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Herr’s view of the Vietnam war is diffucult to interpret because at times he describes it as a hell with brutal accounts of mutilation and death. At other times, he seeks solice in the exhileration that comes from the fear. He was there “to cover the war and the war covered me”, is easiest way to describe what he encountered. Herr was nieve at when he first got to Saigon. He writes of the moring before he was dropped off on the front lines, he had purchased fatigues and dressed up in them, stood in front of his mirror “making faces and moves I’d never make again”. He, and probably most men entering this war thought it would be like old war movies or cowboys and indians. Much later, he ends up buring this set of fatigues and with them, any misconceptions he had that a person could come out of this war the same as they went into it. Herr, personally believed that he didn’t understand what he was about to see until much later, even after he had been back in the United States. He was just responding to whatever stimuli he encountered moment by moment. When describing the origins of the war itself, it is clear that Herr felt it should have never become and international war. In early 1962 and 1963, he saw it as a struggle amoung the already corrupt of Vietnam vieing for stature within the country. There was the occassional American adventurers or CIA, fighting on their own terms, he labelled as Irregulars, “woring in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their own fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.” (This may be a forshadowing of type of individuals who actually were able to survive the war). It began with individuals and groups who were fighting for themselves, whether it was for money, power or even personal satisfaction. It turned into a war where no one was really sure who they were fighting or what they were fighting for. “Their adventure became our war, then a war bogged down in time, so much time, so badly accounted for that it finally became entrenched as an institution because there had never been room made for it to go anywhere else.” In a way, it had started out as a game, the sort of game that men played when they were boys, with unspoken rules, winners and losers. “One night I woke up and heard the sounds of a firefight going on kilometers away, a skirmish outside our perimeter; muffled by distance to sound like the noises we made playing guns as children, kssshh kssshh; we knew it was more authentic than bang bang, it enriched the game and this game was the same, only way out of hand at last, too rich for all but a few serious players.” But, he believed in some people’s minds it was still a game because that was the only way the could cope with the war.
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