By Stuart Mitchner

Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.

—Michael Herr (1940-2016)

All I need to do is type “nyt” on the iMac and Paul Krugman is hurrying past “the horror in Dallas” on his way to the subject of the day. In his column headed “A Week from Hell” Charles M. Blow is asking “soul-of-a-nation questions.” On Sunday’s virtual front page of the Times, a detective from Queens says, “This is insanity. It’s just freaking horrendous.” The African American Dallas police chief David Brown “cannot adequately express” the sadness he feels. 

Expressing the Inexpressible

A landmark among the favored tropes for people attempting to express the profoundly inexpressible is Joseph Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” from his short novel The Heart of Darkness. T.S. Eliot used it, along with the sentences preceding it, as the epigraph for an early draft of The Waste Land, and, for better or worse, it was the Open Sesame to John Milius’s screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Crying out in “that supreme moment of complete knowledge” at “some image, some vision,” Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz cracks and breaks and Conrad’s ivory trader Mr. Kurtz goes mad, literary/cinematic improvements on what the nameless detective from Queens was conveying when he said, “This is insanity.”

In Dispatches (1977), Michael Herr, who died June 23, doesn’t need to quote Conrad. He’s got a whole arsenal of analogies and paradigms for horror, coming at it head-on when he writes that “something so horrible happened in the Khe Sanh sector that even those of us who were in Hue when we heard the news of it had to relinquish our own fear and despair for a moment to acknowledge the horror and pay some tribute to it.” Herr goes on to speak of “anticipated nightmares so vile that they could take you off shuddering in your sleep.” Of the few survivors of the attack on a Special Forces camp, “it was said that some of them had become insane.”

There it is again: if the event you witness is sufficiently horrific, you lose your mind. But simply saying it is too easy. Herr pushes on by going eye to eye with, in this instance, a 20-year-old blonde Marine: “It was the eyes: because they were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank …. On that young, nondescript face the smile seemed to come out of some old knowledge, and it said, ‘I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.’” The Marine has been cleared to fly back to the States, says his goodbyes, but never quite makes it out of Khe Sanh. In describing this seeming attachment to the nightmare — better to stay in hell than risk being destroyed while making your escape — Herr mentions Vietnam’s spawning of a “jargon of … delicate locutions” leading to phrases like “acute environmental reaction,” more crudely known as shell shock. Discussing the lesson he learned in Vietnam, “that you were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did,” Herr admits that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until years later, that “a lot of it stayed stored in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn’t frozen, you are.”

Herr is once again most effective when he moves in for a close-up, describing a man opening fire with an M-16 on full automatic “making the bodies wince and shiver.” Herr writes: “I knew I hadn’t seen anything until I saw his face. It was flushed and mottled and twisted like he had his face skin on inside out, a patch of green that was too dark, a streak of red running into bruise purple, a lot of sick gray white in between, he looked like he’d had a heart attack out there. His eyes were rolled up half into his head, his mouth was sprung open and his tongue was out, but he was smiling.”

Then there’s the soldier of whom it’s said, “I’m sorry, he’s just too crazy for me …. All’s you got to do is look in his eyes.” When Herr risks a glance, “it was like looking at the floor of an ocean. He wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar.” At this point Herr makes a significant connection: “His face was all painted up for night walking now like a bad hallucination, not like the painted faces I’d seen in San Francisco only a few weeks before, the other extreme of the same theater.”

The same theater also houses the Vietnam of Apocalypse Now, which begins with Jim Morrison and the Doors on the soundtrack performing “The End” (John Milius wrote his screenplay listening to Wagner and The Doors), and ends with Marlon Brando’s T.S. Eliot-quoting rogue Colonel Kurtz slowly, studiously, philosophically parsing the words, enunciating “hor-ror … hor-ror ….”

Deadly Beauty

The fantastical carnival-glorious pyrotechnics of Apocalypse Now are sketched out in Dispatches: “Flares were dropping everywhere around the fringes of the perimeter, laying a dead white light on the high ground rising from the piedmont. There would be dozens of them at once sometimes, trailing an intense smoke, dropping white-hot sparks, and it seemed as though anything caught in their range would be made still, like figures in a game of living statues. There would be the muted rush of illumination rounds, fired from 60-mm. mortars inside the wire, dropping magnesium-brilliant above the NVA trenches.” Herr takes the deadly beauty dynamic to the next level: A direct hit on a supply of NVA ammunition “was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.”

Herr then remembers “the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him,” and “how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death ….”

The mixture of beauty and horror may have prompted the reference to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Robert Stone’s introduction to the Everyman edition of Dispatches, where Herr “speaks with the Mariner’s stricken urgency and, like that figure, once he engages our attention he holds us fast so that we cannot choose but to hear. It is as though the writer moves like a magician over the unlucky country of Vietnam and in one blinding shell-burst after another reveals some new field of sorrow, disfigurement, or death.”

Saying It With Music

Around this time last year at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, President Obama had the courage to begin, a cappella, the singing of “Amazing Grace” — a shining example of what it means to “rise to the occasion.” In the Vietnam of Dispatches, where people “talked about Aretha’s ‘Satisfaction’ the way other people speak of Brahms’ Fourth,” the music best suited to the occasion of war is rock and roll. One of the characters with more than a walk-on part in Herr’s “theater” is a black from Motown known as Day Tripper, not so much for the song by the Beatles but because he was “afraid of the night — not the dark but the night.” The helmet Herr wears is inscribed “Time Is on My Side.” Another, lesser known Rolling Stones song, “Citadel,” is paired with the battle centered on the citadel of Imperial City of Hue. In Saigon, Herr sees a man sleeping with a poncho over his head and a radio in his arms on which Sam the Sham is singing, “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” (“I don’t think big girls should, Go walking in these spooky old woods alone”).

Also in Saigon, one of Herr’s fellow journalists responds to Jimi Hendrix’s “long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?”

“There It Is”

Herr chooses not to identify the one song he quotes at length, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” which is played by a DJ on the Armed Forces Radio Network (“moving right along here with our fabulous Sounds of the Sixties”). People who hadn’t been paying attention to the previous number ask for it to be turned up (“It was a song that had been on the radio a lot that winter” ): “There’s something happening here,/What it is ain’t exactly clear.’/There’s a man with a gun over there,/Tellin’ me I’ve got to beware./I think it’s time we stopped, children./What’s that sound?/Everybody look what’s goin down ….”

There it is, then and now: music to listen to while reading the front page of the New York Times. In Vietnam, according to Robert Stone, “‘There it is’” was “a despairing catchphrase to signify the presence of some ineluctable force at the core of the situation. The force would appear suddenly … as if to explain everything, shimmer for an instant and be gone, a malign antic spirit. It never stayed in view long enough to disclose useful intelligence but people came to recognize it. ‘There it is,’ they would say, just to let their friends know they had seen it and to be sure their friends had seen it too.”