Tag Archives: War

What we’re reading — Dispatches by Michael Herr

Positives have been hard to come by during the COVID-19 pandemic. But reading more books is definitely one of them. Without plays, movie theaters or sports for so long, and absent the regular hustle of commuting and socializing, there is plenty of time to give oneself permission to read books again. I’ve always envied those people who say they read like three-four books a month and wondered exactly where they found the time to do so in this modern, high-productivity world where you end up working even when you’re not technically on the clock. Even if I had somehow carved out that time when things were normal it would’ve felt like slacking to take, say, two hours in the middle of the day to read a big chunk of a book. Reading was reserved for evenings before bed, usually balked before long by sleep, and beach vacations with endlessly relaxed hours of leisure between breakfast and lunch with which to consume the literature of one’s choice while lying in the sun. But during these crazy, restricted circumstances the regular rhythms of workaday life have been so disrupted that there are vast swaths of time while “working” from home that are justifiably and easy filled with a bit of reading. And one of the best books that I’ve read during this forced hiatus in any genre or on any subject is Michael Herr’s Vietnam War classic, Dispatches.

Michael Herr in Vietnam – photo by Tim Page

I was honestly surprised that I hadn’t come across Dispatches before now since it is regarded as one of the classics on the subject if not the finest journalst’s account of the Vietnam conflict. Like many young Americans during the 1980s, I went through a major period of fascination with Vietnam during my school years over and above any mandatory history courses. Films like Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now, which echoed long after its initial 1979 release and continues to do so today, and then Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) seemed to ignite a resurgence of interest in that star-crossed war. I consumed a lot of first person accounts like Mark Baker’s grueling oral history, Nam, and Philip Caputo’s personal experiences there as a Marine lieutenant in combat, A Rumor of War. Yet somehow one of the very best of these accounts slipped through the cracks of my reading list those many years ago. So I’m all too happy to have “discovered” Dispatches now, however belatedly and however weird the present circumstances. Fortunately, I was reading an anthology of long reportage called The New Journalism (co-edited and featuring a long essay of principles by the late, legendary Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism’s leading practitioner and proponent), when I came across a brilliant excerpt of Herr’s writing and I knew I had to get the whole book.

“And at night it was beautiful. Even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.

I remembered 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 remembered myself 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, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.” — excerpt from Dispatches

Michael Herr –Photograph by Jane Bown

The late Michael Herr (b. 1940 – d. 2016) was a fairly green reporter with not much more than some rock criticism under his belt when he somehow wangled an assignment from Esquire to cover the war for them on the ground in Vietnam. Continue reading →

Classic Movie Watch — The Dirty Dozen (1967)

In a case of supremely ironic timing, Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen was released in 1967 at the height of the “Summer of Love.” As one of the toughest, nastiest and most fatalistic classic war movies, there is not a lot of love in the Dirty Dozen. But there is a killer plot, action galore and a very cool, badass ensemble cast of male stars who make the whole thing tick over like clockwork. Sharing the hard bitten cynicism and mordant humor that came to dominate the best 1960s WWII films like The Bridge At Remagen, Kelly’s Heroes and Where Eagles Dare, Dirty Dozen reflects both the experiences of the actual combat veterans who contributed to the making of the film, as well as the creeping disillusionment with the nation’s quickly souring military involvement in Vietnam. After the recent Spielbergian gloss given to World War II in the violent but heroic Saving Private Ryan and the excellent and idealistic Band of Brothers, where the action is doubtless brutal but the characters themselves are invariably heroic, one wonders whether today’s moviegoing public would be ready to accept a deranged group of criminal misfits like “The Dozen” as their heroes. But the audiences of the late 1960s made the film a colossal hit, so maybe that says something about the differing need for hero worship between that generation versus ours.

Loosely based on actual events, the plot of The Dirty Dozen unfolds in classic three-act action-adventure epic style: Picking the Men, Training the Men and the Mission. Only in this case the “elite force” being assembled is drawn from a group of convicts in military lockup facing either death sentences or decades-long prison time. And the mission is a suicidal attack on a German staff officer “rest & relaxation” chateau behind enemy lines in pre-D-Day Normandy. Drawing the unenviable task of assembling these misfits into a cohesive commando unit is maverick Major John Reisman, played by the inimitable Lee Marvin. If The Big Heat is Marvin’s apotheosis as the ultra-heavy villain, The Dirty Dozen reflects the archetype of Marvin’s remarkable second act as a lead actor in big films: still the hard man capable of extreme violence but in the end possessed of an individual code of honor that turns him from bad guy into ambiguous hero. As it would again later in Sam Fuller’s excellent The Big Red One, Marvin’s real life combat service as a Marine in the Pacific Theater, were he saw fierce action and was badly wounded, informs his performance as the sardonic and relentless Major Reisman as he badgers, threatens and cajoles his convict team into a cohesive fighting unit. Like many great coaches and military leaders, Reisman’s genius is to realize that if he can get the group of men to hate him they will in turn bond with each other.

thedirtydozen-2

And what a group! Featuring some of the most macho and physically imposing 1960’s actors, as well as some bona fide rising stars, the convicts include Charles Bronson as an honorable German-speaking Polish American convicted of shooting his unit’s cowardly medic; football great Jim Brown as another decent guy wrongly convicted of murder in a case of self defense against a racist attack (this is actually the film that prompted Brown’s premature retirement from the NFL); the towering Clint Walker as a gentle giant with a fierce temper; Telly Savalas as a despicable and crazy Bible-spouting southern racist and woman hater; a young Donald Sutherland as a dim but mischievous private; and a sterling John Cassavetes as a Chicago gangster with a serious problem with authority. Cassavetes really shines among this esteemed company, seeming to channel the ghost of Humphrey Bogart as he proves the biggest obstacle to Reisman’s grand plan, resisting him at every turn through sarcasm and tooth-baring indolence. Continue reading →