Dispatches

‘The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time’ – John Le CarréMichael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but even more so in its honesty.First published in 1977, Dispatches was a revolutionary piece of new journalism that evoked the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam which has forever shaped our understanding of the conflict.A groundbreaking piece of journalism, part of the Picador Collection, which inspired Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.

The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time., 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, Splendid . . . he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front, 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, 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

Michael Herr was born in 1940 in Syracuse, New York. He was a writer and former war correspondent best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. He died in 2016, aged seventy-six.