Fear and Trauma in Michael Herr's Dispatches

Michael Herr's Dispatches is a first-person account of the Vietnam War. The atmosphere of the book is brutal, anarchic and psychotropic.

Fear

Excerpt 1
Medics offer stimulants to soldiers going on night missions, but Herr had no use them. Fear is stimulant enough.

Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. I never saw the need for them myself, a little contact or anything that even sounded like contact would give me more speed than I could bear. Whenever I heard something outside of our clenched little circle I'd practically flip, hoping to God that I wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. A couple of rounds fired off in the dark a kilometer away and the Elephant would be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath. Once I thought I saw a light moving in the jungle and I caught myself just under a whisper saying, "I'm not ready for this, I'm not ready for this."

Excerpt 2
Herr compares the conditions of moving and not moving in Vietnam. Both are terrifying and both are different from the experience of enemy-contact which "draws long raggedy strands of energy."

Fear and motion, fear and standstill, no preferred cut there, no way even to be clear about which was really worse, the wait or the delivery....bad going on foot, terrible in trucks and APC's, awful in helicopters, the worst, traveling so fast toward something so frightening. I can remember times when I was half dead with my fear of the motion, the speed and direction already fixed and pointed one way. It was painful enough just flying "safe" hops between firebases and lz's; if you were ever on a helicopter that had been hit by ground fire your deep, perpetual chopper anxiety was guaranteed. At least actual contact when it was happening would draw long raggedy strands of energy out of you, it was juicy, fast and refining, and traveling toward it was hallow, dry, cold and steady, it never let you alone.

Excerpt 3
A scream to carry "more terror than I'd ever known existed" - Herr gets hit.

One afternoon I mistook a bloody nose for a headwound, and I didn't have to wonder anymore how I'd behave if I ever got hit. We were walking out on a sweep north of the Tay Ninh City, toward the Cambodian border, and a mortar round came in about thirty yards away....When we fell down on the ground the kid in front of me put his boot into my face. I didn't feel the boot, it got lost in the tremendous concussion I made hitting the ground, but I felt a sharp pain in a line over my eyes. The kid turned around and started going into something insane right away, "Aw I'm sorry, shit I'm sorry, oh no man I'm sorry." Some hot stinking metal had been put into my mouth, I thought I tasted brains there sizzling on the end of my tongue, and the kid was fumbling for his canteen and looking really scared, pale, near tears, his voice shaking, "Shit I'm just a fucking oaf, I'm a fucking clod, you're okay, you're really okay," and somewhere in there I got the feeling that it was him, somehow he'd just killed me. I don't think I said anything, but I made a sound that I can remember now, a shrill blubbering pitched to carry more terror than I'd ever known existed, like the sounds they've recorded off of plants being burned, like an old woman going under for the last time.

Excerpt 4
The terrifying quietude of the jungle.

There were times during the night when all the jungle sounds would stop at once. There was no dwindling down or fading away, it was all gone in a single instant as though some signal had been transmitted out to the life: bats, birds, snakes, monkeys, insects, picking up on a frequency that a thousand years in the jungle might condition you to receive, but leaving you as it was to wonder what you weren’t hearing now, straining for any sound, one piece of information....The thought of that one could turn any sudden silence into a space that you’d fill with everything you thought was quiet in you, it could even put you on the approach to clairaudience. You thought you heard impossible things: damp roots breathing, fruit sweating, fervid bug action, the heartbeat of tiny animals.

Excerpt 5
A glimpse of beauty before fear brings back a terrible reality.

I remembered the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up toward his plane to kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-caliber tracers could be, coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and graceful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could harm you. It could make you feel a total serenity, an elevation that put you above death, but that never lasted very long. One hit anywhere in the chopper would bring you back, bitten lips, white knuckles and all, and then you knew where you were.

Excerpt 6
"Senses working like strobes" - the exhausting and hallucinatory terror of enemy contact.

But once it was actually going on, things were different. You were just like everyone else, you could no more blink than spit. It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling gall the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rust of focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin, reaching in at the point of calm and springing all joy and all the dread ever know, ever known by everyone who ever lived, unutterable in its speeding brilliance, touching all the edges and then passing, as though it had all been controlled from outside, by a god or by the moon. And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn't recall any of it, except to know that it was like something else you had felt once before.

Trauma

Excerpt 1
Describing the faces of soldiers.

...I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old....These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they'd be a few feet away but they'd look back at you over a distance you'd never really cross.

Excerpt 2
Herr describes the long-term psychological impact of this prolonged state of fear and high-alert and the trauma of war.

After a year I felt so plugged in to all the stories and images and the fear that even the dead started telling me stories, you'd hear them out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information. However many times it happened, whether I'd know them or not, no matter what I'd felt about them or the way they'd died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, "Put yourself in my place."

Excerpt 3
Dreams.

One night, like a piece of shrapnel that takes years to work its way out, I dreamed and saw a field that was crowded with dead. I was crossing it with a friend, more than a friend, a guide, and he was making me get down and look at them. They were powdered with dust, bloodied like it had been painted on with a wide brush, some were blown out of their pants, just like they looked that day being thrown onto the truck at Can Tho, and I said, “But I’ve already seen them.” My friend didn’t say anything, he just pointed, and I leaned down again and this time I looked into their faces.

Excerpt 4
A haunting story about a young Marine who is unable to leave the war at the end of his service.

On this last morning, the young Marine caught a ride from his company position that dropped him off fifty meters from the strip. As he moved on foot he heard the distant sound of the C-123 coming in, and that was all he heard. There was hardly more than a hundred-foot ceiling, scary, bearing down on him. Except for the approaching engines, everything was still. If there had been something more, just one incoming round, he might have been all right, but in that silence the sound of his own feet moving over the dirt was terrifying to him. He later said that this was what made him stop. He dropped his duffel and looked around. He watched the plane, his plane, as it touched down, and then he ran leaping over some discarded sandbags by the road. He lay out flat and listened as the plane switched loads and took off, listened until there was nothing left to listen to. Not a single round had come in.
Back at the bunker there was some surprise at his return, but no one said anything. Anyone can miss a plane. Gunny slapped him on the back and wished him a better trip the next time out. That afternoon he rode in a jeep that took him all the way to Charlie Med, the medical detachment for Khe Sanh that had been set up insanely close to the strip, but he never got passed the sandbagging outside the triage room.
"Oh no, you raggedy-assed bastard," Gunny said when he got back to the outfit. But he looked at him for a long while this time.
"Well," the kid said. "Well..."
The next morning two of his friends went with him to the edge of the strip and saw him into the trench. ("Goodbye," Gunny said. "And that's an order.") They came back to say that he'd gotten out for sure this time. An hour later he came back up the road again, smiling. He was still there the first time I left Khe Sanh, and while he probably made it out eventually, you can't be sure.