Reviews…
Michael Herr, Tim Page: a note of thanks
I take it from my bookshelf, its covers creased, its pages yellowed by time, its words the language of what was known as the ‘new journalism’ that described an experience alien to people in the safety of their living rooms. Just as the war it describes marked a separation that split apart American society, so did Dispatches mark its own separation from the reportage of the time.
THE PASSING of Michael Herr in 2016 marked the loss of one of the greatest exponents of the New Journalism, now known as ‘creative nonfiction’, the genre that revived the then-staid practice of journalism of its time. Although the genre borrowed characters, plot and storyline from fiction writing, it belongs firmly in journalism. Guardian journalist, Sian Cain, put it this way in regard to its exponent, Michael Herr:
“Herr was one of the most respected writers of New Journalism, the novelistic reportage pioneered by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote, where the journalist is as much part of the story as their subject. He practised this most famously in his book Dispatches, about his time working as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam between 1967 to 1969”.
Dispatches. A dog-eared, time-worn copy of the book sits on my bookshelf. Its pages yellowed by time, it was years ago that I read it. Maybe I read it twice, I don’t remember. It is an immersive read. Is that the right term to describe something that leaves an imprint in your head? I’ve recently felt the urge to read it again. I will.
Dispatches was published a good decade after Herr returned to the US. It is a report of his time in South Vietnam during those incredible years. They were a time when President Lyndon Johnston’s oft-mentioned ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ began to fade. Johnson used that term to buoy-up home support for a war that was looking more and more tired and that was generating more and more resistance on the streets of America as well as those of Australian cities. That light at the end of that long dark tunnel continued to fade until it was finally extinguished as the choppers evacuated the last Americans from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon as South Vietnam collapsed and a troubled, tumultuous period of history came to an end. Who can’t remember Australian film journalist, Neil Davis’ footage of the North Vietnamese Army tank crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon? If anything did, those few minutes of film signified the extinguishing of Johnson’s fabled but forever-elusive light.
The fading of the light. We could see it coming. It was heralded by the Tet offensive and the battle for Hue. It was glossed over at the five o’clock follies, the US Army’s afternoon press briefings in Saigon attended by an increasingly cynical press corps where the military tried to sound positive about the progress of the war as things were falling apart. Herr avoided these increasingly unbelievable shows.
Dispatches begins like this: “There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore.”
Herr was one of a coterie of correspondents and photojournalists who reported the confusion, the faulty strategies and tactics, the magical thinking that dragged the war on and on. Years later, I was speaking to one of them in Byron Bay. He was a shooter (camera, not M16) for AP (Associated Press, one of the big news agencies fielding reporters and photojournalists who produced the news and the images that the newspapers and magazines picked up). An American, he lasted a year there. That was long enough, he told me. Herr spent twice that time and we have Dispatches to show for it.
Dispatches is a gritty, visceral story of the people in that war. I’m not going to describe it because that might spoil your reading of the book. But do that, read it. It is the story of a time many of us went through whether we were there or back at home. A crazy time, a wonderful time and assuredly a strange time. Didn’t another New Journalist exponent, Hunter S Thompson, once say something about how people who survived the decade spent the next one trying to make sense of it all? There is truth in what he said. Some of us are still trying to do that. The rest have given up.
Herr went on to work with the film producer, Francis Cappola, on the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now that was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (it’s only a thin little book — read it three times now). Herr’s Dispatches contributed to the film. This is where photojournalist and author, Tim Page, comes into the story. Tim, living then in Australia, left us in August 2022. His work covered the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and coverage of later conflicts as well as photography for music magazine, Rolling Stone. According to Francis Cappola, Tim inspired his photojournalist character played by Dennis Hopper in the film.
On the passing of Tim Page, the Newcastle Herald’s Tim Hanscombe wrote in an article entitled ‘the renegade photojournalist who brought the war home’:
Page worked alongside people like Sean Flynn, the son of Australian actor Errol Flynn and who disappeared in Cambodia in 1970, and Michael Herr, whose book Dispatches is one of the best accounts of the Indochina conflict. Renowned for putting himself dangerously close to the action, Page was wounded four times. He was the inspiration for the unhinged photographer in Kurtz’s redoubt, played by Dennis Hopper, in Apocalypse Now.
It was a remarkable time in the history of journalism. Reporters would rush into the field in the morning and be back in the evening to write up their stories and process film and print photos. And the perils weren’t confined to the battlefield. Drugs were readily available and in the hothouse of 1960s Saigon, the go-to psychological salve for the mental torment of covering the war.
Whether you were there, whether you were an opponent of the war out on the streets trying to stop it, or whether you were a stay-at-home patriot, Dispatches is worth your reading.
So thanks Michael Herr for your risky and insightful time in South Vietnam, the trial of writing the book, for the stories it contains and for your contribution to the New Journalism. And thanks Tim Page for bringing the wars of our time into our living rooms through your photography. You both made the distant real by showing us what was happening out in the world.
Michael Herr’s Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Herr
Read Sain Cain’s perspective in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/24/michael-herr-author-of-dispatches-dies-aged-76?CMP=oth\_b-aplnews\_d-3
See: https://youtu.be/FKYBToAkzrA at 3.06 minutes into the footage.
See: https://youtu.be/IdR2Iktffaw for a report of Saigon’s final day.
Tim Page: Tim_Page_(photographer)
Newcastle Herald on Tim page: tim-page-the-renegade-photojournalist-who-brought-the-war-home
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