Dispatches

Rather than something that happens automatically, in Dispatches,Herr depicts the act of breathing as something that has to be fought for and consciously done: “A couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath” (5). Breath, too, is applied to setting, not just characters: “Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption” (43). Sometimes the act of breathing is more difficult than others: “dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn’t 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body” (54). During the battle for Hue, when the U.S. military uses tear gas that would blow back over U.S. positions, Herr states that “[i]t was impossible to get a clean breath” (78).

The first section of Dispatches is titled “Breathing In,” while the last is “Breathing Out.” The image that this creates is of Herr, the other war correspondents, and the combat troops, taking the Vietnam War into their bodies, and then eventually expelling it as something different. Not only do the people, cities, and country, acting as vessels for the war, change the war itself, but the war changes the vessels. 

Night represents everything that cannot be controlled in Vietnam, and most specifically the Viet Cong: “Saigon at night was still Vietnam at night, night was the war’s truest medium; night was when it got really interesting in the villages, the TV crews couldn’t film at night, the Phoenix was a night bird, it flew in and out of Saigon all the time” (40-41).

When talking about the enemy, Herr says, “we had the days and he had the nights” (14). Before one of the 4th Division long-range recon patrollers goes out at night, he takes pills that “cooled things out just right for him, that he could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope” (5). After day battles, the bodies of killed North Vietnamese soldiers disappear at night, confusing the Allied forces. 

Color is also used to create vivid language, and lend mood to objects and ideas in Dispatches: “frail gray smoke…brilliant white smoke…deep black smoke from [napalm]” (10). When describing the Marine that empties his M-16 into the corpses of the North Vietnamese soldiers, Herr uses color to capture how this man’s grotesqueness was manifested in his looks. His face “was flushed and mottled and twisted like he had his face skin on inside out, a patch of green that was too dark, a streak of red running into bruise purple, a lot of sick gray white in between…” (19).

Herr also uses the characteristics of color–nuanced and infinite–to try and explain his love for the Marines, while maintaining a hatred for the things that some of them did:

Disgust doesn’t begin to describe what they made me feel, they threw people out of helicopters, tied people up and put the dogs on them. Brutality was just a word in my mouth before that. But disgust was only one color in the whole mandala, gentleness and pity were other colors, there wasn’t a color left out (67).

Toward the end of the book, Herr recalls a frightening night in “a brand-new no-name Marine lz in the heart of Indian country” (255): “[…] clocking the black triangle of the raised tent flap as it turned dark blue, fog white, sun yellow, and it felt okay to get up” (255).