blackboard on the wall and then stare at the total in amused wonder, telling you that he thought it was all a fucking circus. (He’s the same man who told a television star, “Hold on to your ass awhile. You people from the electronic media don’t scare me anymore.”) There was nothing exclusive about that card or its operational match, the Bao Chi credential of the Republic of South Vietnam; thousands of them must have been issued over the years. All they did was admit you to the Vietnam press corps and tell you that you could go out and cover the war if you really wanted to. All kinds of people have held them at one time or another: feature writers for religious organs and gun magazines, summer vacationers from college newspapers (one paper sent two, a Hawk and a Dove, and we put it down because it hadn’t sent a Moderate over as well), second-string literary figures who wrote about how they hated the war more than you or I ever could, syndicated eminences who houseguested with Westmoreland or Bunker and covered operations in the presence of Staff, privileges which permitted them to chronicle fully our great victory at Tet, and to publish evidence year after year after year that the back of the Cong had been broken, Hanoi’s will dissolved. There was no nation too impoverished, no hometown paper so humble that it didn’t get its man in for a quick feel at least once. The latter tended to be the sort of old reporter that most young reporters I knew were afraid of becoming someday. You’d run into them once in a while at the bar of the Danang press center, men in their late forties who hadn’t had the chance to slip into uniform since V-J Day, exhausted and bewildered after all of those briefings and lightning visits, punchy from the sheer volume of facts that had been thrown on them, their tape recorders broken, their pens stolen by street kids, their time almost up. They’d been to see Cam Ranh Bay and quite a bit of the countryside (Mission diction, which meant that they’d been taken out to look at model or “New Life” hamlets), a crack ARVN division (where?), even some of our boys right there at the front (where?), and a lot of Military Information Office people. They seemed too awed by the importance of the whole thing to be very clear, they were too shy to make friends, they were all alone and speechless, except to say, “Well, when I came over here I thought it was pretty hopeless, but I have to admit, it looks like we’ve gotten things pretty much under control. I must say, I’ve been awfully impressed …” There were a lot of hacks who wrote down every word that the generals and officials told them to write, and a lot for whom Vietnam was nothing more than an important career station. There were some who couldn’t make it and left after a few days, some who couldn’t make it the other way, staying year after year, trying to piece together their very real hatred of the war with their great love for it, that rough reconciliation that many of us had to look at. A few came through with the grisliest hang-ups, letting it all go every chance they got, like the one who told me that he couldn’t see what all the fuss had been about, his M-16 never jammed. There were Frenchmen who’d parachuted into Dien Bien Phu during what they loved to call “the First Indochina War,” Englishmen sprung alive from Scoop (a press-corps standard because it said that if the papers didn’t get it, it didn’t happen), Italians whose only previous experience had been shooting fashion, Koreans who were running PX privileges into small fortunes, Japanese who trailed so many wires that transistor jokes were inevitable, Vietnamese who took up combat photography to avoid the draft, Americans who spent all their days in Saigon drinking at the bar of L’Amiral Restaurant with Air America pilots. Some filed nothing but hometowners, some took the social notes of the American community, some went in the field only because they couldn’t afford hotels, some never left their hotels. Taken all together, they accounted for most of the total on Gunny’s blackboard, which left a number of people, as many as fifty, who were gifted or honest or especially kind and who gave journalism a better name than it deserved, particularly in Vietnam. Finally, the press corps was as diffuse and faceless as any regiment in the war, the main difference being that many of us remained on our own orders.

  It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene, and some correspondents fell into that, writing their stories from the daily releases and battlegrams, tracking them through with the cheer-crazed language of the MACV Information Office, things like “discreet burst” (one of those tore an old grandfather and two children to bits as they ran along a paddy wall one day, at least according to the report made later by the gunship pilot), “friendly casualties” (not warm, not fun), “meeting engagement” (ambush), concluding usually with 17 or 117 or 317 enemy dead and American losses “described as light.” There were correspondents who had the same sensibility concerning the dead as the Command had: Well, in a war you’ve got to expect a little mud to get tracked over the carpet, we took a real black eye but we sure gave Charlie a shitstorm, we consider this a real fine kill ratio, real fine.… There was a well-known correspondent of three wars who used to walk around the Danang press center with a green accountant’s ledger. He’d sit down to talk and begin writing everything you’d say, entering it in, so to speak. The Marines arranged for a special helicopter (or “fragged a chopper,” as we used to call it) to take him in and out of Khe Sanh one afternoon, weeks after it had become peaceful again. He came back very cheerful about our great victory there. I was sitting with Lengle, and we recalled that, at the very least, 200 grunts had been blown away there and around 1,000 more wounded. He looked up from his ledger and said, “Oh, two hundred isn’t anything. We lost more than that in an hour on Guadalcanal.” We weren’t going to deal with that, so we sort of left the table, but you heard that kind of talk all the time, as though it could invalidate the deaths at Khe Sanh, render them somehow less dead than the dead from Guadalcanal, as thoug
h light losses didn’t lie as still as moderate losses or heavy losses. And these were American dead they were talking about; you should have heard them when the dead were Vietnamese.

