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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Existentialism Versus Determinism
From the beginning of Dispatches,the role that choice plays in the lives of the various characters is explored. When Herr sits down with a young Marine to eat their C-rations, the Marine says, “Boy, you sure get offered some shitty choices,” but Herr interprets this as “you didn’t get offered any at all” (16). Herr feels that experience has taught this young man that “there was no one anywhere who cared less about what he wanted” (16). But then Herr goes on to say that the Marine is “breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself” (16).
When listing the attitudes of the men to the many ways they could get maimed and killed, Herr leans toward determinism: “There were choices everywhere, but they were never choices that you could hope to make” (134). The possibilities are vast, but the ability to choose your poison doesn’t exist. The threat of having their testicles blown off, as some had seen happen to others, drove the men to bargain with God: “Take my legs, take my hands, take my eyes, take my fucking life, You Bastard, but please, please, please, don’t take those” (133).
With all the death and violence that Herr has encountered, the one thing that he cannot confront is “the look that made you look away” (208). Most of the combat troops that Herr meets have at least a grudging respect for war correspondents. They may not understand why they came, or what their mission is, but they respect the fact that they often put themselves in harm’s way when they do not have to. But it is this element of choice that provokes a different response from some of the troops that Herr comes into contact with:
They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way (208).
Herr and the other correspondents may walk, sleep, and eat alongside the troops, but they have the luxury of choice, while most of the men there do not. It is that element of choice that separates the experience of the correspondents with that of the troops that they are covering.
New Journalism
Herr explores the role that story plays in the war correspondents’ goal of bringing the war experience to their readership. There is the idea that the correspondent is the eyes and ears of the public, and the sights and sounds of the war will make their way to an audience unfiltered and without bias. But New Journalism, which was employed mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, prioritizes truth over facts, with Herr as concerned, if not more concerned, with the sociology of war than simply providing the who-what-why-when-were traditional newspaper journalism.
Throughout Dispatches, Herr explores the role that storyplays in his time in Vietnam. Herr seems to be on a constant quest for story; everywhere Herr goes, people seem to understand that he is there not just to record factsbut to find the heart of the story that will allow him to use literary techniques to make the war real to the outside world in a way that traditional reportage might struggle to. When doing this, Herr affords himself an element of choice when it comes to his mode of reportage. Herr can shape it, expand, or eliminate any part that he wants without fact being the prime decider.
When Herr is in Saigon and wants to hear news of the world, he does not rely on the facts and figures supplied by the Command, but “in the stories brought from the field by friends” (42). The Command is also free to shape its stories. When the Marines run the American flag up after the battle for Hue, the stories in the Saigon papers do not mention the rope breaking, the crowds running in panic, or even the rain; that is, just as the military alters facts to offer the story they feel they need to, so, too, does Herr.
Narrator as Spectator Versus Narrator as Active Participant
Early on in the text, Herr describes his role as a spectator to the war. Responding to the narrative put forward by military command, a“young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence” says “‘All that’s just a load, man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.’ Which wasn’t at all true of [Herr]. [He] was there to watch” (20).
Herr’s illusion that he can stay above the fray is quickly dismantled:
I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as for everything you did (20).
Even before Herr is called on to participate directly in the war by providing cover, he understands the symbiotic relationship between himself and the combat troops:
they were my guns, and I let them do it […] I let them do that for me while I watched, maybe for them, maybe not. We covered each other, an exchange of services that worked all right until one night when I slid over to the wrong end of the story, propped up behind some sandbags at an airstrip in Can Tho with a .30-caliber automatic in my hands, firing cover for a four-man reaction team trying to get back in (67).
Herr travels with the Marines to Langvei two months after it was attacked. His identification with the Marines is reflected in his language as he describes their actions there: “We sat on the hill and watched while napalm was dropped from the bunkers, and then we set up a recoilless rifle and fired at the vents” (160). His use of the word “we” shows that Herr has integrated himself into the unit; he is no longer a mere observer.
Toward the end of Dispatches,it is almost taken for granted that Herr will participate in the actions of the combat troops. In Can Tho “there were so few of us in the compound that they’d had to put me on the reaction force” (183).
