There was nothing inevitable about Pakistan’s association with extremism. After wrestling with the issue, Jinnah recommended a secular republic from his deathbed. After Partition in 1947, Walsh explains, imams lost their sway in society, sinking to a status somewhere between a teacher and a tailor in the villages. Con dieci anni di ritardo (2008) ho di recente visto la serie “Generation Kill”: magnifica, grandissima scrittura, superba regia, confezione di più che alto livello. Consigliatissima. Potrebbe mai esistere senza questo libro di Herr? I don't mean to insult anyone who has served in the military or is serving now. I mean to insult every leader who has ever flippantly involved their country, or their youth, in an unnecessary war. If you're reading this right now, you know: it's happening right now, again.

It all happened so fast, as they say, as everyone who has ever been through it has always said; we were sitting around listening to what we thought were Tet fireworks coming from the town, and then coming closer until we weren't stoned anymore, until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet...telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn't remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy. The short book is filled with “you can’t make this shit up” moments that are too numerous and too spot-on to recite, but I’ll throw out one or two, starting with this gem: The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists. John le Carré described Dispatches as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time" and it featured in the journalism section of The Guardian's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011. [1] In screenplays [ ] Michael Herr's book gave me a glimpse of what Alan lived through, during his time in Vietnam. I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). I've read various accounts of the war over the years: history, novels, memoirs by Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in the North and South. I've taught a course on French colonialism and studied the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course I've watched countless films over the years. But Herr's reporting brought me inside the war, inside the heads of the soldiers, in such an immediate way that reading it was unbearable. I struggled to keep on reading, and it has taken a week for me to organize my thoughts for this review.

Here in the UK, where Herr lived for a while during the 1980s, British war correspondents such as my Observer colleague Ed Vulliamy would make a point of getting an introduction: “Every writer who has tried his or her hand at war journalism,” wrote Vulliamy, “would go to meet Michael Herr rather like a student of the cello would approach Mstislav Rostropovich. Apart from learning by listening, the gratifying thing is to find that one’s own follies and fears are echoes of Herr’s; one almost feels validated in one’s quirks of judgment in the aftermath of war.” The impact of this book is stronger for the fact that it is all straight reporting, and in my view overtakes fiction on the war such as “The Things They Carried” because it is pure fact and because it is able to contrast the statements and positions of military officers and government agents against the perspectives of the foot soldiers. Dispatches arrived late. Herr served as Esquire’s correspondent from 1967 to 1969, and returned to the United States intending to produce a book about what he’d seen there immediately, but 18 months after his return, he suffered a nervous breakdown due to the events that he witnessed and stopped writing for five years, until it was ultimately published in 1977. If you want a traditional historical context for the war, read something like Stanley Karnow's Vietnam first. If you want to understand the mentality that led us there, read Graham Greene's lovely novel, The Quiet American. But, if you want a poetic, impeccably crafted, heartfelt, passionately wrought, deeply thoughtful, uncompromising, and complex emotional prismatic canvas of war and its mad surreality, this is your first stop. John le Carré called Dispatches "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." [1] It was featured in the journalism section of The Guardian 's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011. [2]

Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. Besieged in Khe Sanh with the Marines, Herr looks up at the hills in which lurk NVA artillery positions, raiding parties and Annamese ghosts: After the publication of Dispatches in 1977, Herr worked on the legendary film Apocalypse Nowin 1979. Both the film and novel offer a unique and valuable portrayal of the Vietnam War that differs greatly from traditional accounts. For these contributions, Dispatches remains an essential work of the Vietnam era. Update this section! Declan Walsh begins his captivating new book on Pakistan with an account of how he came to leave the country for the first time, abruptly and involuntarily in May 2013. “The angels came to spirit me away,” is the way he puts it, using the Urdu slang for the all-powerful men of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), whose presence is felt, even when not seen, throughout The Nine Lives of Pakistan.

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The book roars out of the gate with a great opening. The longest section, on Khe Sanh, is classic Vietnam lit. Sometimes it's tough to even read in bed at night. Disturbing shit. And the commanders. My God. George McGovern had them right: "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in." Which is why George McGovern won a sum total of one state when he ran for president. The Republic of Massachusetts. His masterpiece, Dispatches, has been out of fashion for a while, but when it was published in 1977, it was widely regarded as the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War. Today, aside perhaps from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it is the seminal work about the war, full stop. Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn. Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war." Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language.

As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try. Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. And I appreciate his oblique criticisms of the powers that be--juxtaposing quotations from the General Staff and the G.I.s on the ground to make his point. Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar. It describes the world precisely, but it does not describe it easily. Dispatches leaves you with a keener sense of what happened to Herr and to the soldiers around him, but with this clarity comes a messy, difficult uncertainty, too. We’ve seen this world now. What do we make of it?

Dispatches is a litany of horrible, terrible things written about gorgeously. It is immediately immersive and stays that way unwaveringly to the last word. It is un-putdownable, a masterpiece, even in those moments were some of the jaded periodisms now come off as slightly precious. I can't imagine there being a better book affording an on-the-ground feel for the war and the cross-sections of perceptions and the disconnects between the regular grunts and the euphemism-spewing generals, the kind who called a typhoon "an advantageous change in the weather." Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971 After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.”