Dear Pete,
Hope this finds you well in these bizzarro times. How’d you get to be a Pete? My whole life I sort of wanted to be a Pete but there’s only one person on the planet who calls me Pete and that’s my old friend Carlos. He’s a retired Marine. You’d like him. He’s hunky. You get a lot of mail, I’ll cut to the chase. I know you’re crazy busy, but you must be a reader since you carry the Good Book everywhere you go. You’ve also written a book or two yourself. I figured you wouldn’t mind a recommendation from a civilian. Someday, fairly soon, if folks get their act together, you’ll have a block of time to crack that Bible, and others as well. Here’s one that’s up your alley. John Le Carré, Robert Stone, and Hunter Thompson, no slouches when it came to war experience, considered it the greatest non-fiction book about Vietnam. It’s called Dispatches. A war correspondent named Michael Herr published it in 1977. All respect to Le Carré, Stone, and Thompson but to describe the book as solely being about Vietnam also misses the point a little. It’s about what human beings are capable of doing to each other. You might think Herr isn’t your kind of guy a since he fully admits that he spent Vietnam scared shitless. He says that anybody in their right mind, and lots of people who weren’t, were also scared shitless. Early on he tells a story about how once out on patrol he starts bleeding. He thinks he’s got a head wound. “I don’t think I said anything, but I made a sound that I can remember now, a shrill blubbery pitched to carry more terror than I’d ever known existed, like the sounds they’ve recorded of plants being burned…” Turned out it was only a bloody nose, but take note, Pete, that’s some good prose right there. Dispatches has prose this good on every page, but this too misses the point. When soldiers kick the heads of dead children like soccer balls you don’t applaud how well the sentence is crafted. Heads as soccer balls. There’s some war for your War Department. I wonder if the fact that a book can still shock is a good sign or a bad sign. On the one hand, given all we know, how can we possibly still be shocked by what humans are capable of doing to each other? On the other, that depravity can still shock is proof that we’re, some of us anyway, still human. You’ve got some kids, Pete. There’s a little girl in the book. She’s in and out in a couple of lines, so she’s easy to miss. She’s on crutches, a withered leg. She’s selling cigarettes along the street in Saigon. “She had a face like a child dakini, so beautiful that people who needed to keep their edge blunt could hardly bear to look at her.” The only way Herr can sleep is to sleep stoned. Sometimes, he says, he smoked a roach before his feet hit the floor in the morning. Dear Mom, stoned again. Being stoned created the distance Herr needed to get through the day and the night. You get this, Pete, I know you do. But in that war, stoned or not, you couldn’t help but see a lot of things up close. You must have seen a few things up close back in your day, too. No longer. Now it’s through a video feed. Herr says, after nearly fifty years, he’s still saying, come closer, have the guts to look another human being in the face.
All best,
Peter
Peter Orner is the author of eight books. His most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, was named a Best book of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. He teaches at Dartmouth and is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.
