Product Description

"The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." - John Le Carre. "Having read "Dispatches", it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death" - William S Burroughs. "Splendid ...he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front" - Tom Wolfe. "In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway ...he seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, Frank Zappa and Francis Bacon" - "Washington Post'. "We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived but Michael Herr's "Dispatches" puts all the rest of us in the shade' - Hunter S Thompson. "If it were only unconventional journalism, it would stand with the best there is but it's a good deal more than that ...I believe it may be the best personal journal about war, about any war, that any writer has ever accomplished" - Robert Stone.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4354 in Books
• Published on: 1991-10-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
If you've seen the movies Apocalypse Now and Platoon, in whose scripts Michael Herr had a hand, you have a pretty good idea of Herr's take on Vietnam: a hallucinatory mess, the confluence of John Wayne and LSD. Dispatches reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can't wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list ("I just can't hack it back in the World", he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds of civilians; with daredevil photojournalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared somewhere inside Cambodia. Although Herr has admitted that parts of his book are fictional, this is meaty, essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam.

Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any other theatre of combat, as well as the flavour of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried and The Sorrow of War--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic. --Simon Kelly

Customer Reviews

Awesome.
A whole book of cameo snapshots - surreal, stoned, " cassette roll and rock in one ear and door gun fire in the other" with these linked memories woven together Herr has taken us back to the time he watched the madness. If you ever want to try and understand the Vietnam war, or want to see it, the blood, the fear, the humour, cynicism, the irony, she sheer futility of it all, through the eyes of a professional observer then this is the only book for you. I first read it twenty years ago and every time I read it, it just gets better. It's multi layered, a book you can dip into at any page and marvel at Herr's ability to recount the insanity with evocative prose of immense power. If I could write like this, I'd want nothing more from heaven. Its humbling, funny, profound, disturbing. Its awesome.

The first Viet Nam war account I read after I came back.
Insightful and real. I was a combat photographer for the Army in I Corps in 1968 to 1969.His activities mirrored mine to the degree that on every page I just kept nodding my head, yes, that was the way I saw it, too; yes,that happened to me, too. And just keep recording it on paper and on film. His acceptance of distorted reality kept him going and me as well. Herr made me realize that no amount of preparation could get one ready for the horror that was Viet Nam and, that I was not crazy, only traumatized.

A masterpiece
If you want to find out why the Vietnam war happened, don't read this book, because it won't tell you. If you want to find out how the course of the war unfolded, don't read it - same reason. If you want to find out about how utterly bizarre it was to fight in the war on the American side, then read it. That's what it does better than any other book I've read.

Michael Herr was a war correspondent who went to Vietnam and reported on what he found there in a style that can best be described as 'disciplined gonzo'; no wonder he was hired by Coppola to work on the script of 'Apocalypse Now', that other mad, trippy, scary account of the American end of the war. Herr is not interested in strategy, justifications, the rhetoric of America's heroic mission to liberate the Vietnamese from themselves. Like most of the soldiers he meets, he takes it for granted that that's all a crock of manure. From his perspective, the war is a futile and drug-soaked mess, in which America's participation lacks any kind of honour and dignity. The fact that that's a perfectly rational perspective is still often forgotten by people who like to pretend that the Vietnam war was a well-meant affair that just went astray because those pesky GIs smoked too much grass.

There are other, perhaps more crucial perspectives on the war, not least that of the Vietnamese, who were not only the true victims of it but also, most importantly, the winners - the peasant nation that kicked the crap out of a superpower and forced it into a humiliating retreat. But if you want to understand something about the damage Vietnam did to the aggressors, read 'Dispatches'. Only an illiterate person would deny that it's some of the finest American writing of the last century.