TIM PAGE about 1968.
At the small Southern college where I taught in the 1970s, one of the grad students had flown a gunship in Vietnam. Instead of living on campus, he rented a cottage in the woods. He slept there alone, with a Colt .45 under his pillow. The first thing he saw each morning as he woke was the poster-sized image of a Huey instrument panel pinned up at the end of his bed.
He played me tapes of fire-fights in which friends had died. Out of the jabber and roar of bad recording, he teased monologues that were poisoned with the essence of terror and despair.
A few years later, Michael Herr published Dispatches, his collection of reports from Vietnam, written for Esquire. Reading its most famous line, "I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods," I remembered those shouts and cries, and the sudden silences with which they ended.
Herr was 27 when he went to Vietnam as a reporter — only slightly older than the men about whom he wrote. That fact was crucial. He shared their world. The war he depicts is less a military event than a cultural and psychological one, fought to the music of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. An experience that marks these boy soldiers like a tattoo that penetrates to the bone.
"Boy" is the operative word.
Their perception of war alternates carnage with comic books. "Come on," a captain announces to an assembled press contingent, "we'll take you out to play cowboys and Indians." But always at one's shoulder gibbers a sense that this fantasy can tip into madness. "Once I met a colonel," writes Herr, "who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death."
Herr survived, but his involvement, no less than for combatants, came at a price. "Home," he writes. "Twenty-eight years old, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda. Mine opened out into war and loss."
Though he wrote other books and collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which is near enough to its film version, down to characters and even dialogue, Herr created nothing as vivid as Dispatches. No other event in his life would ever cut so deep. He records a conversation with a major returning for a second tour. "After the first tour, I'd have the goddamndest nightmares," the officer tells him. "You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying….”
“I thought they were the worst," he says. "But I sort of miss them now."
Dispatches came to mind this week with the death of combat photographer Tim Page, a pervasive presence in the book. Herr was in awe of Page’s ability to survive injuries that would have killed most men, and not only to recover but keep working, his rock-star good looks progressively degraded into those of a limping, scarred spectre, the Dorian Gray of his own photographs brought to defiant life.
Page’s 1983 book Nam remains one of the most vivid commentaries on a war that, the further it recedes in time, makes even less sense. The art it inspired is fragmentary, ambiguous, cynical, disturbed – all adjectives that apply to the work of Page and Herr, not to mention Tim O’Brien, Larry Burrows, Gustav Hasford, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick. None of it feels finished; everything is in progress. But the best has a ghostly allure.
On Herr’s death in 2016, Page offered one of the most eloquent tributes. "He spoke our language, with the slang of the time, syntax and nuance. He transcribed sentences that still haunt us today, these same sentences that are inscribed in the collective unconscious after Apocalypse Now. We shared the same madness, we knew how glamorous and macabre it was.”