The One About Michael Herr and Jarhead

(Originally published inSpeaking Volumes, the Business Standard, April 2, 2003.)

This is Michael Herr, in Dispatches, first published in 1968: "It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene, and some correspondents fell into that, writing their stories from the daily releases and battlegrams, tracking them through the cheer-crazed language of the MACV Information Office, things like 'discreet burst' (one of those tore an old grandfather and two children to bits as they ran along a paddy wall one day, at least according to the report made later by the gunship pilot), 'friendly casualties' (not warm, not fun), 'meeting engagement' (ambush), concluding usually with 17 or 117 or 317 enemy dead and American losses 'described as light'."
Dispatches is now accounted one of the classics of modern warfare, more than just the correspondent's eye view indicated by the title, some of its reckless, despairing prose captured for all time in the film Apocalypse now. To write it, Herr had to invent a new language, one where he borrowed freely from rock n'roll and wrote red-eyed paragraphs that dripped with hallucinatory energy, that exuded an exhaustion that went beyond the flesh deep into the spirit. He closed with the line, "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."
In between the war Herr went to cover (only to discover that "the war covered me") and today's spectacle of Shock and Awe turning into a grim comedy, where one episode might well be called 'When Bush Came to Shove', the Americans fought a couple of other wars. As Marine sniper Anthony Swofford prepared for the Gulf War with his fellow Marines, he paid sardonic homage to Herr's Vietnam.
"But actually, Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. Mr and Mrs Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real First Fuck. It doesn't matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are antiwar -- the actual killers who know how to use the weapons are not."
Swofford's memoir of the Gulf War is called Jarhead, a skewed homage to the haircut that marks the US Marine out from the rest of his fellow fighters as surely as the blue woad that daubed the faces of warriors in a previous generation. It's had a remarkable reception: J K Rowling's publishers might be able to organise a Hogwarts Express, but few publishing houses could arrange to have a war in Iraq coincide with the publication of a book on the previous war in Iraq. And in a climate of nervous jingoism, where every second war or terrorism bestseller in the US market is a justification of Bush's attack on Iraq, Jarhead with its relentless honesty about what it means to be a soldier awash in the terror and black humour of the Gulf War, is an unlikely success--but a runaway success. Swofford has no illusions who he's fighting for--a bunch of "old white guys" and others who have "billions of dollars to gain or lose in the oil fields". Endorsed by the redoubtable NYT critic, Michiko Kakutani, zooming up the charts in less than a month to hover around number 13 on the amazon.com global bestsellers list, Jarhead is streets ahead of the general's memoirs and expert dissections, the academic treatises on Islam and the firm espousals of US defence policy that have been glutting the market since the first rumbles of war were heard.
Herr covered Vietnam in an age before you had "embeds"--correspondents allowed to travel like camp followers with military units, who have at least in this war, typically churned out excited, patriotic pieces about the bravery of the men whom they're following around, satphones at the ready. He saw that part of the tapestry of that war was rock n'roll, songs "that had been on the radio a lot that winter": "There's something happening here/ What it is ain't exactly clear./ There's a man with a gun over there/ Telling me I've got to beware./ I think it's time we stopped, children/ What's that sound?/ Everybody look what's goin' down…"
By the time Swofford or fellow Gulf War veteran Joel Turnipseed got into the game, it wasn't music so much as images that ruled the roost. Turnipseed, whose memoir Baghdad Express, also about the Gulf War, is doing almost as well as Swofford's, captured the situation perfectly. "CNN--we were so tuned in they had a direct coax link to our cerebral cortex: a chain-smoking war borg in a Mediterranean hangar. SCUDs in Tel Aviv. CNN. Electric night in Baghdad. CNN. Sirens in Dahran. CNN. Generals with wicked in-flight video in Riyadh. CNN, giving new meaning to 'theater of war'."
Tailpiece: "Shock and awe" is a stale phrase now, a term seized upon with delight only by bored sub-editors. The buzzword this week is "militainment"--a blend between military and entertainment which refers to the kind of reality TV the world gets to watch when a superpower sends out its armies well-equipped with camera-toting embeds.
Meanwhile, the US is still sulking over France's refusal to support what is either the War Against Saddam or the War For the Oil Wells, depending on your perspective, and have done their best to change French fries to Freedom fries. This could lead to problems if applied in a larger context. What would happen to The French Lieutenant's Woman, for instance? And will Patrick French now be better known as Patrick Freedom?