I think that experiences build up your life in a butterfly effect, intertwining between good and bad but Vietnam dissolved the minds of the soldiers. After five years in war Herr states “because we all knew that if you stayed too long you became one of those poor bastards who had to have war on all the time”. Recognisably Herr means that war rots the mind and rids you of a normal life.
In the war, Herr was so used to seeing so many wounds and injuries that he once mistook a bloody nose for a head wound. This may mean that he was so paranoid that his mind was just thinking only about the injuries. After this Herr tells himself that he needn’t wonder how to react if he ever got hit. This also shows that he has seen so many injuries that he would know exactly how he would react!
Walking out during a sweep north of Tay Ninh City, towards the Cambodian border, a mortar round came and landed about 30 yards away and Herr says “I had no sense of distances then, after six or seven weeks in Vietnam I still thought of that kind of information as a journalists’ detail that could be picked up later, not something a survivor would have to know”. This shows that he was still thinking of his journalism whilst in the war zone because he was thinking that he should try and work out how far away the mortar hit when he arrived back at camp.
Herr gives an unexpected ending saying that life back in the USA was boring after being in the Vietnam War, he says “Of course coming back was a down. After something like that, what could you find to thrill you, what compared, what did you do for a finish? Everything seemed a little dull…” Herr is implying that once you had gone to Vietnam nothing can scare you or excite you. It’s like there has been so much excitement it has emptied their spirits of it so that they cannot have any thrill and everything is left to be dull. It is like you can take the soldiers out of Vietnam but you cannot take Vietnam out of the soldiers. Herr seemed to miss everything about the war yet he hated it so much he almost got high on war back in the USA thinking about everything he missed and hallucinating about it, the adrenaline buzz.
At the commencement of Herr’s story, he has an abrupt introduction and goes straight into the plot. He starts to talk about the medics giving the soldiers and reporters pills, Dexedrine, and he describes the smell of their breath as “dead snakes kept too long in a jar”. This must have been very potent as he has remembered the exact smell and uses an unusual simile. The pills seemed to have caused paranoia to the majority of the soldiers and reporters. “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 noticed it”. Herr describes the pills making you hallucinate that there is an elephant standing on his chest making him struggle for breath. This is ironic because the pills are meant to aid you but instead they have these terrible side affects. The fact was that Herr knew it was an hallucination and he seemed to know when he was going to need to take them because he says “I’d save the pills for later, for Saigon and the awful depressions I always had there”. Herr meets a Lurp from the 4th division who is said to take his pills by the handful (which is in fact two handfuls). “Downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just right for him”.
The soldiers seem to depend on these pills to take away any fear by changing their perception of the actual fear they are facing but some people took advantage of the pills by taking too many and making themselves dependent on them.
Herr knew another man from the Special Forces who had said “that he had hidden under the bodies of his team while the VC walked all around them with knives, making sure”, they “stripped the bodies of their gear, the berets too, and finally went away, laughing”. The VC just laughed at what they had just done with no remorse or guilt for having just killed a whole team except, unbeknown to them, one survivor.
To another one that he met along the way, Herr says “Didn’t you ever meet a reporter before?”, the Lurp replies “Tits on a bull, nothing personal”. This seems to be a typical soldier comment. He obviously thinks that the only job for a man is to be in the army; to serve your country and shoot guns, and a job such as a reporter is a woman’s job. He describes it as being “tits on a bull”, this is because bulls are very manly creatures and if they had “tits” they would be like a woman or a man with boobies! Later this Lurp tells Herr a story that was “as one pointed and resonant as any other war story he had ever heard but took him a year to understand it.” It was this “Patrol went up a mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.” This is the Vietnam War in a nutshell, the death, the mystery and lack of information everyone had. It also shows that the only people that knew what the war was really like died in it. After being questioned by it, the Lurp gave Herr a look that was to say he knew it was “a waste of time explaining this to someone” such as a reporter.
This Lurp, when in combat painted his face like some clowns in “cirque de soliel” from “San Francisco”, these are scary and Herr said “God help his opposite numbers unless they had at least half a squad along, he was a good killer, one of our best.” He would jump out at you in the jungle as though he came out of nowhere, hidden beneath the trees and his face-paint.
In the story, Herr talks about the first time he heard the Rolling Stones’ message about the Vietnam War, he hadn’t heard it before and he really liked it. Later in the book, Herr and his companion, Flynn pretends to a kid that they were the Rolling Stones and he believed them! This shows that in the Vietnam War they weren’t told about any news, they weren’t given any information and couldn’t listen to the radio or TV, if they did they would have known all the new songs and information in the world.
One day Herr and Flynn went to a big firebase in the Americal TAOR during National Guard weekend. Herr says “that took it all way over to another extreme,” the reason why he says this is because the place was in a shambles. The Colonel was completely drunk only mumbling instead of talking and when talking saying things such as “We aim to make good and goddammit sure that if those guys try anything cute they won’t catch us with our pants down”. This troop was so bad that they had barely attacked any Viet cong but mostly harassed and interdicted a lot of sleeping civilians, Korean Marines and a couple of American patrols. Some of the soldiers there treated the place like school, a place to show off, and to leave your dirt every where as though some one would clear up for you, Herr says “No sandbags, exposed shells, dirty pieces, guys going around giving us that look, ‘we’re cool, how come your not’.”
Herr talks about preparing for war, he says it wasn’t the same as discipline but “going into your own reserves and developing a real metabolism, slow yourself down when your heart tried to punch its way through its chest, get swift when everything went to stop and all you could feel of your whole life was the entropy whipping through it. Unlovable terms” This shows that the soldiers had to force their mind and body into that of a warrior, to make it do all of which Herr stated and to be the ultimate fighter because no ordinary soldier could do it, they weren’t brave enough, strong enough and did not have the right frame of mind. When Herr says ‘Unlovable terms’, he means that all the terms he states are undesired and unlovable and no one would want to be like that and is only forced upon them, this is a very effective short sentence.
In Vietnam, the Vietnamese had the underground as their layer whereas the USA had the ground and everything above, it sounds like the USA have the upper hand but Herr disagrees. “The ground was always in play, always being swept. Under the ground was his, above was ours. We had air, we could get up in it but not disappear into it, we could run but we couldn’t hide and he could do each so well that sometimes it looked like he was doing them both at once.” Herr passionately is saying that it was unfair that they had the air and that the Viet cong had the ground, clearly it seems that Vietnam had the upper hand and Herr thinks that this is unfair. Herr also refers to Vietnam as a man and uses personification, this is very effective because it is more relatable to because most people reading this haven’t been in a war but have been in a game of “stuck in the mud or in business” where they have been at a disadvantage.
Therefore I conclude that Herr greatly attempts in this novel to portray the horror and trauma caused by the Vietnam War. Herr uses short, hasty sentences and writes as though he was talking it, Herr also writes it to make it relatable to the reader. One distinctive main characteristic of the book is that it is a detailed insight with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the Vietnam War. It is a passionate image of the stress, the death, the drugs and endless malevolent occurrences accumulating in this period and the years after it.
