Dispatches by Michael Herr

First published: 1977

Type of work: New Journalism

Time of work: 1967-1968

Locale: Vietnam

Principal Personages:

• Michael Herr, the author, a young journalist in Vietnam
• Tim Page, a photographer
• Mayhew, and
• Day Tripper, soldiers in Vietnam

Form and Content

In 1967 Michael Herr, a young journalist with Esquire magazine, traveled on assignment to Vietnam. Although realizing the benefits of not needing to file a daily or weekly press release as many of his colleagues were required to do, Herr found that the complexities of the war in Southeast Asia consumed him, both mentally and emotionally. He was unprepared for the extent of his involvement and openly admits this early in the narrative. In a voice that expresses his awe, he intones: “Talk . . . about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me.”

Despite the initial difficulty in assimilating these experiences, Herr managed ultimately to understand and communicate them, at first in articles in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and New American Review and, later, in New York magazine and Crawdaddy. Greatly revised, these articles form the core of the narrative that was to appear ten years later as Dispatches. In the tradition of Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, and Ernie Pyle, Herr captures the essence of the American soldier’s experiences in combat. Yet he also goes beyond these earlier writers; by employing the genre of New Journalism, Herr reveals himself by depicting “the way it was” (to borrow a phrase from Hemingway) for the soldiers and by exploring the history of the war and his own reaction to these experiences. Herr summed up the uniqueness of this genre when he noted in a 1979 interview that he considered himself “a writer, not a journalist.”

In focusing most directly on the soldiers, Herr attains an immediacy—yet a formlessness—that reflects his initial perception of the war. Vignettes of varying length permeate the narrative. The shortest consists of two lines: “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.” Longer ones are several pages: the story of Davies, a helicopter gunner stationed at Tan Son Nhut but living in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress. The longest stretch over a chapter: The chapter focusing on Khe Sanh repeatedly refers to Mayhew and Day Tripper, a soldier with a profound fear of night and an obsession with time. These stories, like the countless others that Herr relates, are told without concern for a chronological sequence; rather, one story builds on, or contrasts with, another. What is created in this organization is a powerful sense of the violence and compassion, fear and anger, confusion and courage felt variously by the individual soldiers. From the story of the “always smiling,” youthful Marine with the incongruously aged and “blazed-out” eyes who cannot leave Khe Sanh because of his irrational short-timer’s syndrome to that of the young American-Indian soldier who unselfishly volunteers for a potential suicide mission, what emerges is the variety of emotional reactions to combat.

A second pattern of meditations, about Vietnam itself and about the military and political conduct of the war, complements the stories of the soldiers. Topographically, Khe Sanh is both familiar and eerie, existing “among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement”:

The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off. It is ghost-story country.

Yet if this is a place where reality seems distorted, the reason for the surreal quality lies not always in the land and the climate. On the one hand, Herr’s own rapid movement from location to location—aided by the ubiquitous helicopter—seems to disorient the reader as much as the shift from one vignette to another. On the other hand, Herr is frustrated in his attempts to ascertain the truth about the operations from official sources. Whether in an individual interview with a high-ranking officer or at the “five o’clock follies” (the derogatory phrase used to describe the daily press briefings in Saigon), the best he can hope for is a partial truth.

The structure of the narrative suggests the truth that Herr ultimately recognizes: that he is involved, to varying degrees, in all that he observes and learns, whether it be about the soldiers, Vietnam, or himself. Divided into six chapters, the central four (“Hell Sucks,” about the operations at Hue; “Khe Sanh,” “Illumination Rounds,” and “Colleagues”) all present stories, generally linked thematically, that focus on people and events surrounding Herr. Herr is thus a character in these vignettes, but he is also an observer who must report others’ experiences. In the first chapter, “Breathing In,” however, Herr is affected more immediately by the diverse stories that he is told or that he observes directly. Here the author is often personally involved, as in the short story in which he panics when he mistakes a bloody nose for a gunshot wound, or, later, when he realizes that during one firefight he “wasn’t a reporter, [he] was a shooter.” These five chapters, comprising 250 of the book’s 260 pages, represent an accumulation of varied experiences that reflect Herr’s time in Vietnam.

Balancing with the first, the sixth chapter is appropriately titled “Breathing Out.” In this ten-page coda, Herr interweaves stories of his departure from Vietnam and memories of the soldiers and his own experiences, and culminates with his frustrating attempts to deal with those memories. Herr concludes that he must “write down some few last words and make the dispersion”; he must, he realizes, share his perceptions with the American people.

Critical Context

In revealing himself as an active narrator at the same time that he describes the people and events occurring around him, Herr takes his place with other writers of New Journalism, writers such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. These writers work, as a critic of the genre notes, “not by merely reporting facts . . . but by combining the unique credibility of journalism with the self-reflexive patternmaking of fabulist fiction.” In Dispatches that combination of modes is crucial. As Herr himself says, “conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.” Herr thus goes beyond Pyle and Hemingway in that his self-reflexivity reveals a “secret history,” one which attempts to discover a self in relation to the lives, and deaths, of the many American soldiers with whom he comes in contact in Vietnam. Admittedly incomplete, Herr’s effort to understand these experiences becomes a reflection of his effort to understand his own experience.

The complexity of the experiences, however, eludes a facile understanding. In the final chapter Herr admits that, upon his return home, he was troubled by memories during the day and nightmares during his sleep. Indeed, although it is suspected in 1979 that he is writing a novel that will become a “love story,” his two subsequent major works—narration for the films Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987)—remain focused on the Vietnam War. In committing himself to these endeavors, as in the painful final chapter of Dispatches, Herr is poignantly reaffirming his kinship with the American soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

Herr’s Dispatches thus takes its place among the numerous important narratives that have attempted a re-creation of the compelling experiences of Vietnam, both in and out of combat. These narratives have ranged in genre from personal memoir to oral history and fabulist fiction. Interestingly, Herr’s work has been compared with Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978), a highly acclaimed representative of the New Journalism, for both works convey a sense of confusion about the experience. As O’Brien, a former combat soldier, explains, “Vietnam was like walking a maze”; in constructing his fragmentary novel, O’Brien captures that experience and gives it, with its complex plot, an overarching structure. Herr, on the other hand, comes closer to re-creating for the reader the experience of personal and cultural confusion surrounding the war: Only the general pattern of the six chapters and Herr’s acknowledged central consciousness provide a loose coherence. In this way, Dispatches conveys a powerful impression of a person still sorting out a meaning that will encompass the stories of the soldiers whom he has come to know and respect, the confusing and frightening sense of the place, and the personal events of his tour in Vietnam. Recording these experiences, telling his and their stories, he hopes, will help not only his own understanding but also that of the American people for they, ultimately, are his readers.

Bibliography

Cobley, Evelyn. “Narrating the Facts of the War: New Journalism in Herr’s Dispatches and Documentary Realism in First World War Novels,” in Journal of Narrative Technique. XVI (Spring, 1986), pp. 97-116.

Hellmann, John. “The Hero Seeks a Way Out,” in American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, 1986.

Hellmann, John. “Memory, Fragments, and ’Clean Information’: Michael Herr’s Dispatches,” in Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction, 1981.

Jones, Dale. “The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien: Tales of Disintegration and Integration,” in Canadian Review of American Studies. XIII (Winter, 1982), pp. 309-320.

Van Deusen, Marshall. “The Unspeakable Language of Life and Death in Michael Herr’s Dispatches,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. XVI (Winter, 1983), pp. 82-87.