Dispatches

“Back from the strip a fat, middle-aged man was screaming at some troops who were pissing on the ground. His poncho was pulled back away from the front of his helmet enough to show captain’s bars, but nobody even turned around to look at him. He groped under his poncho and came up with a .45, pointed it into the rain and fired off a shot that made an empty faraway pop, like it had gone off under wet sand. The men finished, buttoned up and walked away laughing, leaving the captain alone shouting orders to police up the filth […].”

This interaction between a captain and his subordinates shows a breakdown in order. Enlisted men have lost respect for their superiors, and no longer fear the consequences of disregarding an order.

“First letter I got from my old man was all about how proud he was that I’m here and how we have this duty to, you know, I don’t fucking know, whatever […] and it really made me feel great. Shit, my father hardly said good morning to me before. Well, I been here eight months now, and when I get home I’m gonna have all I can do to keep from killing that cocksucker […].”

This Marine feels like he’s been sold a bill of goods. His father never gave him attention until he went off to fight in Vietnam, and then, once the Marine has been there for a few months, he realizes that he doesn’t even know what he’s fighting for. His need for his father’s approval turns to anger once he realizes that his father never valued him as a person until he became useful to the government.

“Every day people were dying because of some small detail that they couldn’t be bothered to observe. Imagine being too tired to snap a flak jacket closed, too tired to clean your rifle, too tired to guard a light, too tired to deal with the half-inch margins of safety that moving through the war often demanded, just too tired to give a fuck and then dying behind the exhaustion. There were times when the whole war itself seemed tapped of its vitality: epic enervation, the machine running half-assed and depressed, fueled on the watery residue of last year’s war-making energy.” 

The tragic irony of a person being too tired to keep themselves alive is talked about in great detail here. Later in the book, Herr states that there are many who think that the U.S. went into Vietnam partly because it was assumed that it would be an easy mission. Between 1956 and 1975 over 58,000 U.S. military personnel were killed in Vietnam, and Dispatches, like many other texts that focus on the Vietnam War, describe service as exhausting.

“A lot of people knew that country could never be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with breathtaking concentration, no quarter, laying down the seeds of the disease, roundeye fever, until it reached plague proportions, taking one from every family, a family from every hamlet, a hamlet from every province, until a million had died from it and millions more were left uncentered and lost in their flight from it.” 

Even though there was no official scorched earth policy, much of the country was destroyed during the war and the Vietnamese population was decimated, with 444,000 deaths of military personnel and approximately 627,000 civilian deaths.

“All the grunts were whistling, and no two were whistling the same tune, it sounded like a locker room before a game that nobody wanted to play.” 

Herr often talks about the disconnect between commanding officers and the Marines on the ground. This recollection describes how that disconnect manifests itself even within units.

“The rain had brought up the green, it stretched out cased in thick white fog. In the park itself, four fat green dead lay sprawled around a tall, ornate cage, inside of which sat a small, shivering monkey. One of the correspondents long stepped over the corpses to feed it some fruit.” 

This short passage illustrates that while empathy and compassion still exist, life has become devalued. The fact that the correspondent has become so accustomed to seeing dead bodies that he can will himself to step over corpses shows the level of death and destruction that he has become desensitized to, and yet the correspondent does so in order to complete a kind act.

“Civilian dead lay out on the sidewalks only a block from the compound, and the park by the river was littered with dead. It was cold and the sun never came out once, but the rain did things to the corpses that were worse in their way than anything the sun could have done. It was on one of those days that I realized that the only corpse I couldn’t bear to look at would be the one I would never have to see.” 

The irony that Herr has become so accustomed to seeing death that he can handle seeing any dead body other than his own, which he will never have to confront, is provocative, but may not be fully accurate. In this narrative, he only looks on the corpses of strangers, or relative strangers. Although people close to him die, he is never in a position of having to see them in that state, so he has not really been tested in that way.

