Content area
Full Text
I
The Vietnam war was filled with perplexities and conundrums for American writers. In the realm of pure narrative, one of the more haunting of these was the enigmatic tale Michael Herr says he heard shortly after arriving in South Vietnam from a laconic, third-tour "Lurp" of a U.S. Army Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol who already had more than two years in country. Herr's classic of New Journalism, Dispatches (1977), reports the man's exact words:
Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.1
Herr says he "waited for the rest, but it seemed not to be that kind of story"; it was, however, "as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard." And not only that: "it took me a year to understand it." That would have been more or less the remainder of Herr's time in Vietnam, from December 1967 to late '68-a very long time indeed if the story was just one more comment on the futility of war (Herr 16). Nearly forty years after Dispatches, the tale remains unexplicated for the rest of us. Its "enigmatic" nature for those (like Herr) seeking a "war story," plus some attention from critics who note but never quite interpret it, makes further elucidation overdue. Michael Herr long ago declined to make further substantive comment on Dispatches, so we may never know what he finally understood from the anecdote.
First, however, we need to be aware of the nature of the LRRPs (I'll use the official initialism LRRP for the organization and reserve Herr's spelling Lurp for a member of a LRRP team). Introduced in 1966 at company and platoon levels, the elite U.S. Army LRRPs were successors of the highly trained Ranger battalions of World War II and Korea. The characteristics essential to a member of a Vietnam-era Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol were described by Fourth Division commander General William R. Peers in 1968:
[A]n individual must be qualified both physically and psychologically.... Physically, because LRRP duties are very, very arduous and you never know when you are going to have to cover 10 or 15 kilometers on the ground in very short order....The psychological qualifications...are extremely difficult. You need somebody out there...