SOURCE: Jarraway, David R. “‘Standing by His Word’: The Politics of Allen Ginsberg's Vietnam ‘Vortex’.” Journal of American Culture 16, no. 3 (fall 1993): 81-88.

In the following essay, Jarraway discusses “Wichita Vortex Sutra” as emblematic of Vietnam and postmodern literature.

There is a passage near the end of Michael Herr's Dispatches from the Vietnam war that baffles equally as it fascinates. The passage reads as follows:

One morning, about twenty-five correspondents were out by the Y Bridge working when a dying ARVN was driven by on the back of a half-ton pick-up. The truck stopped at some barbed wire, and we all gathered around to look at him. He was nineteen or twenty and he'd been shot three times in the chest. All of the photographers leaned in for pictures, there was a television camera above him, we looked at him and then at each other and then at the...