Dispatches

Herr explores the effects that war movies have had on the Marines and correspondents. After a few firefights, most combat troops are able to let go of the romance and adventure and go into survival mode. But there are always those that are willing to perform for the television crew, playing the hero: “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” (209).

Herr’s role is unique, even among correspondents. His “ties to New York were as slight as [his] assignment was vague” (213). While other correspondents are required to file copy on a daily basis and are restricted by their editors’ take on the war, Herr is relatively untethered to anyone else’s views or agenda. Although he goes over as a correspondent for Esquire, and he does file at least one story with them, his main purpose for going to Vietnam is to write a book. While other correspondents have to follow deadlines, he is more likely to go to the bar and write up his notes for the day, which will one day be used for Dispatches.

Herr considers it obscene how the MACV Information Office, and some correspondents, adopt a “cheer-crazed language” (222) to refer to death: “Well, in a war you’ve got to expect a little mud to get tracked over the carpet, we took a real black eye but we sure gave Charlie a shitstorm, we consider this a real fine kill ratio, real fine...” (222). Herr also pushes back against veteran journalists who discount the number of dead because they have covered wars with higher death tolls. He feels that it invalidates those killed in Vietnam, who are no less gone for having died in smaller numbers.

The correspondents may not face danger at the same level as the Marines, but there are deaths among the reporters and photojournalists, as well. In a five-day period, eight correspondents are killed. Five correspondents are in a jeep when they fall into a Viet Cong ambush. Even though they yell “Bao Chi” (the Vietnamese word for “journalist”), the Viet Cong soldiers machine-gun them anyway. The sole survivor plays dead, and then runs into a crowd of people. Herr’s good friend, John Cantwell, is among those killed in the jeep.

In May, Herr meets Tim Page, a British photojournalist whose reputation proceeds him. A lot of the guys affectionately refer to Page as crazy. He has almost been killed three times in Vietnam and left after the third close call. But when he hears that Flynn is back in Vietnam, he comes back to shoot the war. Page sets the Marine officers on edge. Flynn tells Page, “They don’t like your hair, Page, and you’re a foreigner, and you’re insane, you really spook the shit out of them” (242). Flynn goes on to say that while the Marine officers may have ambivalent feelings about the war, the one thing they’re certain about is that Page is the enemy.

When Herr and the others get back to “the World” (243), the transition is difficult. They leave Vietnam because they start to fear something more than death. They fear that if they stay too long they will become “one of those poor bastards who had to have a war on all the time” (243). Herr suffers from dreams about dead Marines that are so real that even after he wakes up he is convinced that when he leaves his bed he will have to cover up the bodies strewn across his living room. Others suffer much worse. A friend of his who had been a medic in the Central Highlands two years before still sleeps with the lights on. Others “see their nightmares break in the streets in daylight” (244).

The April after Herr gets back, he hears that Tim Page has been hit again and is not expected to live. He had been next to a sergeant who had stepped on a mine, and a two-inch piece of shrapnel was lodged in his brain. Flynn and another correspondent fly to Saigon to be with Page, and keep Herr updated on his condition. Page is eventually moved to Walter Reed hospital, and then to a rehabilitation institute in New York. He is told that he will be paralyzed permanently on his left side, but Page keeps making strides, so that eventually he is able to walk with a cane and have limited mobility in his left arm. On his twenty-fifth birthday, he throws a party: “Page wanted all the people to be there who, he said, had bet him years ago in Saigon that he’d never make it past twenty-three” (247). He is so happy to be alive and surrounded by his friends, that “even the strangers that turned up then were touched by it” (247).