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IAN EDWARDS
An “Uncompromising Allegiance to Obscenity and
Evil;” Dispatches, the Jouissance of War, and the
Responsibility of Spectatorship
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,nor suggest morals of proper behaviour, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If atthe end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste then you have been madethe victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true warstory by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Tim O’Brien^1
If the Second World War was unprecedented in the number of lives it directly affected, we might say that the Vietnam war entailed, for the first time, the indirect participation of millions of Americans through the media spectacle enabled by television. This article will locate Michael Herr’s Dispatches on an interventional level, as a representation and critique of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the media coverage of the war, and the responsibilities they placed on wider society. The existing criticism, as will be briefly indicated, tends to fall between the stools of either emphasising the literary genres of Dispatches in isolation (thus negating some of their ideological-political implications), or assessing the text in terms of the “New Journalism” paradigm without relating its particular journalistic form to its
antagonistic counterpart, the “conventional” journalism explicitly rejected by Herr. This reading will proceed through two theoretical optics, addressing the subjective vicissitudes of Herr’s narrative positioning through the work of Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. However this author’s wider concerns with some of Zizek’s assumptions, too numerous to be invoked here, necessitate a more nuanced reading of the text’s placement within its cultural field. To condense my differences with Zizek in a single sentence, it seems dangerously essentialist to maintain, as he does, a like- for-like equation of the Lacanian Symbolic with the wider cultural manifold. As a counterweight to this tendency, I insert my readings of the various subject-positions enacted in Dispatches within a notion of the cultural field and its antagonisms as developed by Pierre Bourdieu. In lieu of a rough paraphrase I would rather his work speaks for itself at some length at this point: The literary (etc.) field is a force-field acting on all those who enter it, and acting in a differential manner according to the position they occupy there… and at the same time it is a fieldof competitive struggles which tend to conserve or transform this field. And the position-takings… which one may and should treat for analytical purposes as a ‘system’ of oppositions, are not the result of some kind of objective collusion, but rather the product and stake of a permanentconflict. In other words, the generative and unifying principle of this ‘system’ is the struggle itself.^2 My wider thesis is that in order to locate Dispatches on an ideological-interventional level we must in the last instance express its latent “positioning” of “struggle” and “conflict” qua the other positions enumerated, in opposition to it, within its own field(s). And despite my concerns with Zizek’s universalising tendencies, his approach can be useful in unpacking the specifically subjective modalities which mediate between Herr’s narrator-protagonist, the cultural field, and his implied readership_._ In the first instance, though, I will approach some of the manifest positions offered in Dispatches through their antecedents within U.S. war writing,
humorous strategies of Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five tend more towards their “transformation” by way of the comic effect’s critical distancing. Herr’s literary technique is clearly intended as subversive, and pointedly problematises the kind of cultural re-appropriations signifying “rectitude;” firstly (at the level of form) in its combination of genres and narrative positions—oral history, literary reportage, memoir, cathartic ‘working through’ of traumatic personal material—and secondly (at the level of content) in its steadfast refusal of idealism and its “allegiance to obscenity and evil” in representing the death and brutality of war, unadorned and un-“rectified.” This results in a series of positions rather than a single one, and it is my contention that through analysis of the subjective trajectories implicit within—voyeurism, “acute environmental reaction,” violent acting-out, and trauma— we can infer a strong sense of wider critique also. In essence, Herr utilises his narrative figure as a subjective medium to transgress and transcend the bounds of traditional journalism, and it is in this sense that I wish to address Dispatches as a literary work on its primary level. My working thesis is that Herr’s narrative voice enacts a form of split subjectivity in a sharp distinction he establishes, between the observer/participant figure empathising with and attending the perspective of the “grunt” in the field, and the military bureaucracy and media networks who are approached through a much more editorial/critical perspective. As Dispatches is specifically framed by Herr as a work of memory and/or cultural history assembled retrospectively in the mid-/late seventies, it is interesting in the light of its relationship to “standard” Military History. Until the revolution constituted within the field by John Keegan’s 1976 book The Face of Battle , in the words of John Ellis “military history has been ‘the Commander’s tale’ and the role of the ‘poor bloody infantry’ has been marginalized to a remarkable extent.”^5 Herr’s text