“A little boy of about ten came up to a bunch of Marines from Charlie Company. He was laughing and moving his head from side to side in a funny way. The fierceness in his eyes should have told everyone what it was, but it had never occurred to most of the grunts that a Vietnamese child could be driven mad too, and by the time they understood it the boy had begun to go for their eyes and tear at their fatigues, spooking everyone, putting everyone really uptight, until a black grunt grabbed him from behind and held his arm. ‘C’mon, poor li’l baby, ‘fore one a these grunt mothers shoots you,’ he said, and carried the boy to where the corpsmen were.” 

Dispatches is told from the view of an American war correspondent, and most of the other characters are also American or European. This book does not represent a Vietnamese perspective, and does not pretend to. But in this one exchange, we see the Marines getting confronted with the fact that the Vietnamese are suffering emotionally and mentally, just as the combat troops are. The Marine who takes the boy to get medical treatment from the corpsmen recognizes that this child is suffering, as well.

“At night in the CP, the major who commanded the battalion would sit reading his maps, staring vacantly at the trapezoid of the Citadel. It could have been a scene in a Norman farmhouse twenty-five years ago, with candles burning on the tables, bottles of red wine arranged along damaged shelves, the chill in the room, the high ceilings, the heavy ornate cross on the wall. The major had not slept for five nights, and for the fifth night in a row he assured us that tomorrow […] the final stretch of wall would be taken and he had all the Marines he needed to do it. And one of his aides, a tough mustang first lieutenant, would pitch a hard, ironic smile above the major’s stare, a smile that rejected good news, it was like hearing him say, ‘The major here is full of shit, and we both know it.’”

Herr juxtaposes the Battle of Normandy, in which Allied forces freed Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control, with the more muddled purpose of the Vietnam War. The major represents the optimism and dedication to the mission of WWII, while his aide represents the cynicism of the Vietnam war. 

“The NVA flag that had flown for so long over the south wall had been cut down, and in its place an American flag had been put up. Two days later the Hoc Bao, Vietnamese Rangers, stormed through the walls of the Imperial Palace, but there were no NVA left inside. Except for a few bodies in the moat, most of their dead had been buried. When they’d first come into Hue the NVA had sat at banquets given for them by the people. Before they left, they’d skimmed all the edible vegetation from the surface of the moat.” 

In a very economical way, Herr takes the reader through the experience that the North Vietnamese soldiers had in Hue. The local people, either out of appreciation or fear, welcomed the soldiers with banquets, but by the battle for Hue the North Vietnamese soldiers have been reduced to foraging for the vegetation that floated on the surface of the moat. It gives the reader a real sense of the desperation that these soldiers faced during the last days and weeks of their lives.

“There was a week in the war, one week, when the Army lost more men […] proportionately, than the Marines, and Army spokesmen had a rough time hiding their pride, their absolute glee.” 

A lot of Herr’s writing shows the disconnect between the military command and the combat troops on the ground. The Army spokesmen’s interpretation that the higher losses sustained by the Army is impressive shows that the lives of service members killed in action often becomes reduced to numbers on a tally sheet.

“I see a road. It is full of ruts made by a truck and jeep tires, but in the passing rains they never harden, and along the road there is a two-dollar piece of issue, a poncho which had been used to cover a dead Marine, a blood-puddled, mud-wet poncho going stiff in the wind. It has reared up there by the road in a horrible, streaked ball. The wind doesn’t move it, only setting the pools of water and blood in the dents shimmering. I’m walking along this road with two black grunts, and one of them gives the poncho a vicious, helpless kick. ‘Go easy, man,’ the other one says, nothing changing in his face, not even a look back. ‘That’s the American flag you getting your foot into.’” 

The U.S. Government commits heavy resources to this war, including the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers. As in so many passages in Dispatches, there is a tragic beauty to Herr’s language that is juxtaposed to the imagery comprising the scenes. 

