Dispatches (33 page)

BOOK: Dispatches

5.76Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Debriefed by dreams, friends coming in from the other side to see that I was still alive. Sometimes they looked 500 years old and sometimes they looked exactly as I’d known them, but standing in a strange light; the light told the story, and it didn’t end like any war story I’d ever imagined. If you can’t find your courage in a war, you have to keep looking for it anyway, and not in another war either; in where it’s old and jammed until the rocks start moving around, a little light and air, long time no see. Another frequency, another information, and death no deterrent to receiving it. The war ended, and then it really ended, the cities “fell,” I watched
the choppers I’d loved dropping into the South China Sea as their Vietnamese pilots jumped clear, and one last chopper revved it up, lifted off and flew out of my chest.

I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press center had been, where we’d sat smoking and joking and going, “Too much!” and “Far out!” and “Oh my God it gets so freaky out there!” He looked so unbelievably peaceful, I knew that somewhere that night and every night there’d be people sitting together over there talking about the bad old days of jubilee and that one of them would remember and say, Yes, never mind, there were some nice ones, too. And no moves left for me at all but to write down some few last words and make the dispersion, Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
V
INTAGE
B
OOKS

FIRE IN THE LAKE
The Vietnamese
and the Americans in Vietnam
by Frances FitzGerald

This landmark book by one of our most acclaimed journalists was the first to portray the war not only from the American point of view but also through the eyes of the Vietnamese themselves. Meshing historical, political, and cultural analysis with a sure command of narrative,
Fire in the Lake
gives life to the most important and elusive figures in the conflict.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
,
the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize
History/Political Science/0-679-72394-3

DISPATCHES
by Michael Herr

These pieces portray the frightening, grotesque, and absurd aspects of a senseless war as seen from the trenches.

“What a passionate, compassionate, brilliant book this is. With uncanny precision it summons up the very essence of that war—its space diction, its surreal psychology, its bitter humor—the dope, the dexedrine, the body bags, the rot, all of it.… I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, any war, that any writer has ever accomplished.”

—Robert Stone,
Chicago Tribune

Vintage International
Military History/Vietnam/0-679-73525-9

ONCE UPON A DISTANT WAR
David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan
,
Peter Arnett—Young War Correspondents
and Their Early Vietnam Battles
by William Prochnau

The American reporters who came to Vietnam in 1961 expected to write about an exotic little war in a country of tigers and elephants. What they found instead was a debacle in the making, in which American pilots flew missions illegally while their Vietnamese counterparts strafed the presidential palace. When they reported what they saw, they were pilloried for it at home. But they ended up making history simply by telling the truth. “Riveting … a mythic creation.”—
Washington Post Book World

History/Vietnam/0-679-77265-0

A BRIGHT SHINING LIE
John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
by Neil Sheehan

When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors the war should be fought another way. By the time he died, Vann had embraced the follies he once decried. Sheehan’s tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America’s seduction, entrapment, and disillusionment in Vietnam.