is notable by way of contrast, in its wide-ranging expression of the rigours of war from the point of view of the ‘poor bloody infantry.’ Insofar as Dispatches constitutes itself as historical, I would therefore contend that it posits itself as a “bottom-up” re - historicisation;^6 indeed, the profusion of oral material issuing from the ‘poor bloody infantry’ in Vietnam is partially to be credited with inviting the kind of Military History practised by the likes of Keegan and Ellis (note in this context that the oral histories produced by Vietnam were published in the 1980s, thus making Dispatches a pioneer in the field^7 ). Contrary to the journalists who “talked about ‘no-story operations…,’” Herr’s narrative places the GI’s own words as centrifugal to its movements: Those were the same journalists who would ask us what the fuck we ever found to talk to grunts about, who said they neverheard a grunt talk about anything except cars, football and chone. But they all had a story , and in the war they were driven to tell it.^8 It is important in the context of the following arguments to note that Herr’s perspective is set up, from the start, in opposition to the journalists who assume the grunts have “no story” to tell. Herr places the figure of the “grunt,” in terms of the various “stories” they felt “driven to tell,” as the primary catalyst for his narrative. Indeed, on at least two occasions Herr portrays himself as being strongly invoked by the GI to “bear witness” on his behalf: “His face was all but blank with exhaustion, but he had enough feeling left to say ‘Okay man, you go on, you go on out of here you cocksucker, but I mean, you tell it! You tell it, man. If you don’t tell it….’”^9 To cite an illuminating passage from Zizek on this point; “one must insist on the opposition of the appropriation of the past from the standpoint of those who rule… and the appropriation of that which, in the past, remained its utopian and failed (repressed) potentiality.”^10 While Herr’s technique would tend to forestall the
Foremost among its several modes of address, Dispatches is intimately bound up with the speech-patterns and lexicon of the grunt; the intermingling of his reported speech and its echoing within the narrative voice creates a properly dialogical effect within the text, with several implications. Particularly noteworthy for the purposes of this section is the fact that the soldiers are given a form of embodiment through their own language, and it is pertinent to allude to some of the objective historical factors particular to the troops fighting in Vietnam. It is a commonplace of war in general that for the men on the frontline to be even remotely motivated, either (a) a clear cause and set of objectives to fight for or against, or (b) volunteer status, should be in place.^12 Failing those, the best option to get troops to fight at all is the kind of massive coercion common in (say) Soviet Russia, generally unpalatable to Western liberal democracies. With the draft introducing a certain level of coercion, the average soldier in Vietnam was in the historically interesting position of being an involuntary participant in one of the most mismanaged, objectiveless, haphazard wars ever. Combine those factors with a home-front popular dissent never before or since shown in the U.S, an availability and consumption of narcotics unique to modern war, and an enemy who seemed invisible—with concomitant effects on U.S. frustration—and it might be fair to say that the “average” soldier in Vietnam was almost submerged in bitterness and ennui even when he was not drowned in abject terror. Thus was the morale of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam “with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any other time this century,” its troops “drug- ridden and dispirited where not near-mutinous” and prone enough to outright mutiny, that one source suggests as many as 5 per cent of U.S. officer casualties were at the hands of their own men.^13
Bearing in mind the kind of contradictions incumbent upon the average foot soldier’s position, as hinted at (albeit briefly) above, it is interesting to note how they are reflected in the speech represented in Dispatches. In the first unsegregated U.S. Army the “melting-pot of language” effect was pronounced—many African- American speech patterns entered white culture as a result of their dissemination through Vietnam—and what emerged was almost akin to a dialect in its own right. Herr places this dialect at the very centre of his text, both in direct representation and in the way his own narrative utilises grunt inflections and vocabulary (such as “Airmobility, dig it”) by way of free indirect discourse. This provides a formal analogue to the ideologically-weighted focus on the common soldier within the text. Some of the more common verbal motifs apparent in Dispatches help to focalise the contradictions Herr locates at the centre of the soldier’s existence, not least in the almost astonishing profusion of euphemisms for death that emerged. In the words of O’Brien: They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased , they’d say. Offed, lit up , zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curiousway it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorised, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.^14 As this citation suggests, there is a close relationship between the impending death that is the potential fate of every combat infantryman, and the verbal means he enlists in order to rationalise his position. While O’Brien’s grunts are described as “actors,” they and their counterparts in Dispatches are “acting out” very different “lines” to those commonly ascribed to their position within popular culture. Most notably, there is a pronounced refusal of the kind of “rectitude” traditionally attached to the soldier’s death—Hemingway’s famous aversion to the expression “in vain” comes to mind
