Occasionally his violence goes beyond verbal bluster. From inside his fortified bunker in Colorado, with his pet Dobermans slavering at the perimeter, he fires off missives as if they were missiles. The music made by the language, in his use of it, resembles the percussive iteration of gunfire, or the fulmination of an exploding grenade. He apologised for his typing, but assured the colonel that, 'I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon.' It was sweetly naive of him to imagine that military despots value such credentials nevertheless, his self-assessment was just. In 1975, sent to Vietnam by Rolling Stone to gloat over the withdrawal of American troops, Thompson wrote an uncharacteristically deferential letter to a Vietcong official, requesting an interview. He writes, as the Angels rode, to ventilate what he calls, in this second volume of his collected letters, a 'killing rage - a savage hatred of the venal politicians, thuggish police and crass commercial developers' who during these years in his view transformed America into a fascist state.
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