Michael Herr's Dispatches opens with a marvel: an old map of Vietnam. Stretching between the 26th and the 9th parallel, the country unfolds like a long, thin ‘S’, swelling up in the Red River delta in the North and the Mekong River delta in the South, the ‘two rice bowls at the opposite ends of a carrying pole’. Interestingly, Herr offers a description of the map, but not of what it represents; the poster on the wall – the work of French cartographers – has clearly seen better days. Worn out by the heat and the humidity of the local climate, and made obsolete by the passage of time, it has ceased to provide correct geopolitical coordinates. The anachronism of the old colonial names for the protectorates and territories of French Indochina is part of the incantation of this vision: names such as Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China must have had by the late sixties a mythical, exotic ring, especially when juxtaposed, as on Herr's map, with fabulous places such as the kingdom of Siam. Yet, with the exclusion of the misguided help of this old-fashioned nomenclature, readers are left to their own devices in order to picture the serpentine drawing that appears to have bewitched the narrator. Like Herr's outdated map, this ‘blank’ image of Vietnam gains in evocative power in proportion to its lack of referential accuracy: map and country, signifier and signified are so much more fascinating as they are respectively inadequate mimetic tool and mysterious object of contemplation, empty signs holding the promise of a host of interpretative possibilities.