Herr’s uses of grunt humour enact a complex relationship between the language of everyday life for the U.S. soldier, and the malaise that attended that daily life for many of them, whereby a profound ambivalence in the psychoanalytic sense is often implicit. Strictly in contrast with “traditional” cultural narratives of the heroism, humanity and courage of men in battle, Dispatches goes to some lengths to display their baseness, brutality and fear: It was that joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear, and you could die laughing. They even wrote a song, a letter to the mother of a dead Marine, that went something like, ‘Tough shit, tough shit, your kid got greased, but what thefuck, he was just a grunt….’ 18 Herr’s “true war stories” are therefore far from “moral” or “encouraging virtue:” on the contrary they portray men doing “the kind of things men have always done” through use of the kind of humour which Herr portrays. This exemplifies the point at which Herr’s narrator distances himself from the GI; his humour is invariably more in an ironic vein, typically at the expense of the military bureaucracy, with positional implications to be discussed shortly. Herr plays grunt-apologist to some extent, but his refusal to participate in the darker comedy is manifest. A key moment is the fragment where a soldier offers Herr a bag which he assumes to contain “prunes or dates,” and then realises it is a bag of Vietcong ears; the soldier’s comrades, and then the soldier himself, react sheepishly, and the tale suggests that Herr was unsuited, or unwilling, to indulge macabre grunt humour to that extent. This recalcitrance is fundamental in distancing Herr from the GI, and although many of the means by which he identifies with him will be analysed shortly, this fundamental distance should be stressed. Herr’s specific location of fear in relation to the black humour he represents has further implications for his ontology of the combat soldier. The infinite depths and varieties of fear are articulated in Dispatches every bit as exhaustively as the
excitations of combat or the absurdity of the U.S. military bureaucracy. Herr’s portrayal of the GI is therefore distanced from popular-culture and war-propaganda stereotypes by representing “opportunities” for death, terror and maiming, over and above those for valour or heroism: “Because, really, what a choice there was; what a prodigy of things to be afraid of! The moment you understood this, really understood it, you lost your anxiety instantly.”^19 Far from a lantern-jawed, stoical, martial archetype, Herr’s “typical” grunt is reduced to a Pavlovian stimulus-response where praxis in combat alleviates the organic tension pertinent to constant fear, by way of bodily hexis. Thus the “heroism” of the lone soldier’s mythical machine-gun charge is tellingly reversed by Herr: “So you learned about fear; it was hard to know what you really learned about courage. How many times did somebody have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?”^20 The “heroic” charge is here reduced to an almost automaton-like drive for fulfilment, not of the mythical ideals of culture, but a kind of self-negating adherence to the military machine; in Zizek’s terms Dispatches repeatedly represents scenes where “the subject accepts the void of his non-existence.”^21 The tales of Herr’s “environmentally traumatised” Marines implicates the U.S. intervention along similar, masochistic/self-negating lines, conveying also a subjective dimension to that involvement which is key to analysis of Herr’s positioning, with regard to both the GI and the wider military system. Heroism, or at least the practical acts which are taken to constitute heroism in popular culture, is therefore given a particularly masochistic, reflexive slant by Herr. This must be balanced, however, with the sense of what Zizek calls “excess enjoyment,” continually represented in Dispatches within the soldier’s reaction to combat and death, which provides the fantasmatic link through which Herr’s narrator establishes an identificatory matrix with the men he portrays. The black humour
