What The Co-Writer Of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Can Tell Us About Gaza
Plus: UN report finds Israeli authorities responsible for crime of “extermination”
Perhaps the two most significant American Vietnam War films, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, were directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick, respectively. But they share an important co-writer: Michael Herr, who went to Vietnam as a correspondent for Esquire in 1967, and later wrote the partly-fictionalized memoir “Dispatches.”
The book explores the surreal, macabre, depraved reality of the war from the perspective of the American troops and journalists with whom Herr interacted. American military strategy – portrayed by Herr as the product of arrogant commanders and callous politicians in Washington – dehumanized the actual combatants on the ground, and the civilians caught in their way.
One of the most striking passages in the book, to me, was Herr’s description of the mass media’s relationship with the war, and how the media, explicitly or otherwise, worked to amplify the American government’s reassurances that the war was going well, that a certain amount of death and destruction was to be expected, and that ultimately, the gruesome reality of the war was worth it. In light of the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza, this passage from Herr in “Dispatches” stood out to me (emphasis mine):
Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. But there was also a Command that didn't feel this, that rode us into attrition traps on the back of fictional kill ratios, and an Administration that believed the Command, a cross-fertilization of ignorance, and a press whose tradition of fairness (not to mention self-interest) saw that all of it got space. It was inevitable that once the media took the diversions seriously enough to report them, they also legitimized them. The spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world, and if much of it was sharply queried by the press, all of it got quoted. The press got all the facts (more or less), it got too many of them. But it never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air. The jargon of Progress got blown in your head like bullets, and by the time you waded through all the Washington stories and all the Saigon stories, all the Other War stories and the corruption stories and the stories about brisk new gains in [South Vietnamese military] effectiveness, the suffering was somehow unimpressive. And after enough years of that, so many that it seemed to have been going on forever, you got to a point where you could sit there in the evening and listen to the man say that American casualties for the week had reached a six-week low, only eighty GI’s had died in combat, and you’d feel like you’d just gotten a bargain.
For the past nine months, due to the heroic work of Palestinian journalists on the ground, news from Gaza has flowed like a firehose, full of striking details about humanity erased and society scarred. The worst impulse of the American press in times like this – in other words, when our country or its allies are at fault – is to minimize, to explain away, and to create distance between action and consequence. There are exceptions, including many American journalists who haven’t flinched when it comes to telling the truth about the cost of Israel’s military actions. But at its worst, the media sanitizes.
In this light, one recent piece of writing still ringing in my ears is a late-May entry from the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, “Do We Still Understand How Wars Are Won?”
In It, Stephens writes of Vietnam and other American-fought wars in recent decades as poorly-fought losses, humiliations, and contrasts them with “existential” wars like the Civil War and World War II, which he argued were fought viciously enough that they could succeed. “The Union did not send food convoys to relieve the suffering of innocent Southerners,” Stephens writes, arguing for “morally compromised victories over morally pure defeats” and against “compelling our allies to lose.”
Similarly, when the journalist and founder of Zeteo Mehdi Hasan recently asked the Democratic congressman Dean Phillips whether it was acceptable for Israel to kill hundreds of Palestinians during an operation that saved four hostages, Phillips answered, “It's an unacceptable price, but I think it’s a price that has to be paid.” (Phillips refused to say the reverse was true, that it would be acceptable for Palestinians to kill hundreds of Israelis in order to rescue detainees being tortured to death in Israel).
As Herr said later in life, referring to painful memories of Vietnam, “Just in the way that I wish that all the people who remember it would forget it, I wish all the people who’ve forgotten it would remember it — if they could just change places.”
UN report finds Israeli authorities responsible for crime of “extermination”
On Wednesday, my HuffPost colleague Sanjana Karanth covered this news: The UN Human Rights Council was presented a report – conducted by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel – that found that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed war crimes beginning on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel additionally has committed crimes against humanity, the report found, including “extermination; murder; gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys; forcible transfer; and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.”
Since I last published this newsletter, two weeks ago, Gaza authorities said 500 additional people have been killed in the Strip, bringing the toll to 37,598.
What I’ve Written
HuffPost, “The 'Chilling' Trump Plan That Could Pave The Way For Authoritarianism” (June 11, 2024)
I am recording an interview with the “Refuse Fascism” podcast about this piece on Monday.
What I’m Reading
Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, “Rising Threats to Public Officials: A Review of 10 Years of Federal Data” (May 2024)
Axios, “Dark money news outlets outpacing local daily newspapers” (June 11, 2024)
HuffPost, “Dangerous Heat Wave Tests Puerto Ricans’ Ability To Survive The Latest Power Outages” (June 12, 2024)
Miami New Times, Joe vs. Moe: Does Miami Have Another Ghost Candidate? (June 13, 2024)
Reuters, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” (June 14, 2024)
HuffPost, “She Was Supposed To Be At Pulse Nightclub — And Club Q. Now She's Fighting To Keep LGBTQ+ People Safe.” (June 14, 2024)
Popular Information, “Sinclair floods local news websites with hundreds of deceptive articles about Biden's mental fitness” (June 17, 2024)
Associated Press, “The war in Gaza has wiped out entire Palestinian families. AP documents 60 who lost dozens or more” (June 17, 2024)
The Intercept, “‘Utterly Dismayed’: Air Force Engineer Resigns As Dissent Against Gaza War Slowly Spreads Within Military” (June 18, 2024)
Bloomberg, “Police Helicopter Flights and Spending Soar in New York City” (June 18, 2024)
Texas Tribune, “Texas National Guard is shooting pepper balls to deter migrants at the border” (June 18, 2024)
HuffPost, “Congress Just Passed The Biggest Clean-Energy Bill Since Biden's Climate Law” (June 18, 2024)
HuffPost, “'Shocking': Dutch Lawmaker Describes Probing Israel's Treatment Of International Criminal Court” (June 19, 2024)
HuffPost, “Texas Plans To Execute Ramiro Gonzales, Despite Reversal From Doctor Who Helped Send Him To Death Row” (June 23, 2024)
What I’m Watching
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on Schedule F and Project 2025 (June 17, 2024)
I haven’t seen these yet, but they’re on my to-watch list:
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, “The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza” (June 21, 2024)
Zeteo, “Israel’s ‘Reel Extremism” (coming soon I believe)
Gabriela Cowperthwaite and Nate Halverson, “The Grab”
What I’m Listening To
New singles from Claire Ozmun (I-90 and SHL) and Sara Devoe (sleep with me)