Michael Herr's Dispatches Summary

The Vietnam War might just be the most difficult war the U.S. has ever fought, mostly due to the so called “fog of war.” Our soldiers were sent to an unfamiliar country full of unfamiliar people with an unfamiliar culture. Flying across the Pacific Ocean to get to Vietnam could almost be seen as landing on a completely different country. The people, the scenery, the fighting were all incredibly foreign to the Americans fighting for their country. According to Robert McNamara, from the Americans’ view, the war was simply a part of the Cold War but to the Vietnamese it was a civil war. This led to the three sides, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and Americans fighting the war for completely different reasons. Michael Herr’s Dispatches explores the war as he experienced it being an American journalist traveling with various troops through the East Asian country. Many soldiers fighting did not understand the exact reason the United States was involved in the war between North and South Vietnam. All they knew was they were in a strange land and had to try and survive their year long deployment before hopefully returning home. These men …show more content…
Many believed the Vietnamese to look alike, with their faces making it difficult to understand their emotions, however he soon saw how the Vietnamese saw all American men alike. Herr stated how some of the American workers’ faces “have the look of aerial photos of silicone pits, all hung with loose flesh and visible veins.” He later added the men started to similar even in his eyes. This description of the Americans’ physical appearances leads to the conclusion of the toll the war had on it’s soldiers. These men were pushed to the extremes in ways they never could have imagined. They were plucked from their homes and forced into a land far from similar to their own, a land of humidity, the Vietnamese, and