instant, but sometimes these feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way upuntil you were literally High On War, like it said on all the helmet covers. Coming off a jag like that could really make a mess out of you.^23 Herr’s metaphor in this passage segues from the sexual to the narcotic and back again almost imperceptibly, from “humping the ground” to “High On War” to the “rapid strobing of love and hate in the same instant.” The common denominator in its ontology is one which posits the modality of the drive , in the psychoanalytic sense of an object-less (“the space you’d seen a second ago between subject and object wasn’t there anymore,” the drive for psycho-analysis functions “as its own object”) and distinctly irrational immersion of the subject within his bodily being, with the modality of “surplus enjoyment” being engendered in the subject by the “indivisible remainder of jouissance provided by blind mechanical exercise.”^24 For while fear is annotated by Herr in its many variations, as befitting any “true” representation of men in combat, it would be a travesty of the “truth” of hundreds of soldiers’ anecdotal evidence to deny that many men fundamentally “enjoy” combat in the adrenal, sensual sense portrayed above: And every time, you were so weary afterwards, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn’t recall any of it, except to know that it was like something you had felt once before.… It was the feeling you’d had when you were much, much younger, and undressing a girl for the first time….^25 One of the early reviews of Dispatches puts this neatly: “Herr dared to travel to that irrational place and to come back with the worst imaginable news: war thrives because enough men still love it.”^26 “That irrational place” stands here for both Vietnam and the unconscious register of enjoyment located by Dispatches in the soldiers there, and the “daring” shown by Herr is in “travelling” to both of those “places.” He goes to some lengths to establish the danger of his position, both by
extension from his descriptions of fear, and in the scenes he repeatedly depicts of soldiers expressing amazement that he is a “volunteer” correspondent: “what, you mean you don’t have to be here?” Further, the insistent “you” of the narrative address confronts Dispatches’ audience with their own investment in the “irrational places” visited. As is often noted by critics, in the course of his opening chapter, Herr gradually broaches the boundary between voyeur and participant. His initial frame of reference for war and death is intensely voyeuristic-sexual: “You know how it is, you want to look and you don’t want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war photographs in Life …. I didn’t have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world.”^27 This position is repeated on the next page in one of Herr’s most arresting passages, on “each other’s stories about why we were there.” From “the lowest John Wayne wetdream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy,” Herr sweeps through the “standard” explanations in pastiche form, the “overripe bullshit” of “tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong” and so on. This is then undercut spectacularly by the “other” (truth?) “you could also hear” from “some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying ‘All that’s just a load , man. We’re here to kill gooks. Period.’” The “other” which is prioritised as a “story” over the “overripe bullshit” of official explanations implies that both indiscriminate violence and racism lie at the heart of America’s Vietnam complex, with Herr, as so often, deferring to the authenticity of the common soldier’s perspective. The conclusion to this passage turns the screw further: “Which wasn’t at all true of me. I was there to watch.”^28
fragment, but this passage à l’acte has definitively shattered the illusion of Herr’s passivity as a witness. The text almost instantly shifts temporal perspective from this “one last war story,” to 1975 and Herr’s traumatic dream of his array of “dead faces,” strongly reminiscent of Yossarian’s in Catch-22 : “when I got up next morning I was laughing.”^31 Once again the motif of death’s reality “encysted” by an ambivalent laughter appears, not only linking Herr’s reaction to the grunt’s “joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear,” but also placing Dispatches in the context of the “subjective destitution” of its narrative figure.^32 “Breathing Out,” the final chapter and formal counterpart to the first, positions Herr “back in the world, and a lot of us aren’t making it,” trapped in the stereotypical malaise of the alienated Vietnam veteran, and framing the text as a whole as enclosed within his narrator’s bildungsroman. Insofar as Herr’s initial frame of reference for combat exists on a phantasmatic level (with his “first porn” analogy and the way he depicts himself making “faces and moves he would never make again” in the mirror when first trying on his army fatigue uniform^33 ), his passage from voyeur to participant as outlined above is strongly suggestive of Zizek’s notion of “traversing the fantasy” through praxis: “in accomplishing this act, the subject suspends the phantasmatic frame of unwritten rules which tell him how to choose freely—no wonder the consequences of this act are so catastrophic.”^34 In Herr’s own words, he spends the interim period between Vietnam and the composition of Dispatches “thinking about what happens when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, then afterward you can’t handle the experience. ”^35 In Zizek’s terms the “fundamental fantasy” is necessarily disavowed as unconscionably traumatic to the subject. Dispatches similarly displays several instances of Herr’s turning away from, or foreclosing outright, the “traumatic” content of his reactions to combat, and its
