Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 72

68 Popular Culture Review rather be told their son is undergoing acute environmental reaction than to hear that he is suffering from shell shock, because they could no more deal with the fact of shell shock than they could with the reality of what had happened to this boy during his five months at Khesanh.63 Shortly upon his arrival in Vietnam, Herr realized that any conventional attempt at covering the war would be inadequate in an environment where disinformation and dislocation were the watchwords. He also quickly dismissed any notion of the neutral observer impersonally and objectively filing stories about the war. Instead, the moral responsibility of the eyewitness to history weighed heavily upon his shoulders: Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.64 Clearly, Herr is struggling with the same concerns as Didion, Wolfe, Thompson, and Mailer—how best to record the historical events of a decade that was marked by social fragmentation and personal alienation. Like his New Journalism counterparts, Herr experiments with a reporting style that seeks insight into a subjective reality; however, Herr appears more willing to explore the ethical consequences of the reporting process itself. Conclusion Just as the social and political turmoil of the 1960s prompted many Americans to reevaluate the morality of American domestic and foreign policies, plus the reality and worth of the American Dream, so too did various journalists in the Sixties reexamine the methods used to record societal strife. For journalists like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Michael Herr, attempting to record an objective reality in a society where the center no longer was holding seemed futile. In the midst of social fragmentation and increasing personal alienation, the subjective reality emerged as the reporter’s meaningful frontier of analysis. The New Journalists dismissed the traditional journalistic practice of the reporter as neutral observer; instead, the reporter often became the central character of the story by personally reacting to the social upheaval being observed. On the surface, the stories stood as one reporter’s testimony to disorder and dislocation; however, on closer examination, the reporter serves as a mirror for what is transpiring in the hearts and minds of Americans at large. The New Journalist also tries to accomplish this by writing the narration from the point of view of the characters depicted.