“On a night shortly after the Langvei attack an entire platoon of 1/9 was ambushed during a patrol and wiped out. Hill 861 had been hit repeatedly, once for three days straight during a perimeter probe that turned into a siege. For reasons that no one is certain of, Marine helicopters refused to fly missions up there, and 1/9 was cut off from support, re-supply or medical evacuation. It was bad, and they had to get through it in any way they could, alone. (The stories of that time became part of the worst Marine legends; the story of one Marine putting a wounded buddy away with a pistol shot because medical help was impossible, or the story of what they did to the NVA prisoner taken beyond the wire–stories like that. Some of them may even have been true.) The old hostility of the grunt toward Marine Air became total on 861: when the worst of it was overand the first Ch-34 finally showed over the hilltop, the door gunner was hit by enemy ground fire and fell out of the chopper. It was a drop of over 200 feet, and there were Marines on the ground who cheered when he hit.” 

The fact that some Marines cheer as their fellow Marine gets hit with enemy fire shows how badly war warps morality. The Marines on the ground feel abandoned, and by the time the helicopters show up, the Marines who have been under siege for three days view the helicopter crew as the enemy.

“I went down into the Seabee bunker, picked up a bottle of Scotch and a field jacket, and told one of the Seabees to give my rack to anyone who needed it that night.

‘You ain’t mad at us or anything?’ he said.

‘Nothing like that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ he said as I left. ‘If you think so.’” 

“If you think so” is said in such an offhanded way, but it shows the degree to which this member of the Civil Engineer Corps doesn’t take survival for granted. He has seen too much death to assume that the two will meet again.

“Often you’d hear Marines talking about how beautiful those hills must have been, but that spring they were not beautiful. Once they had been the royal hunting grounds of the Annamese emperors. Tigers, deer and flying squirrels had lived in them. I used to imagine what a royal hunt must have been like, but I could only see it as an Oriental children’s story: a conjuring of the emperor and empress, princes and princelings, court favorites and emissaries, all comparisoned for the hunt; slender figures across a tapestry, a promise of bloodless kills, a serene frolic complete with horseback flirtations and death-smiling game. And even now you could hear Marines comparing these hills with the hills around their homes, talking about what a pleasure it would be to hunt in them for anything other than men.” 

The juxtaposition that Herr makes between the children’s story of a royal hunt to the reality of men hunting men in the hills of Khe Sanh shows the current carnage in sharp relief, with all of its attendant sights, smells, and sounds. It also gives a glimpse into the country’s storied past, which lives in the memories of the Vietnamese people. Further, it shows how Herr sees narrative in anything and everything he encounters while in Vietnam. 

“The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he’d have to wait for one of his own ships, they weren’t coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well bring him down. So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions.

The commander’s code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals.

‘God damn it, Sergeant,’ he said through the static, ‘I thought you were a professional soldier.’

‘I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, I was gonna lose my man.’

‘This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?’

‘Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper “dirty laundry”?’

‘At ease, Sergeant,’ Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken.” 

This event reinforces the idea that there is a lack of cooperation, not only between branches of the service, but among different outfits. The colonel is more concerned with his outfit’s reputation for being able to handle its own business than the life of one of his medics. The difference in the colonel’s experience of the war and his sergeant’s experience is illustrated by the colonel’s use of the term “dirty laundry” and the jokey code name and call signal he uses.

“Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it […].” 

The idea that this war is materially different than other wars that the U.S. had been engaged in is revealed in the fact that not only do conventional tactics not work against the Viet Cong, but the traditional ways of reporting on war result in reductive reporting; thus, Herr winds up using New Journalism to get to the essence of serving in Vietnam. Even if facts are changed, one reads Dispatches and feels what it was like to be there. 

“There was a well-known correspondent of three wars who used to walk around the Danang press center with a green accountant’s ledger […] The Marines arranged for a special helicopter (or ‘fragged a chopper,’ as we used to call it) to take him in and out of Khe Sanh one afternoon, weeks after it had become peaceful again. He came back very cheerful about our great victory there. I was sitting with Lengle, and we recalled that, at the very least, 200 grunts had been blown away there and around 1,000 more wounded. He looked up from his ledger and said, ‘Oh, two hundred isn’t anything. We lost more than that in an hour on Guadalcanal.’ We weren’t going to deal with that, so we sort of left the table, but you heard that kind of talk all the time, as though it could invalidate the deaths at Khe Sanh, render them somehow less dead than the dead from Guadalcanal, as though light losses didn’t lie as still as moderate losses or heavy losses.” 

