I am getting over a virus (iv)
from the Janitor at the Viet Nam Literature Project
Still weak, still looking back at 2008 when I looked back from 1976 forward.
Next time I wrote about Michael Herr, and his influence through his Dispatches, the voiceover for Apocalypse Now and work on Full Metal Jacket. I was against Herr's influence, and still am.
His is the voice from nowhere, the journalist. His literary talent impresses if you haven't got one yourself. He blows smoke. I use my talent to ground the reader in specifics and think things through.
My final PCA paper went through the chain of command to show books written by men at ascending rank, to introduce the private, the non-commissioned officer, the captain and the major in contrast to the colleged lieutenant citizen soldiers who usually win the prizes.
In the course of that research I noticed David Marr, David Elliott, and Keith Taylor, veterans who wrote their narratives as historians of the nation of Viet Nam. I started attending seminars of Yale's Council on Southeast Asia Studies.
They hired me to renew a publishing series on Viet Nam. I used my share of my grandfather's life savings to go to the Southeast Asia Studies Summer Institute 1991 at Cornell to learn Vietnamese, and walked into class with Barbara Cohen, Dana Sachs and Bob Brigham. Keith was our history teacher.
Later, Mark Sidel sent me to Ha Noi, where Lady Borton and Huu Ngoc received me, and I made friends with Hoang Ngoc Hien, Duong Thu Huong and Nguyen Huy Thiep. My life changed, and here I am an anthropologist in North Carolina. Anthropology is the university science that systematically recognizes diverse means of scholarship.
That is all another story. I was telling you what I know about narratives by Americans who fought in Viet Nam, so you can interpret what I say about my cousin Peter's stack of books his brother David selected to represent his time there with the Marines.
Let’s look at that passage again by measures.
Next time I wrote about Michael Herr, and his influence through his Dispatches, the voiceover for Apocalypse Now and work on Full Metal Jacket. I was against Herr's influence, and still am.
His is the voice from nowhere, the journalist. His literary talent impresses if you haven't got one yourself. He blows smoke. I use my talent to ground the reader in specifics and think things through.
Irritated. Pissy. True.
Unworthy of author or critic. I disagree with the man. Why not. He wrote that trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese was like trying to read the wind.
Yeah. I have read the winds at work in the fields and at sea and in the woods through my adult life. I was raised by landless peasants. I have read and spoken 3 languages with Vietnamese and their faces on 3 continents.
I am also a Jew, like Michael. I love that the search engine returns little else about this slumming angel except that he, like me, is chosen. 2 of us make 3 opinions.
I enjoy his speech, autodidact, true-crime, vernacular as the humanists - Hellenists and Latinists all - wrote it. My pronoun is him but I am writing in Herr right now.
My final PCA paper went through the chain of command to show books written by men at ascending rank, to introduce the private, the non-commissioned officer, the captain and the major in contrast to the colleged lieutenant citizen soldiers who usually win the prizes.
1 of the best things I ever did. I have never stopped doing it.
What rank wrote each book? What rank are you?
In the course of that research I noticed David Marr, David Elliott, and Keith Taylor, veterans who wrote their narratives as historians of the nation of Viet Nam. I started attending seminars of Yale's Council on Southeast Asia Studies.
David M. separated as captain, I think. Captain of Marines where you may in theory command 2 hundred Marines who in theory can each fight in a company of infantry.
The civilian rank is MFWIC. Arrive and get stuff done, as that historian has. An Army captain is instead the branch manager.
If you are a good sergeant they will try to get you to commission as a captain. Then all your friends will make fun of you.
David E. told me he was briefly an enlisted man at the highest of the lowest ranks, almost a corporal, before he arrived in-country already married to a Vietnamese national so they busted him right out of the service. He stayed on it seems to me with the Army Security Agency, who are civilian.
A Vietnamese under him referred to him to me in Vietnamese as Captain David. That would be the cool kind of captain, a rank they grant when you have to move through the Army without anyone asking questions.
