Dispatches

This section covers the Tet Offensive, and the intense fighting that occurred in Hue. The Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968, when the People’s Army of Vietnam surprised the U.S. Armed Forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam with a well-coordinated spate of attacks across the country. The U.S. was able to beat back the North Vietnamese and maintain a certain level of control in the country, but the enemy’s ability to wage such a devastating operation against the allies, and photographs from that intense period of fighting, were responsible for turning U.S. public opinion against the war.

At first, Herr is in Saigon, where a curfew has been put into effect in response to the intensification of fighting during the Tet Offensive: “Saigon had been depressing enough, but during the Offensive it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating” (70). Because trash and human waste is building up on the streets, leadership is concerned that it will add to the death tolls. Herr feels that “if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency” (70).

The narrator travels with the troops to Hue, where the fighting is most intense: “Everyone else in the truck had that wild haunted going-West look that said it was perfectly correct to be here where the fighting would be the worst” (74).