Dispatches

This section covers the Tet Offensive, and the intense fighting that occurred in Hue. The Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968, when the People’s Army of Vietnam surprised the U.S. Armed Forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam with a well-coordinated spate of attacks across the country. The U.S. was able to beat back the North Vietnamese and maintain a certain level of control in the country, but the enemy’s ability to wage such a devastating operation against the allies, and photographs from that intense period of fighting, were responsible for turning U.S. public opinion against the war.

At first, Herr is in Saigon, where a curfew has been put into effect in response to the intensification of fighting during the Tet Offensive: “Saigon had been depressing enough, but during the Offensive it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating” (70). Because trash and human waste is building up on the streets, leadership is concerned that it will add to the death tolls. Herr feels that “if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency” (70).

The narrator travels with the troops to Hue, where the fighting is most intense: “Everyone else in the truck had that wild haunted going-West look that said it was perfectly correct to be here where the fighting would be the worst” (74). Some Marines have written names of operations and girlfriends on their helmets and flak jackets. Others have written down their outlook on the situation, like “HELL SUCKS.”

The streets of Hue are covered with the dead bodies of civilians. Later on, “some 5,000 ‘shallow graves’ outside the city, containing the bodies from [North Vietnamese Army] executions” (85) are found.

In the middle of the fighting, Herr jumps at the opportunity to travel back to the press center in Danang. Here, away from the continuous firefights and dropping of napalm, the Marines play volleyball and the air-conditioned dining room is stocked with alcohol. After getting his fill of hamburgers and bourbon, and taking a shower so hot he thought he’d “gone insane from it” (80), the narrator prepares for a 5 AM wake-up call, so that he can travel back to Hue.

Once the North Vietnamese Army is expelled, the occasion is marked with two flag-raisings. During the first, “200 refugees from one of the camps were recruited to stand, sullen and silent in the rain” (83) and watch the North Vietnamese Army flag lowered, replaced by the Government of Vietnam flag. But as the new flag is being raised, the rope snaps and the refugees, thinking that the Viet Cong have shot it down, run from the site: “There was no rain in the stories that the Saigon papers ran, no trouble with the rope, and the cheering crowd numbered thousands” (83).