  So there we all were, no real villains and only a few heroes, a lot of adventurers and a lot of drudges, a lot of beautiful lunatics and a lot of normals, come to report what was ultimately the normals’ war; and somehow, out of all that, a great number of us managed to find and recognize each other. You could be hard about it and deny that there was a brotherhood working there, but then what else could you call it? It wasn’t just some wartime clique of buddies, it was too large in number for that, including members of at least a dozen cliques, some of them overlapping until they became indistinguishable, others standing in contemptuous opposition to one another; and it was far too small to incorporate the whole bloated, amorphous body of the Vietnam press corps. Its requirements were unstated because, other than sensibility and style, it had none. Elsewhere, it would have been just another scene, another crowd, but the war gave it urgency and made it a deep thing, so deep that we didn’t even have to like one another to belong. There was a lot that went unsaid at the time, but just because it was seldom spoken didn’t mean that we weren’t very much aware of it or that, in that terrible, shelterless place, we weren’t grateful for each other.

  It made room for correspondents who were themselves members of Saigon’s American Establishment, it included young marrieds, all kinds of girl reporters, a lot of Europeans, the Ivy-League-in-Asia crowd, the Danang bunch, the Straights and the Heads, formals and funkies, old hands (many of whom were very young) and even some tourists, people who wanted to go somewhere to screw around for a while and happened to choose the war. There was no way of thinking about “who we were” because we were all so different, but where we were alike we were really alike. It helped if you went out on operations a lot or if you were good at your work, but neither was very necessary as long as you knew something of what the war was (as opposed to what the Mission and MACV told you it was), and as long as you weren’t a snob about it. We were all doing terribly upsetting work, it could often be very dangerous, and we were the only ones who could tell, among ourselves, whether that work was any good. Applause from home meant nothing next to a nice word from a colleague. (One reporter loved to call his New York superiors “those leg motherfuckers,” taking from Airborne the term for anyone who was not jump-qualified; if you can appreciate the 4th Division Lurp who called himself “The Baptist” even though he was an Episcopalian, you get the idea.) We were all studying the same thing, and if you got killed you couldn’t graduate.

  We were serious enough about what we were doing over there, but we were also enchanted by it (not even the most uncomplicated farmboy pfc can go through a war without finding some use for it), and even when you got tired, felt you’d had too much, grown old in an afternoon, there were ways to take that and work it back into the style that we all tried to maintain. Things had to get really bad before you saw the war as clearly as most troops came to see it, but those times were rare enough and we (Those Crazy Guys …) were incorrigible. Most of us had times when we swore that we’d never go near any of it again if we could only be allowed out this once, everybody made those deals, but a few days in Danang or Saigon or even Hong Kong or Bangkok would get you over that, and the choice to go back was still there, still yours, priceless option, property of the press corps.

  Friendships were made directly, with none of the clutter that had once seemed so necessary, and once they were made they outvalued all but your oldest, most special friendships. Your scene before Vietnam was unimportant, nobody wanted to hear about it, and we often seemed a little like those Green Berets out in their remote, harassed outposts, groups of eight or twelve Americans commanding hundreds of local mercenaries who could be as hostile as the Cong, who often were Cong; living together this way for months at a time without ever learning each other’s first names or hometowns. You could make friends elsewhere, a Special Forces captain in the Delta, a grunt up in Phu Bai, some decent, witty (and usually suffering) member of the Embassy Political Section. But whether you hung out with them or with other correspondents, all you ever talked about anyway was the war, and they could come to seem like two very different wars after a while. Because who but another correspondent could talk the kind of mythical war that you wanted to hear described? (Just hearing the way Flynn pronounced the word “Vietnam,” the tenderness and respect that he put in it, taught you more about the beauty and horror of the place than anything the apologists or explainers could ever teach you.) Who could you discuss politics with, except a colleague? (We all had roughly the same position on the war: we were in it, and that was a position.) Where else could you go for a real sense of the war’s past? There were all kinds of people who knew the background, the facts, the most minute details, but only a correspondent could give you the exact mood that attended each of the major epochs: the animal terror of the Ia Drang or the ghastly breakdown of the first major Marine operation, code-named Starlight, where the Marines were dying so incredibly fast, so far beyond the Command’s allowance, that one of them got zipped into a body bag and tossed to the top of a pile of KIA’s while he was still alive. He regained consciousness up there and writhed and heaved until his bag rolled to the ground, where some corpsmen found him and saved him. The Triangle and Bong Son were as remote as the Reservoir or Chickamauga, you had to hear the history from somebody you could trust, and who else could you trust? And if you saw some piece of helmet graffiti that seemed to say everything, you weren’t going to pass it along to some colonel or tell it to a Psyops official. “Born to Kill” placed in all innocence next to the peace symbol, or “A sucking chest wound is Nature’s way of telling you that you’ve been in a firefight” was just too good to share with anyone but a real collector, and, with very few exceptions, those were all correspondents.

