I'm rereading M. Herr's Dispatches for a class I'm doing. Everybody stole from Herr, so DJ shouldn't be faulted, but man did I do a double take when I got to the part of 'Breathing In' relating to "spooks"--Western intelligence types in Vietnam.
"By 1967 all you saw was the impaired spook reflex, prim adventurers living too long on the bloodless fringes of the action, heartbroken and memory-ruptured, working alone together toward a classified universe. They seemed like the saddest casualties of the Sixties, all the promise of good service on the New Frontier gone or surviving like the vaguest salvages of a dream...."
Stylewise, DJ is of course a lot closer to Herr than to, say, Tim O'Brien. But that passage! Is that not Skip Sands?
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