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Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it has always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a Command that didn’t feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an Administration that believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of objectivity and fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space. It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them. The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in a sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air. The jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in ARVN effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive. 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.

- from Michael Herr’s Dispatches.

I started Dispatches yesterday and am close to finished now. With virtually every page, I’m realizing more and more why this book is considered a classic. Here’s a measure of how effective Herr’s reporting and writing are: My very first thought upon waking this morning was an overwhelming sense of gut-level thanks that I get to rest in comfort, that I get to sleep without fear that I will wake to the sound of the bullet, the mortar, the grenade that will end my life.

Herr tells of learning from two Marines that another Marine from earlier in the book had died in combat. Herr couldn’t remember the guy’s name. Neither could the two Marines. Neither could I. Maybe that just means I’m inattentive. But I don’t think so. I think, rather, that a masterful storyteller put just enough space between the Marine’s final living appearance and the news of his death. This left me, as the reader, as something more than a spectator to the forgetting of this young man’s name. The effect is all the more haunting and heartbreaking because Herr never acknowledges what he’s doing or preaches about the shame of it all.

The quote above is haunting in the more macro sense that we must always worry that we are repeating old mistakes, that we are part of some new “cross-fertilization of ignorance.”