47 pages • 1 hour read
Michael HerrDispatches
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“Khe Sanh,” Chapter 5-PostscriptChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
The disconnect between what the higher ups in Command are telling the correspondents, and what the correspondents are actually experiencing in the field, is explored in this chapter.
Herr travels to Dong Ha with Karsten Prager, a correspondent with Time, who has been covering the war on and off for three years. When they get there, they request an interview with the commander, General Tompkins. Tompkins offers the correspondents packs of cigarettes, and sits down to listen to a long, intricate question from Prager involving “weather variants, air capability, elevation and range of our big guns, his big guns, problems of supply and reinforcement and (apologetically) disengagement and evacuation” (148).
The general explains that he is hard of hearing and asks Prager to repeat the question. As Prager restates the question, Herr’s mind drifts to the Marines in Khe Sanh, especially Mayhew. Prager ends his question with, “what I want to know is, what if [the North Vietnamese] decides to attack at Khe Sanh and, at the same time, [the North Vietnamese] attacks at every single base the Marines have set up to support Khe Sanh, all across the DMZ?” (149). Smiling, the general says that this is exactly what the U.S. Armed Forces want them to do.
The correspondents get an equally unsatisfying answer when they travel to Danang and attend an important press conference. Peter Braestrup, a former Marine and a correspondent with the Washington Post, asks a brigadier general from Marine Headquarters why, if the Command has expected the North Vietnamese to attack since November, they have not had the Marines fortify their position in Khe Sanh. The general answers, “I think you’re hitting a small nail with an awfully big hammer” (151).
Chapter 6 Summary
As monsoon season breaks, the temperature warms up in Khe Sanh, and the threat of an attack by the North Vietnamese dissipates. The once beautiful hills around Khe Sanh are being subjected to an unofficial scorched earth policy: “We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh” (153).
Traveling by Chinook from Cam Lo to Dong Ha, Herr is seated next to a Marine reading from the Bible. When Herr offers the Marine a cigarette, the man declines, but reciprocates by showing him the psalm he has been reading, 91:5, which states that there is no reason for you to be afraid of the night and the darkness because while thousands fall around you, “it shall come nigh thee” (154).
Herr signals back his appreciation for the psalm over the sounds of the helicopter blades, but he “had a nasty impulse…to find a passage which [he] could offer him, the one that talked about those who were defiled with their own works and sent a-whoring with their own inventions” (155). The psalms leading up to this are, “36And they served their idols: which were a snare unto them. 37Yea, they sacrificed their sons and daughters unto devils, 38And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and the land was polluted with blood.” Herr’s impulse is to strip the comfort that the Marine finds in the Bible with a psalm in which God admonishes man for indiscriminate killing.
Postscript Summary
China Beach faces the Bay of Danang, and every Marine gets to have a few days rest at China Beach during their tour. Besides the beach, there’s a cafeteria with a jukebox and hot food. The Marines get a chance to play in the surf, take hot showers, and visit the local “scivvie houses” (164).
In the cafeteria, two Marines approach Herr, remembering him from Khe Sanh. They let him know that both Day Tripper and Orrin made it home. He wants to ask about Mayhew, but temporarily forgets his name. He describes the nineteen-year-old, and it finally rings a bell for one of the Marines, who tells Herr that Mayhew was killed, and that he had taken an RPG round right to the chest. The two Marines keep on trying to come up with Mayhew’s name, but the name has already come back to Herr.
“Khe Sanh,” Chapter 5-Postscript Analysis
Herr writes, “The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done” (158). There were a few riots that broke out among the different outfits, mirroring the heartbreak, anger and turmoil in America’s cities. An African-American staff sergeant who had brought Herr to his outfit for dinner the night before, cut him “dead on the day we heard the news” (158). Later, the staff sergeant seeks Herr out, and the two of them sit on the grass, sharing a bottle of scotch. This Marine encapsulates the internal struggle of African Americans serving in the war. They are risking life and limb in Vietnam, but if they are lucky to make it home alive, they will return to a country that does not afford them equal protection under the law. This staff sergeant had wanted to make the military his career; he tells Herr, “But dig it. Am I gonna take ‘n turn them guns aroun’ on my own people? Shit!” (159).
Mayhew’s death is the first one that the reader experiences, having gotten to know the character. Herr temporarily forgets the fallen Marine’s name, but we haven’t forgotten. We become invested in a character, and, like Day Tripper, lament the fact that Mayhew signs on for four more months. So much of Dispatches feels like we are strapped into Herr’s bad dream, experiencing short snippets of conversations and encounters. Even though the section with Day Tripper and Mayhew is only a little more than twenty pages, it gives the reader two characters to pin our hopes to. In the postscript, one of those characters is taken away from us, with Mayhew functioning as a stand in for every young Marine killed in Vietnam.
