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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.