Dispatches

The narrator discusses the role that drugs play during the war. Dexadrine is a stimulant that the medics give the soldiers before they patrol at night. Herr doesn’t see a need for the drug because, “a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear” (4). He finds the night patrols so terrifying he decides to not join the Lurps, the “long-range recon patrollers, who did it night after night for weeks and months, creeping up on the VC base camps or around moving columns of North Vietnamese” (5).

Herr meets a 4th Division Lurp who takes handfuls of pills at a time. He keeps downers in his left pocket and uppers in the right, “one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it” (5). This is the Lurp’s third tour. In 1965, the Lurp had been part of the Calvary Division when he becomes the sole survivor of his platoon after it heads into the Ia Drang Valley. In 1966, he returns to Vietnam with Special Forces, and after being ambushed, he hides underneath the corpses of his fellow soldiers while the Viet Cong walk among the dead bodies, looking for survivors. When he gets sent back home, he is unable to “hack it back in the World” (5). He upsets his parents by pointing his rifle out of the window and training it on people and cars, his finger on the trigger. Back in Vietnam, his teammates are just as wary of him, with no one wanting to make eye contact.

That summer, Herr travels around the country with photojournalists Tim Page and Sean Flynn, the son of movie stars Lili Dimita and Errol Flynn. When they fail to salute a commanding officer, the officer asks, “Don’t you men salute officers?” (7), and Page responds that “We’re not men. We’re correspondents” (7). When the commander finds out that they are journalists he wants to throw an impromptu operation for their benefit. The correspondents have to take the next helicopter out to avoid the commander getting his men killed “for a little ink” (7).

Later, Herr recounts a chopper ride full of corpses. He doesn’t want to get on, but the pilot has gone out of his way to pick him up. The Marines have run out of body bags, along with almost everything else, and the bodies are wrapped in ponchos, fastened with plastic straps. Herr is wedged into a small space between the door gunner and one of the bodies. When the helicopter ascends, the poncho covering the corpse next to Herr blows back, exposing the dead man’s face and open eyes. The gunner starts yelling, “Fix it! Fix it!” (17). After a couple of aborted attempts, Herr lifts the head of the corpse and tucks the poncho in place. 

Herr compares his reaction to seeing the death and destruction in the Vietnam War to what he felt as a child when he would look at photographs of war in Life Magazine:“It may have legitimized my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn’t have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world” (18). Marines always want to know what Herr is doing in Vietnam. When one of the Marines says that they are there to kill, Herr knows that that is not true of him; Herr “was there to watch” (20).

When Herr first arrives in Vietnam, a gunner on a Chinook throws him a helmet with “TIME IS ON MY SIDE” written across it and “No lie, GI” written underneath. He is happy to have the helmet until he realizes where it came from: “The sweatband inside was seasoned up black and greasy, it was more alive now than the man who’d worn it” (21). He ditches the helmet, hoping that no one sees him. A sergeant refers to him as “Freshmeat” and tells him to find “some other outfit to get [himself] killed with” (22). When Herr nervously laughs in response, the sergeant says, “This ain’t the fucking movies over here, you know” (22). Herr says that he knows, but they both know that this is not true.

After the troops see action, they sit around in groups waiting to be picked up by the helicopters. Herr listens to their stories. One Marine recounts how he had this lieutenant that they all called “Lieutenant Gladly ‘cause he was always going like, ‘Men…Men, I won’t ever ask you to do nothing I wouldn’t do myself gladly” (26). When he asks the Marine to run up to the ridge and report to him, the Marine replies, “Never happen, Sir” (26). The lieutenant goes himself, promising the soldier that they were going to have a talk when he gets back. But, the Marine says, “damned if the fucker didn’t get zapped” (26).

One afternoon, the narrator is walking with a group of Marines when a mortar round detonates thirty yards away. When they hit the ground, the young Marine in front of him accidentally kicks Herr in the face. Herr thinks he has been shot in the head, and he lets out “a shrill blubbering pitched to carry more terror than I’d ever known existed” (32). At first the young soldier is apologetic, but quickly loses pity, and starts laughing at the narrator.