Herr's View Of The Vietnam War example essay topic

Herr's view of the Vietnam war is diffucult to interpret because at times he describes it as a hell with brutal accounts of mutilation and death. At other times, he seeks so lice in the exhilaration that comes from the fear. He was there "to cover the war and the war covered me", is easiest way to describe what he encountered. Herr was nieve at when he first got to Saigon. He writes of the morning before he was dropped off on the front lines, he had purchased fatigues and dressed up in them, stood in front of his mirror "making faces and moves I'd never make again".

He, and probably most men entering this war thought it would be like old war movies or cowboys and indians. Much later, he ends up during this set of fatigues and with them, any misconceptions he had that a person could come out of this war the same as they went into it. Herr, personally believed that he didn't understand what he was about to see until much later, even after he had been back in the United States. He was just responding to whatever stimuli he encountered moment by moment. When describing the origins of the war itself, it is clear that Herr felt it should have never become and international war. In early 1962 and 1963, he saw it as a struggle amoung the already corrupt of Vietnam viewing for stature within the country.

There was the occassional American adventurers or CIA, fighting on their own terms, he labelled as Irregulars, "working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their own fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know". (This may be a for shadowing of type of individuals who actually were able to survive the war). It began with individuals and groups who were fighting for themselves, whether it was for money, power or even personal satisfaction. It turned into a war where no one was really sure who they were fighting or what they were fighting for. "Their adventure became our war, then a war bogged down in time, so much time, so badly accounted for that it finally became entrenched as an institution because there had never been room made for it to go anywhere else". In a way, it had started out as a game, the sort of game that men played when they were boys, with unspoken rules, winners and losers.

"One night I woke up and heard the sounds of a firefight going on kilometers away, a skirmish outside our perimeter; muffled by distance to sound like the noises we made playing guns as children, k hh k hh; we knew it was more authentic than bang bang, it enriched the game and this game was the same, only way out of hand at last, too rich for all but a few serious players". But, he believed in some people's minds it was still a game because that was the only way the could cope with the war. The tactics used to fight the Vietnam war were, basically, guerilla warfare. It was diffucult to tell the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army from the South Vietnamese. These tactics had not been used in other wars of this magnitude and were unexpected, forcing soldiers, at times, to fire upon anyone they saw. This was also a war fought by very young men, not just the grunts, but even their commanding officers were sometimes in their early twenties, never having experienced anything even close to war.

According to Herr, the conditions the soldiers were living in made it a struggle to survive at times, even without being shot at constantly. "Night sweats, harsh functions 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 of a combat zone. Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-slice your anxiety and backwater smell of your own body... There were spots in the jungle where you had to have a cigarette going all the time, wether you smoked it or not, just to keep the mosquitos from swarming in your mouth. War under water, swamp fever and inst and weight control, malaria's that could burn you out and cave you in, put you not twenty-three hours of sleep a day without giving you a minute of rest...

". Herr makes it clear that these men were dealing with a nightmarish situation with conditions that they were not accustom to fighting armies that lived in these conditions all their lives. The Americans had a definite disadvantage from the beginning. When in the field, Herr, spent much of his time surrounded by grunts. They were the soldiers who were lower than officers, usaully the ones who wanted to be there the least. Besides writing about what he actually saw, a great deal of his writing was derived from the stories that they told.

It seemed as though he had both disdain and affection for the grunts. At times he was horrified by the noche lant way they could describe killing Vietnamese, or even the enthusiasm in which they depicted some of the battles they had lived through. Herr, was however, able to accept the fact that it wasn't entirely their fault, they had to cope any way possible. It was the grunts who looked out for Herr and many of the other correspondants of the war. He pointed out how in Hue, they had tried to give him their helmets and flak jackets because he didn't have his own. How, in Khe San, two marines that he had just met went out to find him a stretcher to sleep on, while so many of them were sleeping on the floor.

"If you tore your fatigues on the wire or trying to crawl for cover, you'd have new, or at least fresh ones within minutes and never know where they came from. They always took care of you". This demonstrates that Herr appreciated the situation that they were in. They were humans, forced to live in an inhumane situation. For every terrible act they carried out, some also showed compassion. Herr does not always show the same affinity towards soldiers of higher ranking as he does for the grunts.

Especially a particular colonel he met at the rex BOY in Si agon who was lecturing his views about the differences between Vietnamese and Americans. The colonel explained: " We are a nation of meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We are going to club him to death with our meat". He believes that this is the attitude that kept the United States in the war, colonels and generals who were out of touch with the reality of the situation. Later, however, he interviews the commander of the 26th Marine regiment, Colonel david Low nds in Khe San. This particular colonel was often depicted as incoherent to the tragedy of the war by many correspondants.

He was not fond of reporters because they failed to report the whole story. During Herr's interview with him, he was able to see that this was a man who would not sent his troops anywhere that he was not willing to go himself. He had a compassionate side, but had to act a certain way because, he, in a way, was a grunt himself. He had to instill confidence and do the undesirable work that his superiors were not willing to do themselves. Most soldiers ranking above a captain disliked the press. Herr accepted this and seemed to carry a small bit of embarrassment over his status in the war.

Correspondants were able to come and go as they pleased. They were getting p aided to follow the sorrow of others". It was creepy being despised in such casual offhanded ways. And there were plenty of people who believed, finally, that we were nothing more than glorified war profiteers. And perhaps we were, those of us who didn't get wounded or otherwise fucked-up".

Throughout the book, Herr shares soldiers, as well as correspondant's fears of being injured or killed. Many men became very superstitious during the Vietnam war because it they say so many people die. He described how men carried locks of hair, photos, one marine even saved an oatmeal cookie he had been sent. These details represent the hopelessness that many of the soldiers felt toward their situations. They believed that it would take something more than their own skills to keep them alive. The were unable to protect themselves and turned to anything else they could think of.

There were also established preferences of ways to be injured or killed. "Some feared head wounds, some dreaded chest wounds or stomach wounds, everyone feared the wound of wounds, the Wound... You could die in a sudden bloodburing crunch as your chopper hit the ground like dead weight, you could fly apart ot that your pieces would never be gathered, you could die in the last stages of malaria... ". Injury or death was inevitable. One point, in particular, that Herr made clear was that no one left the war unchanged.

Whether, they were soldiers, correspondants or even the Vietnamese themselves. He depicts one situation where a ten year old Vietnamese boy approaches himself and some marines. The boy was walking oddly and then lunges at them tearing at their eyes and cloths. It was clear that the boy had gone crazy, something that had occurred to none of them before.

He tells of many people who were unable to leave the war and ended up staying in Vietnam. He, himself, would wake up thinking that there were dead marines that needed to be covered when he was at home in the US.