Through the text of  Trip to Hanoi an important application pertaining to humanity and interactions within was uncovered by Sontag through her interactions with a foreign culture. Sontag uncovers this insight through a systematic journaling of her experience coupled with later and compounded insight. Through her experience she relates the unexpected and enlightening experience that showed to her the reasons for the great complexities of the vietnam war. 

In the early stages of her experience in Hanoi, Sontag becomes frustrated with the seemingly choked relations with her Vietnamese hosts.  In an overly accommodating experience she feels childlike and finds her actions conforming to her feelings. This does not settle well and creates the frustration within her. For her nothing is as her preconceived ideas suggest, and she lost in a culture completely foreign to her. She does not learn until further insight that her frustration was a direct result of this clash of cultures. This clash of cultures, she goes on to find, created many of the complexities underlying the Vietnam War. In the part of the writing that relates her experience though her journaling of the experience, we get a taste of her experiance as it clashes with the culture she is partaking of unknowingly. It is not until later that Sontag realizes that the way she is being treated is natural in the Vietnamese culture. Her insight in the later part of the text outlines this in relation to the problems created by the U.S.'s presence in vietnam. 

What Sontag learned and related through her experience is directly applicable to our own interaction with others. Beyond, but contributing to, rhetoric is each individuals own life experiences and beliefs.  Sontag portrayed this on a much larger scale but to the same end.