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�

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. Herr recognizes this ideology of control and the irony of its unapplacability in Vietnam. On the ground floor of the jungle world of Vietnam, where guerrilla strategies and cloaking terrain created chaos not seen from America’s distant bird’s eye view, the idea of control seemed ludicrous. Herr writes, “That fall, all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control,....psychopolitical control,...control of terrain through the Strategy of the Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing left standing up that looked true was your sense of how out of control things really were” [p. 48]. Herr further sums up America’s distant, inhumane view of controlling communism in Vietnam when he writes, “Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays” [p. 59]. Not only did Herr recognize errors specifically in America’s war on controlling Vietnam’s communist ideology, but he also noted errors in America’s governing ideology as a whole. He says the American mistake of subjugating, dominating, and controlling the minds of people began with the Trail of Tears in which American westward expansion forced Native American Indians to leave their homelands on a thousands-of-miles journey that resulted in the deaths of many of the native people. Herr sees Vietnam as a subsequent and logical point in America’s westward expansion through America’s West and onward into Vietnam’s western Pacific location [p. 49-50]. The American ideology of manifest destiny that Herr is exposing sees controlling opposing ideologies as necessary in imperial conquest. Even though supporters of opposing ideologies may die by the thousands and millions, America’s manifest destiny ideology ironically sees the death as necessary for the betterment of those opposing people. Herr calls America’s i

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