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War weary: if Iraq is not another Vietnam, why do I find myself rereading Dispatches?

Article Excerpt
Last fall, everyone I knew was talking about Vietnam. Not that we hadn't been talking about it before. Ever since the invasion of Iraq, those of us old enough to remember had been unpleasantly struck by the parallels: blundering engagement in a country of whose history and culture our government was largely ignorant, a country unilaterally declared vital to our national interests by an administration that hustled Congress into supporting intervention based on falsehoods. (Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda not specious enough for you? Try Robert McNamara's characterization of a 1964 North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer secretly gathering intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin as "unprovoked.") By late 2006, as the disconnect grew ever wider between the Bush administration's assertions and what was actually going on, as "stay the course" began to sound a lot like "light at the end of the tunnel," Vietnam loomed larger and larger. Suddenly, I found myself rereading Dispatches.

Michael Herr's brilliant, bitter, and loving book was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1977, and the critical consensus has held steady ever since. Somehow, a young journalist whose previous experience consisted mostly of travel pieces and film criticism man aged to transform himself into a wild new kind of war correspondent capable of comprehending a disturbing new kind of war. "Herr is the only writer I've read who has written in the mad-pop-poetic/bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Vietnam has lived," wrote playwright and Vietnam draftee David Rabe. John le Carre called Dispatches "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." It created enough of a sensation to prompt me to shell out $8.95 for the hard cover, a lot of money for a college undergraduate in 1978. That was less than three years after North Vietnamese troops had marched into Saigon, during the odd political lull between Richard Nixon's resignation and Ronald Reagan's election. I read Dispatches then through particularly rose-colored glasses, confident that we had learned the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate. In the ensuring 29 years, my awe at Herr's achievement has never lessened, but each of the three times I've re-read it, I've found new things. The book hasn't changed, of course, but I have.

On first reading, the images Dispatches implanted in my mind were unquestionably harrowing: the corpse-strewn streets of ruined Hue, Vietnam's imperial city; the spooky vistas of Khe Sanh, where the Marines endured near-perpetual fire from ghostly North Vietnamese divisions invisible in the jungle. But those blasted landscapes painted in swaggering rock 'n' roll brushstrokes were as remote from my own experiences as the implacable rituals of guilt and expiation in Greek drama--indeed, I naively thought the book offered overdue catharsis for the Vietnam tragedy and expressed a new national consensus about it.

Herr's contempt for the authorities who had dumped American troops into combat, Iris matter-of-fact depiction of that combat as senseless, dehumanizing, and futile, seemed like givens. Didn't everyone feel that way by 1978? My liberal, urban friends certainly did, and few voices anywhere were being raised in defense of a military and political strategy whose ultimate fruits (helicopters evacuating the last Marines from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon while desperate, abandoned Vietnamese civilians swarmed the grounds below) were a painful...

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