Made me curious about the spectral kingdoms and extinguished dynasties of pre-colonial Vietnam, the spooky historical geography which haunts Herr from under the French place names and American grids. Contemplating an unreal old map in his Saigon apartment, Herr knows “that for years now there had been no country here but the war”:

The terrain above II Corps, where it ran along the Laotian border and into the DMZ, was seldom referred to as the Highlands by Americans. It had been a matter of milita

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This is war reportage as heartbreaking poetry. One of the roughest pieces of writing I have ever encountered. Beautiful, angular and harsh stylistically. There is a wonderfully (and terrifyingly) immersive quality to this book.

I'd kind of heard of this, but didn't know its significance and avoided reading about it while reading it. Turns out he later wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, which makes sense because Vietnam film is 100% rooted in the language and stories of this book. I'm conflicted because it tells things as horribly as they were and yet within this book is the seed for the romanticism of the Vietnam war. All those movies and all those people I always felt were enjoying them for More...

Having been in VietNam and having been in some of the Marine Units that Michael Herr writes about in "Dispatches" is the best depiction of war in general and VietNam in particular that I have ever read. It started me on the path to healing that I had kept hidden since I came back from Nam. Thank You Michael.

Not only is this the most engrossing piece of journalism, the most touching memoir, and the most illuminating book on war I've ever read; it's also written as if Herr was on fire and being chased by literature-eating wolves. I read it twice in a row and would do it again.

Fucking amazing. Supposedly the most famous journalistic account of the war in Vietnam... I wouldn't disagree. Nonfiction, but to me on par with any of O'Brien's work from a storytelling perspective, which is saying a lot. Outpaced the highest of expectations.

First of all, the language. Good God but Herr really tears it up. It's both mesmerizing and gutting to read this book. And I really got that feeling I get whenever I read exceptional writing, that I'll never be able to match up.

Despite this being a fairly short book, Herr takes you into many varied corners of the war. There's a lot of obvious dark stuff, but there are also really interesting bits where he gets into how the war has a certain allure and describes it as beautiful and even though he More...

Listened to Roy Porter's marvelous reading of this during a road trip this summer. The eight hours flew by. Porter inhabits the different characters Herr creates: British, French, slacker, Southern, and also gets the sometimes manic, sometimes exhausted, sometimes distantly ironic tone of Herr's writing just right. Herr was a war correspondent in Vietnam for less than two years -- 1967-1969 -- and he took some eight years to find exactly the right words to capture his experiences. The chronology More...

Dispatches is a novel in which the author,Michael Herr tells what he thought of when he was at Vietnam War,way back in the 1960s. The war was really long and really treacherous.He mentioned in the story that many Vietnamese people died and even some American troops as well. Michael Herr did have a really tough time when he was away from America because he wasn't able to see his family, his friends, and he even couldn't get into contact with them. He had one of his brothers that did commit suicid More...

My hat's off to anyone who can sum up this book in a review. It is beyond anything I've ever read in its portrayal of men at war as witnessed by the war correspondents who accompany them on the front lines. Unlike the embedded journalists of our own time, the writers and photographers who covered Vietnam were much closer to being free agents, restricted only by their ingenuity and fearlessness to seek out the action that would represent the essence of America's military presence in southeast Asi More...

Michael Herr captures the feelings, the violence, and the insanity of the late 1960s. In 1969 I went to college instead of Vietnam and I graduated the year it all came crashing down. A significant portion of my youth was spent trying to understand from journalism what was happening in Southeast Asia; only later would I realize that the understanding I sought was not and could not be available from file-at-five journalism. Herr was accredited to Esquire and was free of that pressure. He explains More...

Dispatches is a superb collection with a flashes of brilliance. Herr is a gifted writer and a measured study of the motivations behind man’s actions. I loved it. One way to adequately critique Herr is to put his flame next to O’Brien’s excellent collection, “The Things They Carried.” In suggesting a comparison, I’ve immediately placed Herr next to the very best in War Short Stories. O’Brien’s disturbing gift was his use of unbelievably beautiful and poetic prose... while describing... some of th More...

Esquire magazine sent a correspondent to Vietnam, and the result is, as the cover states, one of the best books about war ever written.

Rather than a military listing of battles and hardware, enemies and tactics, this is a book about the people and the culture of the war. It brings the human element into view.

And, it's written in a cool fashion. The author takes pleasure in the jargon and the language of the war, not so much the acronyms and the military terms, but rather the conversation of the More...

UN CARTONE ANIMATO NOIR: "TOPOLIN, TOPOLIN, VIVA TOPOLIN"
Questo libro contiene tutti i film sul Vietnam che ho visto e che sono stati mai realizzati. Eppure è stato scritto prima di qualsiasi film sul Vietnam.
Il fatto è che chiunque abbia voluto fare un film sull’argomento ha letto ‘Dispacci’ con attenzione, è partito da queste pagine.
A cominciare da Coppola, che per “Apocalypse Now” lo volle cosceneggiatore (la voce off di Willard-Sheen è un parto di Herr), proseguendo con Kubrick, che lo coinv More...

This is a searing look at the Vietnam War, told in a series of loosely connected stream-of-consciousness vignettes. There is not much of a narrative thread holding everything together, and some of the book is hard to understand without at least a basic familiarity with the history of the Second Indochina War. Nevertheless, this book works. For any fans of the movies Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket, you will enjoy everything here - the author was a screenwriter for both of those films, and dr More...

I've read that Michael Herr's Dispatches is one of the best, if not the best, book that has been written about the Vietnam War. I've certainly not read widely enough to know whether that's true or not (and a personal favorite of mine remains Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried), but Herr manages to convey to the reader what it was like to be in Vietnam with a very authentic voice. He gives a flavor to the time, place and people that will remain in my mind for quite a while. I thought Dispatche More...

Overall a very good book, that sits up there with any Vietnam story ever told. I think I expected a little more from the book that was the basis for the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but... When it came down to it, all that was taken from this book for those films were very minor details, short anecdotes and characters. There was so much of the book that was left untouched by Hollywood.

But the stories were good, and Herr's experience was very unique. There were angles on t More...

The author, Michael Herr, had a hand in the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and I can see the similarities with this book. He gives you stories, people and places during the Vietnam war as he mucks about with the grunts and marines. He has a good eye for observing and reporting on what some might think are the small, inconsequential bits but really are the most intriguing bits. The book has feeling too, not just dry observing and yet I didn't pick up any judgmental attitudes. More...

Waterstones booksellers in the UK now display their books increasingly with the front cover showing. This has been proven to increase sales and it works because I bought this book knowing nothing about it previously. Attracted by the quote by John Le Carre and a picture of a GI's helmet with grafitti on it that reads "Hell sucks".

I soon discovered that this is one of those "famous" books written by a famous war correspondent from the Vietnam war. At the height of the war, Michael Herr found hims More...

If you grew up, as I did, in the 1980s, Vietnam was the scar that defined our culture. It divided the hippies from the squares, dashed the 60s dreams of a better world, and queued up the orgy of self-involvement and political conservatism that defined the Reagan administration. But what was it? If you were born after 1975, you only knew it from the movies. And that means you knew it from Michael Herr, who wrote parts of Apocalypse Now and all of Full Metal Jacket, and before any of that wrote "D More...

This book will be a serious departure from almost anything else you've been reading right before it - it's almost entirely stream-of-consciousness, and in an everyman way that doesn't exactly borrow from Faulkner or Joyce. The first few pages are pretty startling as far as prose style goes.

The best bits are the actual anecdotes, events that Herr witnessed, and I found myself dragging through the parts that were more opinion and set-up of coming events. Herr's strategy in this book is to throw la More...

Well…what can I say about a book that I’ve read four or five times so far!? I’ve had it for almost three years now, so I read it every six months or so. No, not on purpose. It’s just my healthy dose of Michael Herr’s great book. I’ll tell you what…if you’re tired, or you’ve had enough of official government numbers and policies, and if you are especially interested in the Vietnam war, or the life of common soldiers and their feelings in combat…this a must read. Why? Because it’s the real deal, t More...

I'm surprised it took me this long to hear about this book - one of the better bits of New Journalism and one of the best books about the Vietnam war I've read.

At first, I was actually put off by the book, which is very stylized and seemed to be making this Esquire correspondent's experience of the war somehow the most important experience to be had, but Herr's logic grew on me a bit. He argues, at one point, that he was as responsible for what he had seen as the soldiers he wrote about were re More...

I often find I learn a lot about geography and history through reading fiction, and though this book isn't fiction but a war correspondent's account of being in Vietnam in the late '60s, I hoped for the same here. My knowledge of the Vietnam war isn't good, and I hoped this book would remedy that. Unfortunately it's not an ideal first port of call, as it assumes a lot of prior knowledge that non-Americans may not possess, and was peppered with initials and acronyms but had no glossary or any oth More...

Riveting and brilliant account of the chaotic and stressed out world of the soldier in Vietnam as digested by an embedded journalist. From nearly 10 years of hindsight, Herr writes from his experience as a correspondent for Esquire for a one year period from 1967 to 1968, a time of major escalation in the war, including the Tet Offensive and major sieges of Hue and Khe Sahn. The quality of the writing is solid and renders a great balance between the visceral experiences of combat (the terror, me More...

I'd never heard Dispatches mentioned in speech or in print until I got a copy of it in a package sent to me from my uncle, who'd died three or four days earlier. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the basis for not only Full Metal Jacket but also, to some degree, Apocalypse Now.

It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers a More...

"Den bästa bok jag har läst om män och krig i vår tid" lär John la Carré ha sagt. Även om jag är osäker på det där om män så håller jag fullständigt med angående krig.

För Dispatches, eller rapporter som den heter på Svenska, behandlar inte kriget i stort. Det är heller ingen fullständig redovisning för Michael Herrs tid i Vietnam, inget fulländat filosofiskt resonemang och kriget och dess innebörd och det är inte heller en sammanställning av ögonvittnesskildringar från folk som var där. Den är More...

I picked up this book because I have always been interested in the thoughts, distillations of authors about the Vietnam War, or if you are in Vietnam, called the American War. For the generation born after the war was fought and beginning to be forgotten, Michael Herr's book will put you right there when it was happening, where it was happening, never mind why it was happening because as his account so excruciatingly lays out, the why can neer be sufficiently explained. This is an intense accoun More...

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*The Picador Paperback edition of Michael Herr’s 1977 book Dispatches.

This cover reminds me of M*A*S*H. In both, a weird brand of 70s minimalism flavors the apocalypse with humor and whimsy. The saturated green helmet with its slogan ‘HELL SUCKS’ and a teardrop peace sign in vivid yellow, nestles in a hyperbolic (but mostly true) blurb from John Le Carré. It’s certainly the best book I’ve ever read on men and war in any time, but then again I haven’t read More...