Taken Over By War

Taken Over by Way

Dispatches, written by Michael Herr portrays a vivid and mortal vision of the Vietnam War that he experiences while serving there as a war correspondent. He brings the reader through a tour of his duty in Vietnam conveying pain, humor and also compassion. Herr introduces different aspects of the brutal war experience and the human reality during wartime. It is hard to cope during such a fast paced time of unexpected events, and Herr makes an attempt to tell about how many men did cope until many of them died. The men fighting the war put their lives, hearts and everything that ever meant anything to them on the line for their country.

To start, one quote by Herr that I particularly liked was “Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it” (p.20). I liked this quote because as a person in his situation, it seems like exactly how one would feel. Going to Vietnam to serve as a correspondent, the war took over him. It was everywhere. There was no avoiding it no matter what way you turned.. He was right in the middle of the action and it had taken over his life. Another realistic Herr writes of is how sometime she did not know whether an action took place in a second or an hour. It is as if he was lost in the moment; in shock. He had no concept of time and sometimes time seemed to just freeze and all these violent actions just took over.

Herr uses expressive language in order to help the reader grasp the brutality and viciousness that occurred during the war. One reads, “The roads were mined, the trails booby вЂ" trapped, satchel charges and grenades blew up jeeps and movie theatres…and choppers fell out of the sky like fat poisoned birds a hundred times a day. After a while, I couldn’t get on one without thinking that I must be out of my fucking mind” (p.14). This quote made me realize how constant the killings and massive attacks were. You were not safe anywhere. Wherever you went, there was a chance you would be blown up into pieces by a mine, get on a helicopter and not make it down alive. Also, another quote that I thought was poignant was, “Sometimes you’d get so tired that you’d forget where you were and sleep they way you hadn’t slept since you were a child. Mostly what you had was on the agitated side of half sleep, you thought you were sleeping, but you were really just waiting. Night sweats, harsh functioning of consciousness, drifting in and out of your head, pinned to a canvas cot somewhere, looking up at a strange ceiling or out through a tent flap at the glimmering night sky of a combat zone” (p53-54). Once again as I read this I got the chills. To imagine the uneasiness of attempting to fall asleep which probably never happened only to awaken minutes later by anxiety and constantly up in arms never knowing what to expect next, gave me a sense of such apprehension and discomfort. I have so much sympathy for these combatants that I think I was so naÐ"Їve to before. I never was exposed to the terror and anguish they experienced day after day, night after night, wishing it would all be over. I look differently at the cars that I see now with bumper stickers indicating they were Vietnam Vets.

Although I thought Dispatches had many terms hard to understand due to his use of language in some situations, such as “lz”