The veteran war correspondent carries around an accountant’s ledger, the most appropriate accessory for a man who has lost touch with the lives behind the statistics of war. Herr and Lengle have lived among the combat troops for too long to maintain the same self-preserving distance that this experienced war veteran uses to view the men on the ground.

“[W]ho but another correspondent could talk the kind of mythical war that you wanted to hear described? (Just hearing the way Flynn pronounced the word ‘Vietnam,’ the tenderness and respect that he put in it, taught you more about the beauty and horror of the place than anything the apologists or explainers could ever teach you.) Who could you discuss politics with, except a colleague?”

Herr’s assertion is that one might get facts and figures from military personnel and politicians, but it takes a correspondent to capture the mood of the place. This is especially heartbreaking considering Flynn’s presumed death at the end of the book.

“We came back or moved on, keeping in touch from New York or San Francisco, Paris or London, Africa or the Middle East; some fell into bureaus in Chicago or Hong Kong or Bangkok, coming to miss the life so acutely (some of us) that we understood what amputees went through when they sensed movement in the fingers or toes of limbs lost months before. A few extreme cases felt that the experience there had been a glorious one, while most of us felt that it had been merely wonderful. I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” 

The war correspondents choose to cover the Vietnam War, each for their own personal reasons. The notion that their time in Vietnam both has left them (the missing limb) and yet will never leave them (false sensations from that limb) is an interesting analogy to use, as Herr himself must have seen plenty of soldiers who had lost an actual limb. 

“One day a letter came from a British publisher, asking [Page] to do a book whose working title would be ‘Through with War’ and whose purpose would be to once and for all ‘take the glamour out of war.’ Page couldn’t get over it. ‘Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan […] Can you take the glamour out of a Cobra or getting stoned at China Beach? It’s like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn.’ He pointed to a picture he’d taken, Flynn laughing maniacally (‘We’re winning,’ he’d said), triumphantly. ‘Nothing the matter with that boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is good for you, you can’t take the glamour out of that. It’s like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.’” 

Nothing captures the ambivalent feelings that the correspondents have toward covering the war more than Page’s reaction to the publisher. As painful, frightening, and dehumanizing as it has been, it has also been adventurous, thrilling, and sexy. Page, who has given as much as any correspondent can give to the war without dying, still is not willing to deny that covering the war has been one of the best experiences of his life.

“[W]hen he told me that he saw ghosts whenever they went on night patrol I didn’t laugh, and when he said that he’d started seeing his own out there I think I freaked a little. ‘Naw, that’s cool, that’s cool, motherfucker was behind me,’ he said. ‘It’s when he goes and moves up in front that you’re livin’ in a world of hurt.’ I tried to say that what he probably had seen was the phosphorescence that gathered around rotting tree trunks and sent pulsing light over the ground from one damp spot to another. ‘Crazy,’ he said, and, ‘Later.’” 

In wartime, the uncommon becomes common: this Marine is accepting of seeing ghosts, as long as they’re not in front of him. When Herr points out that there’s a natural reason for what the Marine is seeing, the Marine deems Herr’s explanation “crazy.

“I said shot-gun, shoot ‘em ‘fore they run now,’ at Nha Trang, talking to a man just starting his second tour. ‘When I come home I seen how scared you all was. I mean it wasn’t no damn combat situation or nothing like that, but believe you me, you was scared. I seen it here and I seen it there, so what the fuck? I come back.’” 

This soldier has experienced the war, and experienced being home after the war, and sees the similarities in both worlds. For him, Vietnam is just an intensification of the fears that people are experiencing back home, so he might as well be at war, where he can push against those negative emotions. There is a rather startling logic to this statement; it’s not inaccurate, and the fact that a similar level of fear can reside stateside reinforces not only the turbulence of the time but that many soldiers, after their tour is up, find little solace in returning home.