Colt 45 Song

Herr was 27 when he went to Vietnam as a reporter — only slightly older than the men about whom he wrote. That fact was crucial. He shared their world. The war he depicts is less a military event than a cultural and psychological one. An experience that marks these boy soldiers like a tattoo that penetrates to the bone.

"Boy" is the operative word.

Their perception of war alternates carnage with comic books. "Come on," a captain announces to an assembled group, "we'll take you out to play cowboys and Indians." But always at one's shoulder gibbers a sense that this fantasy can tip into madness. "Once I met a colonel," writes Herr, "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."

Herr survived, but his involvement, no less than for combatants, came at a price. "Home," he writes. "Twenty-eight years old, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, with a heart like one of those little paper pills they make in China, you drop them into water and they open out to form a tiger or a flower or a pagoda. Mine opened out into war and loss."

Though he wrote other books and collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris.