Dispatches

As a Vietnam veteran, teacher of war literature, and writer, I am disappointed that I never interviewed Michael Herr. I can only imagine what such an encounter might have been like with this larger-than-life figure, at least the persona (adrenaline junky, reporter on drugs) found in this fragmented collection of war reportage. With its New Journalistic style and content, the sensory-overload writing might be best described as a collection of literary illumination rounds (their underlying message—war is hell and addictive). As a freelance journalist, Herr arrived in Vietnam wanting to reveal the large ugly truths about the war, which he… show more.

From the opening pages, his writing knocks your britches off and never relents, driving at you, into you, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence, word after word. So authentic and immediate is his writing, that when I closed the book after finishing it, I discovered I had been transported back to and into my own war.

Michael Herr was a correspondent for Esquire Magazine, covering the Vietnam War from late 1967 to early 1969. In this non-fiction book written in 1977, only two years after the war ended, he recounts with unerring accuracy the horrors of war and the daily lives of soldiers in a combat zone. He also captures the broader picture of the war as only a correspondent based in Saigon could, giving the reader a glimpse into the absurdity by which those orchestrating the war explained their actions. This immediacy to the time of the events leads to an insightful and informative… show more.

Dispatches is the psychological descent of a mind into the lunacy of the Vietnam War, a genuine Apocalypse Now, as told by a correspondent whose literary achievement is to distill the ‘voice’ of Vietnam to the mortified reader.

It matters little that the key characters are inventions: they serve as avatars for Vietnam’s malignant futility.

Reading Dispatches you’re in the grip of a book that won’t let you go until you understand the emotional truth about this napalmed, noxious episode in history, played out in the twisted imaginations of politicians functioning light years away from the bloody tableau of… show more.

The basic rule of writing a news story? Declarative sentences. These are easily understood and avoid confusing readers who want factual information first, with less of an emphasis on literary style. But all that changed when Herr wrote this book which turns words into weapons as you'll read in his lyrical and chilling reports during the U.S.-Vietnam War.