  We shared a great many things: field gear, grass, whiskey, girls (that Men Without Women trip got old all the time), sources, information, hunches, tips, prestige (during my first days there bureau chiefs from Life and CBS took me around to introduce everyone they could think of, and somebody did as much for other new arrivals), we even shared each other’s luck when our own seemed gone. I was no more superstitious than anyone else in Vietnam, I was very superstitious, and there were always a few who seemed so irrefutably charmed that nothing could make me picture them lying dead there; having someone like that with you on an operation could become more important than any actual considerations about what might be waiting on the ground for you. I doubt whether anything else could be as parasitic as that, or as intimate.

  And by some equation that was so wonderful that I’ve never stopped to work it out, the best and the bravest correspondents were also usually the most compassionate, the ones who were most in touch with what they were doing. Greenway was like that, and so were Jack Laurence and Keith Kay, who worked together as a reporter-camera team for CBS for nearly two years. And there was Larry Burrows, who had been photographing the war for Life since 1962, a tall, deliberate Englishman of about forty with one of the most admirable reputations of all the Vietnam correspondents. We were together on one of the lz’s that had been built for the operation that was supposedly relieving Khe Sanh, and Burrows had run down to take pictures of a Chinook that was coming in to land. The wind was strong enough to send tarmac strips flying fifty feet across the lz and he ran through it to work, photographing the crew, getting the soldiers coming down the incline to board the chopper, getting the kids throwing off the mailbags and cartons of rations and ammunition, getting the three wounded being lifted carefully on board, turning again to get the six dead in their closed body bags, then the rise of the chopper (the wind now was strong enough to tear papers out of your hand), photographing the grass blown flat all around him and the flying debris, taking one picture each of the chopper rearing, settling and departing. When it was gone he looked at me, and he seemed to be in the most open distr
ess. “Sometimes one feels like such a bastard,” he said.

  And that was one more thing we shared. We had no secrets about it or the ways it could make you feel. We all talked about it at times, some talked about it too much, a few never seemed to talk about anything else. That was a drag, but it was all in the house; you only minded it when it came from outside. All kinds of thieves and killers managed to feel sanctimonious around us; battalion commanders, civilian businessmen, even the grunts, until they realized how few of us were making any real money in it. There’s no way around it, if you photographed a dead Marine with a poncho over his face and got something for it, you were some kind of parasite. But what were you if you pulled the poncho back first to make a better shot, and did that in front of his friends? Some other kind of parasite, I suppose. Then what were you if you stood there watching it, making a note to remember it later in case you might want to use it? Those combinations were infinite, you worked them out, and they involved only a small part of what we were thought to be. We were called thrill freaks, death-wishers, wound-seekers, war-lovers, hero-worshipers, closet queens, dope addicts, low-grade alcoholics, ghouls, communists, seditionists, more nasty things than I can remember. There were people in the military who never forgave General Westmoreland for not imposing restrictions against us when he’d had the chance in the early days. 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. A lot of the grunts had some of that sly, small-town suspicion of the press, but at least nobody under the rank of captain ever asked me whose side I was on, told me to get with the program, jump on the team, come in for the Big Win. Sometimes they were just stupid, sometimes it came about because they had such love for their men, but sooner or later all of us heard one version or another of “My Marines are winning this war, and you people are losing it for us in your papers,” often spoken in an almost friendly way, but with the teeth shut tight behind the smiles. It was creepy, being despised in such casual, offhanded ways. And there were plenty of people who believed, finally, that we were nothing more than glorified war profiteers. And perhaps we were, those of us who didn’t get killed or wounded or otherwise fucked up.