Jennifer Percy

  • Front Lines

    IN DISPATCHES (1977), Michael Herr’s seminal Vietnam memoir, the author remembers being a kid and poring over war photographs in Life magazine, “the ones that showed dead people or a lot of dead people.” The corpses, he recalls, were all smashed together, often in positions of strange intimacy, as if holding or stroking each other. He stared at the photographs for hours, but nothing in him changed—his experience of looking did not change. “I still wouldn’t have accepted the connection between a detached leg and the rest of a body,” he writes. The photograph concealed “essential information”