Dispatches

When in Saigon, Herr almost always gets stoned before going to sleep, which results in him not being able to remember his dreams. He interviews the Marines and asks if they can recall their dreams, and they tell him that “they didn’t remember their dreams either when they were in the zone, but on R&R or in the hospital their dreaming would be constant, open, violent and clear” (33). Not only does Herr go to bed stoned, he often smokes before getting out of bed.

In the Highlands, it is possible to get a pound of weed for a carton of Salems from the Montagnards, the indigenous people of the Central Highlands. Smoking with some infantrymen, one of them hands Herr a plastic bag full of what looks like dried fruit. Hungry, Herr almost reaches into the bag, “but it had a bad weight to it” (34). He realizes later that it was a bag of dried ears cut off of North Vietnamese soldiers.

Dana Stone, a photojournalist covering the war, tells a story about flying in a Chinook with a Marine’s rifle pointed straight at him. When he motions for the man to point it away, he and the other Marines just laughed. Flynn pipes up and says that, “There’s a colonel in the Seventh Marines who said he’d give a three-day pass to any one of his men who killed a correspondent for him. A week if they get Dana” (35). Dana argues that that’s “bullshit. They fucking think I’m God” (36).

A new correspondent comes by the hotel room to introduce himself. He starts peppering Dana with questions, “but that made sense since the man had never been out and Dana hardly ever came in” (37). When the new correspondent asks, “What does it look like when a man gets hit in the balls?” (38) he comes “as close as you could get to a breach of taste in that room” (38). But Stone answers him matter-of-factly “because he’d seen that, he was just telling the man” (38).

Herr describes the conflict in the early 1960’s as a “spookwar,” “when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty” (50). Back then the U.S. presence wasn’t classified as soldiers, or even advisors, they were “[i]rregulars, working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know” (50). But then “Their adventure became our war” (51).