Search - Dispatches

The men’s magazine Esquire used Herr as a freelancing reporter on the Vietnam War beat for about two year in the late 1960s. The jarheads would mock him, “Are you gonna tell the people what we’re wearing.” Then they’d shake their heads, amazed that anybody who didn’t have to be In Country would choose to be In Country but ruefully aware that Herr could pull back to Saigon when the going got tough. A classic of the Vietnam War era, this book feels like Apocalypse Now in that the reader always gets the feeling that all hell is going to break loose any minute. Stressed. Extreme. Severe. Telling is the fact that Herr worked as Stanley Kubrick’s consultant on the tense movie Full Metal Jacket. Herr writes the first third in a complex, free-association, stream-of-consciousness style that forces a reader to set the intensity aside and wonder what is fantasy and what is so-called factual assertion. I think if a reader wanted to focus on distinctive Nam documents, Dispatches would be worth reading after Fields of Fire (James Webb) and A Rumor of War (Phillip Caputo). As Edmund Blunden advised in his poem, "Victorians:" "… read first, and fully shape/The diagram of life which governed them."

Sums up the very essence of the war. Possibly hte best about Vietnam.

On the Vietnam War.