Dispatches by Michael Herr

The recent anniversary of the death of Errol Flynn made me think of the Vietnam War book Dispatches by Michael Herr which features Flynn's son who was described thus: Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had thirty years before as Captain Blood, but sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The input!

Is it any surprise that Herr was also the co-writer of the screenplays for both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Gives one a new respect for the prose of Dispatches which could be summed up by the following paragraph:

In the months after I got back the hundreds of helicopters I'd flown in began to draw together until they formed a collective meta-chopter, 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. Men on the crews would say that once you'd carried a dead person he would always be there, riding with you.

Yeah - the whole book is like that. Maybe why I'm re-reading it.