Dispatches by Michael Herr Read Free Book Online

cigarette,” hustle and connection ran like a current down Tu Do, from the cathedral to the river. Rounding Le Loi there was a large group of correspondents coming back from the briefing, standard diurnal informational freak-o-rama, Five O’Clock Follies, Jive at Five, war stories; at the corner they broke formation and went to their offices to file, we watched them, the wasted clocking the wasted .
    A new correspondent came into the room to say hello, just arrived from New York, and he started asking Dana a lot of questions right away, sort of bullshit questions about the killing radius of various mortars and the penetration capability of rockets, the ranges of AK’s and 16’s, what shells did when they hit treetops, paddy and hard ground. He was in his late thirties and he was dressed in one of those jungle-hell leisure suits that the tailors on Tu Do were getting rich cranking out, with enough flaps and slots and cargo pockets to carry supply for a squad. Dana would answer one question and the man would ask two more, but that made sense since the man had never been out and Dana hardly ever came in. Oral transmission, those who knew and those who didn’t, new people were always coming in with their own basic load of questions, energetic and hungry; someone had done it for you, it was a kind of blessing if you were in a position to answer some questions, if only to say that the questions couldn’t be answered. This man’s questions were something else, they seemed to be taking on hysteria as they went along .
    “Is it exhilarating? Boy, I’ll bet it’s exhilarating.”
    “Aw you wouldn’t believe it,” Dana said .
    Tim Page came in. He’d been out at the Y Bridge all day taking pictures of the fighting there and he’d gotten some CS in his eyes. He was rubbing them and weeping and bitching .
    “Oh you’re English,” the new man said. “I was just there. What’s CS?”
    “It’s a gas gas gas,” Page said . “Gaaaaaa. Arrrrgggh!” and he did a soft version of raking his nails down his face, he used his fingertips but it left red marks anyway. “Blind Lemon Page,” Flynn said, and laughed while Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?
    “What does it look like when a man gets hit in the balls?” the new man said, as though that was the question he’d really meant to ask all along, and it came as close as you could get to a breach of taste in that room; palpable embarrassment all around, Flynn moved his eyes like he was following a butterfly up out of sight, Page got sniffy and offended, but he was amused, too. Dana just sat there putting out the still rays, taking snaps with his eyes. “Oh I dunno,” he said. “It all just goes sort of gooey.”
    We all started to laugh, everyone except Dana, because he’d seen that, he was just telling the man. I didn’t hear what the man started to ask next, but Dana stopped him and said, “Only thing I can tell you that might actually do you some good is to go back up to your room and practice hitting the floor for a while.”
    Beautiful for once and only once, just past dawn flying toward the center of the city in a Loach, view from a bubble floating at 800 feet. In that space, at that hour, you could see what people had seen forty years before, Paris of the East, Pearl of the Orient, long open avenues lined and bowered over by trees running into spacious parks, precisioned scale, all under the soft shell from a million breakfast fires, camphor smoke rising and diffusing, covering Saigon and theshining veins of the river with a warmth like the return of better times. Just a projection, that was the thing about