Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches’: New Journalism Tackles Vietnam

Though you may not realize it, chances are you have already come across this classic piece of postmodern journalism in some way or another. Seen Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket? Then you have already delved a bit into Michael Herr’s breakthrough book on the Vietnam War.

Originally published in 1977, Dispatches was comprised mostly from pieces written by Herr for Esquire magazine from his stint of reporting on the conflict in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. We follow Herr throughout the country, from places most have never even heard of, such as Can Tho and Chu Lai, to focal points seen in every American History textbook: Khe Sanh, Da Nang and Hue. Herr also reports on the Tet Offensive firsthand, the ultimate turning point in the Vietnam War.
Within the pages of this memoir the reader is thrown into the muck and mire that was the Vietnam War, meeting extremely notable people along the way.

Herr presents the reader with figures like the drunken general who wishes to create an operation out of thin air for good press coverage, the tallest Vietnamese soldier ever seen by the author, a man who constantly apologizes for every bump in the road they hit and Sean Flynn, son of famed actor Errol, who went to Vietnam as a photojournalist and disappeared in Cambodia in 1970.

Herr also focuses on some of the more infamous characters he met there as foils within the memoir. The door gunner who jokes about shooting women and children because they are slower moving targets, the soldier who reluctantly changed plans from skinning a dead Viet Cong fighter to talking to a reporter, and the Special Forces soldiers who collected body parts as trophies.

While these are some of the more memorable subjects Herr interviews within the memoir, the biggest interviewee is the regular, downtrodden soldier (as the book progresses, the theme of soldiers with depression is seen more and more). It is within the countless interviews with these men that we as readers come to understand what the Vietnam experience was like.

Until the publication of this book, most books on the subject of the Vietnam War were purely objective, dealing with figures, tactics, political decision-making and outcomes. Herr deals predominately with how the war affected the American combatant, telling us the truth about Vietnam and providing a voice to the servicemen and women.

This is due in part to the genre and movement in which Herr was writing in at this point in time: New Journalism. Focusing more on the idea of subjectivism and the involvement of the writing within his or her own work, Dispatches is a prime example of this genre.

Herr is bringing the readers warfare with all strings attached: terror, death, excitement, tension, sadness and so on. But he does not merely gloss over these things with official reports and statistics, rather, he brings the smell of death, the adrenaline rush of excitement, the near-catatonic sadness and the tension as thick as the Vietnamese jungle.

In doing this, we are forced to take part in the book and become actively engaged in the lives of these men and women to the point where their fears become our fears, their joys our joys and their losses our losses. The further into this book the reader gets, the more involved we become. When Herr hears a snap or a rustle outside the perimeter and believes it is a Viet Cong sapper, we believe it is as well.

This book is the only one of its kind. While there are many memoirs of the Vietnam War, none of them can match the power of this one. The stories presented within the pages will often suck the air out your lungs and leave you speechless.

Here is the “unofficial” report of the Vietnam War, free from politics and governmental influence. There is no forward from a high-ranking commander nor is there an epilogue from such distinguished figures such as Kissinger or McNamara.

This is the story of ordinary people thrown into an extraordinary situation in American history.

Read this now.

Conner McDonough can be reached at cmcdonough@spartans.ut.edu.