He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of megadeath

I’m currently re-reading Michael Herr’s Dispatches for the umpteenth time.

Dispatches is the book about the Vietnam War in my opinion, arguably about any War the Americans have fought post 1945.

I only mention this because, and I’m not being particularly original here, it dawned on me some time ago that you could just do a search and replace on the text; replacing Saigon with Baghdad, Vietnam with Iraq and VC with insurgent, and publish it under a new name tomorrow…

Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower, the poison history, fucked in its root no matter how far back you wanted to run your trace....You'd stand there nailed in your tracks sometimes, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I?…

…Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they'd been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they asked you, 'Are you a Dove or a Hawk?' and 'Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?' Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I'd think but I wouldn't say it...

…That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, 'Colonel, you're insane'? It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines….

…(they had) chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, 'right here in-country.' Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death...

A most recommended read. As with most decent books if you get ‘it’ you get it big time. If you don’t, fuck it, it don’t mean nuthing