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Dispatches, in detail
Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a correspondent for Esquire in 1967 and spent eighteen months embedded with Marine and Army units before the experience broke him psychologically. Dispatches, published a decade later after years of writing and revision, is the book that came out of that time. It is not a conventional war memoir or a piece of journalism. Herr writes in a style that incorporates the rhythms of rock music, the argot of the soldiers he lived with, and a prose consciousness that is explicitly destabilized by what it witnessed.
The book has no conventional narrative structure. It proceeds through fragments: Khe Sanh under siege, the Tet Offensive in Hue, helicopter assaults, nights in bunkers, conversations with soldiers who have developed the particular dark humor of men who expect to die. Herr does not attempt to explain the war politically or strategically. He is interested in what the war felt like — the fear, the boredom, the adrenaline, the moral vacancy of a conflict in which the logic of survival had replaced every other value.
The portrait of the soldiers is Dispatches's most lasting contribution. Herr was embedded with grunts rather than officers, and the men he writes about are young, mostly working-class, frequently terrified, and often very funny in a bleak register. They are not the heroes of World War II mythology or the drug-addled misfits of antiwar caricature. They are people in an impossible situation, doing what they can to stay alive, in a war whose stated purpose most of them have long since stopped believing.
Dispatches influenced every subsequent piece of American war writing. Herr later wrote the narration for Apocalypse Now and contributed to the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket. But the book itself remains the definitive literary account of what Vietnam felt like from the ground up. It is also one of the stranger and more formally inventive works of American nonfiction — a book that is partly memoir, partly journalism, and partly something harder to categorize that resembles what traumatic memory actually looks like.
The big ideas
- 1.
Herr writes from inside the experience rather than outside it, producing prose that mimics the fragmentation and intensity of traumatic memory rather than imposing narrative coherence on events.
- 2.
The soldiers Herr portrays are neither heroes nor monsters. They are young men in an impossible situation, doing what they can to survive a war whose political logic they have largely stopped caring about.
- 3.
Khe Sanh, the subject of the book's longest section, was one of the most psychologically devastating engagements of the war — a siege that lasted months and whose strategic purpose was unclear even to the military commanders conducting it.
