Dispatches

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Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion.

Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. Within a few blocks of Walsh’s home, a courthouse, a UN office and an army checkpoint are all bombed. No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing. is a question Herr asks himself in passing about a soldier he meets, but I think it's the implication in the question that explains why this is one of my favorite books. The second is the question of what exactly it is that makes Vietnam so much more relentlessly horrifying to our soldiers than any other war we'd fought up to that point (and possibly any war since).How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)? Along with fellow journalists Sean Flynn and Tim Page, Herr partakes in the culture of drugs and rock and roll, smoking marijuana and listening to the music of Hendrix, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Every time there was combat you had a licence to go maniac, everyone snapped over the line at least once there and nobody noticed, they hardly noticed if you forgot to snap back again. All you could say that wasn’t fundamentally lame was something like, ‘He who bites it this day is safe from the next,’ and that was exactly what nobody wanted to hear. Just the idea of being able to peace out when things get really nasty would have to be a pretty significant sleep aid.

A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you'd get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections. Come non ritrovare nelle parole di Herr tante situazioni dell’invasione dell’Iraq e dell’Afghanistan?

Although presented as a memoir when published in the United States in 1977, in France, Dispatches was published as a novel. One night a few months ago, half-asleep, I heard his name, of all places, on the Bill Simmons podcast. This is best read from a foxhole with a shaker full of vodka and the smell of moist earth in your nostrils.