The Annotated Dispatches (2005)

I sometimes stop by public libraries not to borrow books but to buy them. Many libraries have a “Friends of the Library” section where they sell books for a dollar or two and sometimes you can discover something amazing.

Not long after I moved to California, probably in late 2004 or early 2005 I was browsing the dollar book section of the Foster City public library and came across a copy of Dispatches by Michael Herr, a first-hand account of Herr’s experiences in the war. Aside from being an extraordinary book in and of itself, Dispatches forms much of the backbone of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. As a devotee of Kubrick’s work, I knew what it was right away and so I picked up the hardcover, delighted.

My simple delight turned to astonishment, however, when I opened the book. The previous owner had made extensive notes in the margins—during his first read-through in black pen, during his second read-through in blue—commenting upon the events described in the book. And not just any comments—comments by a U.S. Marine who had served in Vietnam and had been in some of these same locations, who had fought in some of these same battles, and who even knew some of the people depicted by Herr in the book. I was dumbfounded, holding in my hands this magical, emotionally moving window into the mind of another person, this view of the Vietnam War unlike any other, Herr’s text mixed in with that of this anonymous Marine.

Sometimes the sentences seem to write themselves and sometimes you have to work at it. This is one of those projects that wrote itself—I just scanned each of the spreads that had been annotated and put them in the correct sequence.