Dispatches by Michael Herr Narrative

Dispatches by Michael Herr

Narrative voice and perspective in Herr's Dispatches

Michael Herr's enigmatically titled book Dispatches might be called a postmodern view of the Vietnam War. The book evolves a fragmented narrative, its title referring to the subjectivity of fragmented voices of different troops, politicians, and reporters, all writing of their experiences in Vietnam. Herr tells the book in multiple voices, all authored by himself, but with different perspectives upon the conflict. He peppers the book with quotes from the era, and pairs them with reflective, philosophical passages abut the nature of war and journalism -- and brutal anecdotes from the field. His viewpoints are jarring, multidimensional, even contradictory at times. They are an emotional map or landscape of Vietnam's territory, which may be the truest map of this entire contentious region.

Torn by a civil war, Herr presents a Vietnam, not concretized by his reporter's experiences, but continually destabilized by the terrors of war. Instead of a traditional reporter, who says what he knows, Herr admits what he does not know, even though he saw some of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War, side-by-side with battle-hardened soldiers: "You'd stand nailed there in your tracks, some times, no bearings and none in sight, thinking, Where the fuck am I, fallen into some unnatural East/West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia, and once we'd done it, we couldn't remember what for. It was axiomatic that it was about ideological space, we were there to bring them the choice, bringing it to them. Like Sherman bringing the Jubilee through Georgia, clean through it, wall to wall with pacified indigenous and scorched earth."

Maps continually change so much, delineating who controls who and what, they are ultimately rendered meaningless. Vietnam is perhaps the ultimate postmodern experience -- a fragmented country, where every individual possesses multiple identities: reporter and American, soldier and drug fiend, reporter and son of a famous actor, teenager and killer, communist and nationalist. No one even knows when the conflict began -- after World War II? Before 1961?

Even the maps that hang on the wall are already out-of-date.

For the American Herr, for most Americans Vietnam did not begin in reality, but in the movies. He "keeps thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing Little guts and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn't done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after the first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn't let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras.

" The madness, in short, is not in the war, but in American culture that glorifies violence and links male identity to systematized violence. The media and culture create soldiers, rage, and violence, these things are not natural. In Herr's estimation, one might say, if there had been no Vietnam, a bloodthirsty American culture would have to create it for more violence to be cannibalized on screen. Significantly, helicopters bring meat and movies to the troops, substances that epitomize American culture and manhood -- and just as the war is about blood, raw flesh, and the ability to dramatize conflict on a screen for the movies and television.

Interestingly, when Herr speaks of such violence, he does not speak of the troops as 'others,' as they, he embraces that the violence of American culture is also part of his own upbringing. Herr never trumpets the truth-telling of his profession, rather he sees reporters just as mendacious as politicians, just as drunk on the idea of telling a good story, and war makes for a good narrative: "A lot of correspondents weren't much better. We'd all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City; years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. The first few times that I had got fired at or saw combat deaths, nothing had really happened, all the responses got locked in my head. It was the same familiar violence only moved over to another medium: some kind of jungle play with giant helicopters and fantastic special effects, actors lying out there in canvas body bags waiting for the scene to end so they could get up again and walk it off. But that was some scene (you found out), there was no cutting it.

Herr's Dispatches intensely personal tone may frustrate some readers in search of an objective history of the Vietnam War. But Herr would likely respond that it is impossible for an American to truly and fairly render a portrait of Vietnam that is complete. When Americans talk of Vietnam, they are talking of themselves, their own cultural assumptions, their own war-films. "Come on,' the captain said, 'we'll take you to play Cowboys and Indians,'" anachronistically stapling the myth of the Wild West to a South Asian nation.

This not only shows the cold masculine violence of war, it also indicates the limits of the American worldview in terms of seeing other nations -- we see the West in the jungle, and democracy in the South Vietnamese cause. This is another postmodern truth -- looking at the face and voice of another, we can only see ourselves, our own cowboy heroism that casts war as play.

Herr is clearly critical of American bravado in this passage. Yet he acknowledges that the experience of combat is another thing, separate from these literary reflections or his ironic tone that he takes when he stands apart, observing generals and soldiers. In the visceral moment, there is another, opposite impulse -- when you are bombed, Herr admits, you hate your enemy. "Maybe you couldn't love the war and hate it inside the same instant, but some times those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were Utterly High On War, like it said on al the helmet covers. Coming off a jag like that could really make a mess out of you.

" Herr's reference to 'strobic' invokes the 'trippiness' of the anti-war counterculture, which is present even in Vietnam.

Living on the edge is both exciting and nauseating: "you could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs, arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement the whole rotten deal could come in on the freaky fluky as easily as the so-called expected ways, you heard so many of these stories it was a wonder.

" Of course, some people revel in this aspect of Vietnam, like Herr's colleague Sean Flynn, son of the legendary actor Errol Flynn (Another movie parallel). The soldiers are also full of profanity and bravado in the face of death.