Speaking Of Books ...
A few weeks ago Full Metal Jacket was on cable. I watched a few minutes of it and decided that since I had only seen it once many many years ago that I needed to Netflix it. I did some Net surfing on the movie and discovered that Michael Herr had been a co-writer of the movie. Turns out it is the same Michael Herr who wrote the introduction of the edition of Rock Dreams that I own. I did some surfing on Herr and found out that he had written a highly-acclaimed book on the Vietnam War, Dispatches. I headed to the downtown library the following Saturday to check out a copy of the book. Shortly after I cracked it open, I was blown away. As he writes in the book, he covered the war for Esquire, and didn't have a daily or weekly deadline to meet. So he captured vignettes and moments. Herr is not only a stylist with talent to burn, he has damn good eyes and ears. To wit:
In Chu Lai some Marines pointed a man out to me and swore to God they'd seen him bayonet a wounded NVA and then lick the bayonet clean. There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much." Well, they said you needed a sense of humor, there you go, even the VC had one. Once after an ambush that killed a lot of Americans, they covered the field with copies of a photograph that showed one more young, dead American, with the punch line mimeographed on the back, "Your X-rays have just come back from the lab and we think we know what your problem is."
This scene occurs early in the book and isn't out of the ordinary as the book reads on. As I got further in the book, I was impressed by the kindness that ordinary infantrymen showed Herr during his time in or near the action - they would offer him an air mattress to sleep on or go look for a stretcher to crash on when they would end up sleeping on the ground. When Herr was back in safe positions at a restaurant or bar, "grunts" who recognized him from earlier in the war would seek him out, sit with him, and tell him stories.
Like I said, this book blew me away. Highly recommended, oh-so-highly.