Dispatches

The act of seeing/watching/looking is conveyed often in Dispatches, as Herr explores and then challenges his role as a spectator. At one point, Herr is on a helicopter to drop supplies for one man: “God knows what kind of Lord Jim phoenix numbers he was doing in there, all he said to me was, ‘You didn’t see a thing, right Chief? You weren’t even here’” (9).

When Herr hitches a ride on a helicopter full of corpses, the poncho covering the face of one of the dead Marines blows off, exposing the man’s face: “They hadn’t even closed his eyes for him” (17). The gunner, perhaps thinking that the eyes were looking at him, starts yelling at Herr to fix it. It’s not until Herr covers the eyes that the gunner is able to start functioning again.

Once Herr makes the realization that seeing something makes you responsible in some way, he argues that “The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes” (20). The eyes are repositories for much of what one experiences, even before one knows how to process it.