The fuggen shlut gazette. Price: 0 cents

 Don't you love a bargain. That's what you're getting with my new chronicle: the fuggen shlut gazette.

All those years rubbing shoulders with journalists and journalism teachers at the faculties of Complutense in Madrid, Spain; and the University of Technology, Sydney Australia.

Look at you, you penny saving newly minted reader of Benji's new fangled: fuggen shlut gazette. (Insert PR event and fanfare here).

On this momentous occasion I invoke an exemplary historical date: December 7th. Why is this date notable? It's the day the Japanese attacked pearl harbor in Hawaii. However for Benji, a mere 62 years after this momentous event, the date marked my relocation to China. 

A tremendous historical event in between December 7, 1941 and December 7, 2003; in the neighbourhood of the Pacific Ocean 🌊🌊🌊, was, without question, the Vietnam war.

A splendid book that accompanied me on December 7, 2003, was written by a one-time Esquire magazine journalist. I'm afraid I don't know much about Esquire magazine, it might be a 1960s version of Maxim magazine. I do know I only brought this book, and a learn to speak Chinese book with me, in my one bag. That I can recall.

The writer was an American and embedded himself with American soldiers in Vietnam, kind of like what was happening with journalists who had embedded themselves in Iraq at the time of reading (2003). The book was really set in late 60s or early 70s though. What was striking about this book and, no doubt, different to the embedded journalists in Iraq, was the fact that this journalist was not allowed to just stand or lie by passively with the soldiers. When they were under fire he had to shoot. So even though he never had formal military training like the soldiers had, he was expected to pick up his machine gun and fire on at least one occasion, possibly several, as I recall it. I doubted he embellished this to appear more formidable or badass, although actually it seems like maybe he did. I'd actually like to read this book again, fire up some old neurons.

Herr:

A lot of Dispatches is fictional. I've said this a lot of times. I have told people over the years that there are fictional aspects to Dispatches, and they look betrayed. They look heartbroken, as if it isn't true anymore. I never thought of Dispatches as journalism. In France they published it as a novel.... I always carried a notebook. I had this idea—I remember endlessly writing down dialogues. It was all I was really there to do. Very few lines were literally invented. A lot of lines are put into mouths of composite characters. Sometimes I tell a story as if I was present when I wasn't, (which wasn't difficult)—I was so immersed in that talk, so full of it and so steeped in it. A lot of the journalistic stuff I got wrong.[3]