On Narratives of War
I read Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) as a teenager and didn’t get it. The praise — John Le Carré’s dithyrambs, on the paperback cover, there — didn’t seem to me to describe the bitty, centripetal, disorienting book I was reading. But of course the bittiness, the centripetal disorientation, was entirely the point, a gloss on combat as existentially deracinating and confusing. I re-read the book recently. It’s superb.
The book begins with Herr remembering how free the US Army was with drugs in the 1960s: Dexedrine and others. Herr discloses that, personally, he never needed these pills and stimulants, since war itself was stimulating enough for him. Even the remote sound of combat, distant gunfire, was enough to punch the adrenaline through his system, ‘like an elephant sitting on my chest’. But other soldiers made use of them, and one soldier that Herr knew took handfuls of pills, day and night. We’re not given his name.
This was his third tour. In 1965 he’d been the only survivor in a platoon of the Cav wiped out going into the Ia Drang Valley. In 66 he’d come back with the Special Forces and one morning after an ambush he’d hidden under the bodies of his team while the VC walked all around them with knives, making sure. They stripped the bodies of their gear, the berets too, and finally went away, laughing. After that, there was nothing left for him in the war except the Lurps.
A Lurp is a long-range reconaissance patrol. This is the first soldier we meet in the novel, and Herr describes, or establishes (since so many Vietnam movies drew on this book for their tropes), a distinctive, even archetypal combatant:
I think he slept with his eyes open, and I was afraid of him anyway. All I ever managed was one quick look in, and that 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. Even at division he never went anywhere without at least a .45 and a knife, and he thought I was a freak because I wouldn’t carry a weapon.
In what I take to be (Herr, who worked as a journalist after the war, published the novel as reportage, but later revealed that he’d made much of it up, and insisted it should rather be considered a novel) a deliberate reference to Moby Dick, Herr then gives us this individual’s proto-narrative of war:
But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story as ever I heard, it took me a year to understand it.
‘Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.’
I waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story; when I asked him what had happened he just looked like he felt sorry for me, fucked if he’d waste time telling stories to anyone dumb as I was.
This is bold of Herr, narratively-speaking, as the opening move in a long book — a long novel — that presents as a mosaic of war-stories. All such stories, Herr is saying, are mendacious. The truth of war is unstoryable, for story requires, as a very basic precondition, at least Moby Dick’s Jobian And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Some soldiers do survive war of course, and Herr was one such; and men who survive war do tell their tales, as Herr did. But Dispatches is saying: these narratives cannot get at the heart of war, since the heart of war is killing and dying, and the killed and the dead do not go further in their storytelling than the blank assertion, wordless and incompletable, of their deadness. There’s something profound in that.
