Dispatches by Michael Herr

Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage (August 6, 1991)

The war has changed, the society has evolved, but we are the same.

Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lurid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one, I don’t know how to tell you how complicated that made my life. Freezing and burning and going down again into the sucking mud of the culture, hold on tight and move real slow.

…

I saw a picture of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting in the same spot on the Danang River where the press centre had been, where we’d sat smoking and joking and going, ‘Too much!’ and ‘Far out!’ and ‘Oh my God its 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 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.

pp. 261-262