Year in Hell: Memoir of an Army Foot Soldier Turned Reporter in Vietnam, 1965-1966 Book

"Flip religion, it was so far out, you couldn't blame anybody for believing anything…Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they'd killed, a little transfer of power; they carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends' underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie through his tour, wrapped up in foil and plastic and three pair of socks. He took a lot of shit about it. ("When you go to sleep we're gonna eat your fucking cookie'), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn't kidding."



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.


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.


Sean Flynn and Dana Stone

The point I'm trying to make is that war correspondents were at as much risk as the combat soldiers they were there to write about. The soldiers were in awe of them because it was beyond comprehension to a drafted marine to think that anyone would want to be in this hell by choice. "Two Marines that I hadn't even met before nightfall had gone out on the scrounge and come back with a new stretcher for me to sleep on…. They were always doing things like that for you, the way Mayhew had tried to give me his mattress, the way grunts in Hue one day had tried to give me their helmets and flak jackets because I had turned up without my own. If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you'd have new or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you."

General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans. He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven's poem.

Anecdote of a Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens

The battle was considered a victory by both sides. With the American commanders claiming a x10 ratio for kills they could estimate 10,000 to 16,000 KIA off of 1,602 bodies actually found. The Americans lost 2,016 killed and 8,079 wounded. after the battle the American blew up the base and moved out. The NVA swarmed in to take over the area. You might ask yourself what was accomplished.



"We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh. the smaller foothills were often quite literally turned inside out, the streeper of them were made faceless and drawless, and the bigger hills were left with scars and craters of such proportions that an observer from some remote culture might see in them the obsessiveness and ritual regularity of religious symbols, the blackness at the deep center pouring out rays of bright, overturned earth all the way to the circumference; forms like Aztec sun figures, suggesting that their makers had been men who held Nature in an awesome reverence."

There's something happening here,
What it is ain't exactly clear.
There's a man with a gun over there,
Tellin' me I've got to beware.
I think it's time we stopped, children,
What's that sound?
Everybody look what's goin' down

The men who came back from Vietnam have minds filled with dark places, shards of pain, and trapped screams. Night sweats, twisted sheets, bruises from wrestling demons, and fear parched throats haunt their nights long after they return home.

"I've been having this dream," the major said. "I've had it two times now. I'm in a big examination room back at Quantico. They're handing out questionnaires for an aptitude test. I take one and look at it, and the first question says, "How many kinds of animals can you kill with your hands?'"
…
"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."

Michael Herr's dreams are a melted series of images, sounds, and smells.

"In the months after i got back the hundreds of helicopters I'd flown in began to draw together until they'd formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver-destroyer, provider-waster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny, and human; hot steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun fire in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly an intruder."



The writing in this book is superb. The words are dropped on you out of the bays of planes with bombs that explode around your ears and rattle your spinal cord. The dialogue is the crackle of gunfire coming at you through the elephant grass, zip, vip, zip. The stories will bring you so close to the action that spent ordinance will be hailing on your helmet as it falls through the canopy. Herr helped with the screenplays for the movies Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Whether he receives credit or not this book has influenced every Vietnam movie ever made or that will ever be made. This is best read from a foxhole with a shaker full of vodka and the smell of moist earth in your nostrils.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:

War is Forever

Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don't kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop." 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."

The opposite of war is not peace but justice, the access to judgments of equity that mitigate coercion. Essentially war is unfairness made the norm, "a psychotic vaudeville." War is unfair because there is no human recourse to the random exercise of power. The unfairness of war affects everyone even those, especially those, exercising the power. The further out on the tendrils of power, as these tendrils encounter victims, the more unfairness, the more coercion, exists. At that zero-distance, coercion is unremittingly ugly:"Disgust doesn't begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that." Is there any other word than de-humanization? "'Well, you know what we do to animals . . . kill 'em and hurt 'em and beat on 'em so's we can train 'em. Shit, we don't treat the Dinks no different than that,'" says one young soldier with neither apparent irony nor shame.

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. Who can judge who is most defiled, the soldier coerced by his superiors or the soldier's victim coerced by him? All suffer through either grief or memory. Herr knows this: "Varieties of religious experience, good news and bad news; a lot of men found their compassion in the war, some found it and couldn't live with it, war-washed shutdown of feeling, like who gives a fuck. People retreated into positions of hard irony, cynicism, despair, some saw the action and declared for it, only heavy killing could make them feel so alive... 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."

The effects of the unfairness of war are cumulative and gestational. They ripen and metastasize : "And some just went insane, followed the black-light arrow around the bend and took possession of the madness that had been waiting there in trust for them for eighteen or twenty-five or fifty years... it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes... They'd say (I'd ask) that they didn't remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R& R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear,"

Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one's neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: "...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans." This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: "A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before." This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: "... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour." And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: "They believed that God was going to thank them for it."

There is good reason to believe that the country's present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: "Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can't handle the experience." I don't know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: "Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn't happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you'd gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, 'Scream a lot, and all the time.'"

No ideal was left unmolested. No injustice was left un-trivialized. No confession of guilt was ever offered without rationalization. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: "It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene." But injustice will not lie quiet. The effects of war are genetic; they are passed on as a dismal legacy of power and its unfairness. The country tried to forget and dug itself deeper, coerced itself, into violence that it now performs on itself at the armed hands of its children to the consternation of their parents. The country does seem to be screaming now. But no one is really listening. No one cares if they annihilate themselves in their undeclared civil war. If only they would tweet about it less.