“catastrophic” consequences are replayed retro-actively through the temporal frame established by his setting the narrative in 1975.^36 The complex displayed in Herr’s narrative positioning is between the traumas arising from both “watching” and “acting;” as both acts are mutually implicated, a sense emerges of Herr’s dual complicity with the horrors he relates, with a strong element of guilt structuring the complex. On this basis it is difficult to concur with Beidler’s proposition that “Herr’s chief work in the book is the work of keeping his moral and mythic bearings in a world of war.” Keeping one’s morals would seem to be impossible bearing in mind the dual complicity of watching and acting (and the centred, “moral” subject would presumably adapt sufficiently well to what he has witnessed that he would not suffer the type of traumata of Herr’s narrative voice); and Herr repeatedly undermines American mythologies of war as perpetuated by the master narratives (John Wayne, Cowboys and Indians, the omnipotence of technology, etc.).^37 Whilst Herr’s trajectory within Dispatches is distinctly akin to “traversing the fantasy” in order to undergo “subjective destitution,” the intention of the final section of this essay is to locate the structural significance of this process in ideological terms. Herr’s partial sense of complicity serves, effectively, to announce his location within the field in the Bourdieusian sense of openly avowing the subjective avatars of his dis/position, and the interplay between his narrator’s registers of complicity and criticism is fundamental in establishing the text’s ideological stance. Herr’s identification with the grunt is far from unambiguous, and he makes few efforts to idealise the men he “stood as close to… as possible without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”^38 Whilst his narrator shows an affinity with their camaraderie and their often-solicitous attitudes towards him, this is coloured by a frank acceptance and articulation of the inhumanity
solution befitting American “know-how and hardware,” a mechanised plague superintended with a boy-scout’s diligence. On the other hand, Herr portrays officers whose sense of bloodlust eclipses that of the most atavistic foot soldiers, and which is entertained on a much wider scale: That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; whatcould you say except, ‘Colonel, you’re insane’? It was like turning up in some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines…. Doomsday celebs, technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for backup, deep in their hearts, therewere always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, ‘right here in-country’. Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.^42 Whilst Herr makes no suggestion that in instituting the infamous “body count” approach, the U.S. military came closer than any modern army to institutionalising and symbolically ratifying genocidal practices in its troops, the “dreamy mega-death” in Vietnam is clearly represented by Dispatches as issuing from the upper echelons of the military command-structure. Herr’s editorial reactions to this tend to be framed as humour in the face of the absurd, but it is important to recall that the presence of humour in Dispatches invariably indicates the “joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear” and death, alluded to previously. Colonels seem to attract the greatest portion of disdain, as when in Chapter Five Herr follows the description of one prepared to let a soldier die from heat exhaustion rather than order a medevac chopper, with the bizarre insistence of another in taking his Styrofoam cup. Herr’s reaction is to “exchange the worst colonel stories we knew,” from the “colonel who threatened to court-martial a spec-4 for refusing to cut the heart out of a dead V.C. and feed it to a dog,” to the one
who believed all men under his command should have combat experience, and got all his cooks “wiped out on a night ambush.”^43 A constant theme therefore emerges, of the command-structure imposing utterly unrealistic practices and expectations on the basis of misplaced prejudices: “The belief that one Marine was better than ten slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.”^44 Myths of American nationhood are therefore shown in Dispatches to be fundamental to the conduct of the war in Vietnam, and Herr’s approach continually undercuts them, as seen in one short fragment that expresses the ambivalence of the ‘benevolent’ intervention; “Vietnam, man, bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em and feed ’em.”^45 Counterposed with the sense of brutality represented in the combat soldier, Dispatches therefore posits that in U.S. officers a particularly warped “tyranny of reason,” alongside that kind of gratuitous brutality, is structuring the prosecution of the war by the higher reaches of command. Herr’s point is that the violence latent in command-structures was rarely articulated other than in unguarded “unofficial” instances, and there is a further aspect to the military machine’s conduct against which Dispatches reacts violently. On an anecdotal level, reports of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam’s (MAC-V’s) falsifying both casualty figures and kill ratios are so common as to be pretty much accepted fact, and Herr makes frequent reference to this phenomenon: while the official number of dead was listed at 3,000, I never met anyone who had been there, including officers of the Cav, who would settle for anything less than three or four times that figure….^46 A twenty-four-year-old Special Forces captain was telling me about it. ‘I went and killed one VC and liberated a prisoner. Next day the major called me in and told me that I’d killed
