This may be a pathetic roll, but at least I am on it. Now, normally I don't finish one book until months after starting it and putting it down for something else. I can remember all of the books I have read this way. Put I am on to two in row read in this way, with my timely completion of The Corrections and Dispatches. Both I would classify in the top of their genre. Two books so different but both remind you that stories are merely metaphors for life.

I have always had an intense interest in the US involvement in Vietnam, ( I don't know what to use in the place of "involvement"), probably because I was taught by so many draft dodgers in junior college. Dispatches is the best representation of that time and that place; the mindless bureaucracy and corporate efficiency, the terror and its effects on young men, the escapism needed to survive, and the submission exchanged for endurance.

What I can never get over is that most soldiers there were only 19 or 20. People that age to me seem so young, babies almost, so little knowledge of the world. Michael writes how there was so much energy in young men invested in that country towards destroying it; if only that energy could have been to something creative.