from Dispatches by Michael Herr:
Page 2,
"At the end of my first week in country I met an information officer in
the headquarters of the 25th Division at Cu Chi who showed me on his map
and then from his chopper what they'd done to the Ho Bo Woods, the
vanished Ho Bo Woods taken off by giant Rome plows and chemicals and long,
slow fire, wasting hundreds of acres of cultivated plantation and wild
forest alike, 'denying the enemy valuable resources and cover.'
"It had been part of his job for nearly a year now to tell people about
that operation; correspondents, touring congressmen, movie stars,
corporation presidents, staff officers from half the armies in the world,
and he still couldn't get over it. It seemed to be keeping him young, his
enthusiasm made you feel that even the letters he wrote home to his wife
were full of it, it really showed what you could do if you had the
know-how and the hardware. And if in the months following that operation
incidences of enemy activity in the larger area of War Zone C had
increased "significantly," and American losses had doubled and then
doubled again, none of it was happening in any damn Ho Bo Woods, you'd
better believe it. . . ."
Page 223,
"I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years
of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You
don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those
grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a
television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their
heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire,
getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the
war hadn't done that to them."
Page 229,
"The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words,
sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world, and if much of it was
sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. . . . And after
enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on
forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and
listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a
six-week low, only eighty GI's had died in combat, and you'd feel like
you'd just gotten a bargain."
Tom Walker
