New York: Vintage International, 1991.
Michael Herr's Dispatches is a collage of Vietnam War memories penned into book form nine years after the author returned from his 1968 stay in the war-torn country as a correspondent for Esquire magazine. Written in stream-of-conscious form, Herr's book is both his personal struggle to come to grips with the war by using his language to describe undescribables and it is a critique of American ideology as well. As a personal struggle, the book is a cathartic effort for Herr who disperses his pain of collected Vietnam memories on the last page with the dispelling chant, "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam" [p. 260]. As a critique of American ideology, the book must be examined more closely. Using irony, first-hand accounts, and subjective interjections, Herr blasts through the detached, monolithic American view of the Vietnam war and brings the raw, visceral, ground-level human-interest story straight to our senses in order to dispell any myths or misconceptions about war and about the war in Vietnam. This paper will examine Herr's blasting critique of American ideology circa 1968 and will specifically focus on Herr's assessment of the government, the news media, and the youth culture of the time.
As a critique of American governing ideology, Dispatches looks on a macro level at the global superpower's overall historical record while it also examines on a micro level the specific government ideoalogy surrounding war in Vietnam. The Vietnam War was about control, or containment of, the communist ideology in the world. North Vietnam had become a communist country, a satellite of the communist motherland the Soviet Union, and the communist ideology was quickly spreading to the democratic South Vietnam. The democratic United States feared this spread, thinking that once South Vietnam became communist, other countries would follow, and sought to contain any further communist spread by eliminating all communist supporters from Vietnam.
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At various interludes I will draw upon information from Michael Herr's book Dispatches, critically accepted as the best book about Vietnam, therefore it should provide a good reference point when assessing these films authenticity. ...
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