I’ve spent the weekend working on an essay about how the working poor fight our wars. No military writing can be the same, though, after a writer reads Michael Herr’s accounts of Vietnam in 1967-1968, written in country for Esquire Magazine. (I just re-read that sentence, and I know it’s weak, but it will have to stand. My brain is one long, slow blur. It’s all I can do to keep half an eye on The L-Word.)
I had the luxury of being a Cold War warrior. The closest I came to danger was when I was issued a bad holster in an exercise and unknown to me my .38 dangled out of my holster (nothing can make people scatter faster than a pistol with a mind of its own). The Air Force I knew was the one-mistake, supply-side, all-volunteer military. It’s hard to imagine what Vietnam was like. This summer I plan to read the rest of Dispatches (for class this week I read “Illumination Rounds”) and find out.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Our plan to rule the world advances one more step! - 2007
- Step Away Quietly - 2006
- Librarian Writers, Part Deux - 2004
My other favorite Vietnam book is “The Things They Carried.” Fiction, yes. True, yes.
I had the privilege of being an air evac medic in Vietnam with the USAF, 903rd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, in 1967-68 and strongly recommend Michael Herr’s book. It’s an important book that sadly has not been read lately otherwise we wouldn’t be in the same sink hole in Iraq. Can it be a quagmire since it’s mostly desert land? Change the date and location of news from the Pentagon and we’re hearing the same double speak. As the French say, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
As for us Vietnam vets, we will soon be relegated to history’s trash bin, living in our memories that become less real as time passes and greeting a nostalgic point of view as the drug of a youth we never really understood. Herr’s book should be required reading for all of us so that the revisionist that have begun to rewrite history get it right. War sucks, serves no useful purpose and is the aprodisiac of the powerful. Thanks for bringin the book to light.
I’ve been meaning to check out your blog, KS. Glad to finally get here. I didn’t know you were in the military. Learn something new every day. Read Fields of Fire by James Webb. A good Vietnam novel that I read in college along with Dispatches. I recently heard of a new book, Hero Mama, on NPR. The reminiscences of a young woman who lost her dad to the Vietnam War and whose mother carried the family following his death. I’m a military brat myself–we didn’t do the hard core traveling, but I grew up attached to Fort Bragg, NC. That war caused a lot of different casualties. I wonder daily why the hell we (the U.S.) are going there again. See you in Chicago maybe.
Recently read, and have written about, “Illumination Rounds” for a composition class I’m taking. A bit difficult at first, but well worth the effort….
After Sebald’s “The Rings of Saturn,” the term “difficult” has taken on relative meaning for me…