opinions & ViewsnThose Dying GenerationsnMichael Herr: Dispatches; Alfred A.nKnopf Co.; New York, 1977.nby Stephen R. MaloneynThe Scottish poet and critic EdwinnMuir observed that one could almost saynthat Troy fell so that a poem—the Iliad—nmight be written. On the evidence ofnMichael Herr’s Dispatches and othernworks dealing with the recent debacle innSoutheast Asia, one almost imagines thatnSaigon fell so that a gaggle of literarynjournalists might say in chorus, “We toldnyou so!”nHowever much Dispatches concentratesnon Vietnam, it is only marginallynabout war. Let me explain. If Homer hadncomJ30sed the Iliad without reference tonthe abduction of Helen, if he had neglectednAchilles and emphasized Ajax, if henhad eliminated all mention of the godsnand goddesses, if he excised all evidencenof hamartia and hyhris, not to mentionnhomeland and honor, what would havenremained? A Greek version ofnDispatches. Mr. Herr’s book is thus aboutnwar only in the sense that a textbook onnlogical positivism is about life.nLike so much of the American journalismndealing with the Vietnam War,nDispatches is basically a set of literarynformulae—mainly those of literarynnaturalism—masquerading as UltimatenRealism. Herr gives us sounds, sightsnand smells—a Viet Cong soldier hungnup on barbed wire, a pile of “body bags”nsmashed into gore and human pulp by anmortar shell, a stinking latrine, a necklacenfashioned from Viet Cong ears, a soldiernhorribly wounded and dying alone. Butnhe does not give us any sustained analysisnDr. Maloney, previously a professor ofnEnglish poetry, works for Phillips PetroleumnCompany and wrote for a range ofnpublications from Georgia Review tonFortune.n6nChronicles of Culturenof the war. For him North and South,nCommunism and democracy, freedomnand servitude, remain pallid abstractionsnin a bloody world.nSome conservative reviewers seenDispatches as merely chanting the samenold refrain, “Hell no, we won’t go.” AndnHerr certainly does drag out some oldnstock figures from the Comedie Indochine:nthe Marine colonel who tells thenpress about the boys at Khe Sahn: “Men,nthose Marines are clean.” ^Q see againnthe fabled officer—was he from thenPhoenix brigade.” —who wanted to destroynthe village in order to save it. Mynfavorite Dispatches original is “thencolonel who had a plan to shorten thenwar by dropping piranha into the paddiesnof the North.”nBut Herr is not Dr. Spock; he is—ofnall people—Walter Pater, the Victoriannaesthete and amoralist who came to valuensensations above all else. Pater oncensummed up his goal: “to burn like a hardngem-like flame.” Similarly, life after thenWar is, for Herr, only a remembrance ofnexcitement past.n”Of course, coming back [to peacefulnAmerica] was a down. After somethingnlike that, what could you find to thrillnyou, what compared, what did you do forna finish? Everything seemed a little dulln. . . You missed the scene, missed thengrunts and the excitement, the feelingnyou’d had in a place where no drama hadnto be invented, ever.”nDispatches strongly implies that youngncorrespondents came to Vietnam in largenpart to escape from dullness. Take TimnPage, Herr’s photographer-friend whonwas seriously wounded. Recuperating,nPage was asked by a British publisher tonwrite a book that would once and for alln”take the glamour out of war.” Pagenreplies, “Take the glamour out of war! Inmean, how the bloody hell can you donthat?” Or consider the son of swashbucklingnErrol Flynn, Sean, a photographernattracted to war the way prostitutes arennndrawn to bars. Young Flynn takes on annalmost symbolic role in Dispatches—thenquintessence of coolness, of savoirguerre,nof youth, living the role that his fathernmerely played out on the silver screen.nHerr’s youth, Flynn’s youth, the averagen”grunt’s” youth: this is the real themenof Dispatches, the superiority of youth.nHerr does not dwell overmuch on thendeath of young soldiers—or on the deathnof Sean Flynn—because at least they diednyoung, men’s death; they did not have tongrow old.nHerr’s journey through Vietnam oftennseems mainly a flight to avoid encounteringnanyone over 30—senior officersn”seeing light at the end of the tunnel”n(one tunnel-rat, a young Marine, asksnhaughtily, “What do they know aboutntunnels?”); corrupt civilian engineers,ndoubling their salaries on the blacknmarket and gunning their Hondas upnand down the steps of a Vietnamese warnmemorial; and especially graying reporters,n”the sort of old reporter that mostnyoung reporters I knew were afraid ofnbecoming someday.” The older reportersnare Herr’s Struldbruggs.n”You’d run into them once in a while atnthe bar of the Danang press center, mennin their late forties who hadn’t had thenchance to slip into uniform since V-J Day,nexhausted and bewildered after all of thosenbriefings and lightning visits, punchy fromnthe sheer volume of facts that had beennthrown on them, their tape recordersnbroken, their pens stolen by street kids,ntheir time almost up.”nThe double meaning of the last clausenis probably intentional. For aging is anform of death and moral decay in Herr’snvision. In contrast, the young reportersnare portrayed as a semi-mystic communitynthat has eaten the forbidden fruit.n”Where we were alike, we were reallynalike … we were the only ones whoncould tell, among ourselves, whethern[our] work was any good.” Reinforcingnthis impression of a closed, self-selectedn