No real captain can fuck with you and every major knows better. Martin Sheen is that kind of captain in Apocalypse Now. Robert Duvall needles him about it. “Young captain,” the colonel addresses the assassin.
Keith it seems to me was a private, what we mean by soldier. Just a guess.
Leaders all. I followed them. Another best thing I ever did. I followed these 2 junior uncles and 1 big brother into Vietnamese.
[I started attending seminars of Yale's Council on Southeast Asia Studies.]
They hired me to renew a publishing series on Viet Nam. I used my share of my grandfather's life savings to go to the Southeast Asia Studies Summer Institute 1991 at Cornell to learn Vietnamese, and walked into class with Barbara Cohen, Dana Sachs and Robert Brigham. Keith was our history teacher.
By the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies I meant its chair James C. Scott, and Huynh Sanh Thong who founded the publishing series. I didn’t name them in 2008 since I still felt guilt and shame about the affair.
Now that I judge that I dodged a bullet in failing I still don’t want to talk about it. But you should know about Jim and Thong, as well as Barbara, Dana, and Bob. Look them up or wait until I write a Viet Nam letter about their publications.
Later, Mark Sidel sent me to Ha Noi, where Lady Borton and Huu Ngoc received me, and I made friends with Hoang Ngoc Hien, Duong Thu Huong and Nguyen Huy Thiep. My life changed, and here I am an anthropologist in North Carolina. Anthropology is the university science that systematically recognizes diverse means of scholarship.
Oh my more names. You can find what I have edited or written about Lady, Ngoc, Huong, and Thiep on the web. I hope to return to them in my letters, and start on Mark and Hien.
Saints of my calendar, they all are authors, best understood by reading their work, even when the critic is a friend. I don’t have the strength right now to do a good job.
That is all another story. I was telling you what I know about narratives by Americans who fought in Viet Nam, so you can interpret what I say about my cousin Peter's stack of books his brother David selected to represent his time there with the Marines.
Portrait at All People Soul Food Grill, Hillsborough, North Carolina, © 2007 by Tim Duffy. Link to the essay “I am getting over a virus” here. The first and second and third Viet Nam letter on “I am getting over a virus” appeared on February 7 and February 10 and February 13. The fifth appeared on February 19, 2024.
Assume you know all this. My mad reporter skills are exclusive to China. A reporter is only as good as his sources. Like you I have no shortage of janitorial work.
Herr was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a jeweler, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. His family was Jewish. After working with Esquire in the 1960s, from 1971 to 1975 he published nothing. Then, in 1977, he went on the road with rock and roller Ted Nugent and wrote about the experience in a 1978 cover story for Crawdaddy magazine. Also in 1977, he published Dispatches, upon which his reputation mostly rests.
Herr was credited in the film for writing the narration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1997 film The Rainmaker. He had previously contributed to the narration for Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Full Metal Jacket (1987) with director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford. That film was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. Herr collaborated with Richard Stanley in writing the original screenplay for the 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau based on the H.G. Wells novel of the same name. However, Stanley claims the subsequent rewrites cost Herr his writing credit, omitting most of the material created by the two writers.
Herr wrote a pair of articles for Vanity Fair about Stanley Kubrick, which were later incorporated into the short book Kubrick (2000), a personal biography of the director. He declined to edit the script of Kubrick's last film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Herr lived with his wife Valerie in Delhi, New York, until his death on June 23, 2016, at the age of 76.
Everyone complains to me that they can’t understand you. Good idea to go back and annotate yourself.
MFWIC
Mother Fucker What's In Charge
Re: Duong Thu Huong, I wonder how Nina met her? I haven’t seen Nina since we were all scattered to the winds by the Tiananmen massacre.
I probably like Herr for the reasons you state (no literary talent). My work on China may be described the same way, except I would never write: “trying to read the faces… was like trying to read the wind.” Live with locals for decades and you start to read faces.
Good 😊 Old Mark Sidel.
Please 🙏 keep the reflections coming. It picks up where I left New Haven and never returned…..