Dispatches

Now that Herr is at home, he has difficulty talking to people about the war. Either they are not interested in talking about it, or when they do ask, Herr doesn’t know what to say. He starts to recount people and events from Vietnam. He remembers a Marine who swore he could see his ghost on night patrol but was okay with it because the ghost was behind him: “It’s when he goes and moves up in front that you’re livin’ in a world of hurt” (252). He recalls having hallucinations, in which he was convinced that the people he saw walking around were people that he had seen die. He describes Flynn and Dana one last time, before explaining that neither had beenseen since April 1970, when they biked into Cambodia. It is presumed they had been captured and are now considered Missing in Action.

It seems that whatever spurred Herr to go to Vietnam in the first place was not resolved by Vietnam: “There’d been nothing happening there that hadn’t already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in the World. I hadn’t been anywhere, I’d performed half an act; the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly” (251). Herr finds it hard to distinguish his life and death from those he left behind in Vietnam, and he doesn’t feel particularly invested in either.

The book ends on a picture that Herr sees of a North Vietnamese soldier sitting along the Danang River where the press center used to be. He imagines the man sitting with his Vietnamese neighbors talking about “the bad old days” (260). And there’s nothing left for Herr to do except “write down some few last words” (260).