Michael Herring's Dispatches

Street Freak: Git Some!!!

Canada on Dec 23, 2023

John Zervos: One of the most insightful and disturbing books written about the conflict in Vietnam

Germany on Aug 25, 2023

Clive P L Young: Just as powerful now as when I first read it in the late 70s, maybe more so. I thought it a bit pretentious then, but now it seems more profound. Herr’s rich fever-dream, druggy, rock-and-roll lyricism (amplified his subsequent work on ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’) still frames much of the pop culture view of the Vietnam war. The author acknowledges, “conventional journalism could more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.” Herr was a magazine journalist, hopping helicopters “like taxis” to cover hotspots, so viewing the conflict (”a war of our convenience”) simultaneously from above as well as the brutal grunt ground-level, both the “glamour” of war and its PTSD-triggering gruesomeness. Herr finds his own, and his fellow correspondents’ ambivalence deeply troubling, “I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.” In the first section, ‘Breathing In’ Herr tries to capture the mesmerising sensory and cultural overload of arriving “in country”, then on to ‘Hell Sucks’ and the bloody Tet Offensive in Hue. The biggest section covers (comparatively conventionally) the futile, even “absurd”...

United Kingdom on Feb 18, 2021

Gerardo: Buena edición y magnífico libro. Si no estás acostumbrado al slang americano de la época o al lingo militar, puede costar leerlo.

Spain on Aug 24, 2019

Alessandro Califano: One of the best war relates I've ever read. Human and fully involved, never cynical, nor bombastic, nor approximate in his descriptions of context, feelings, ...and wounds. A must-read about the US in Vietnam

France on May 27, 2017

C. Collins: Michael Herr's book, Dispatches, is a powerful literary work with its journalistic documentary immediacy, its emotional impact, and its historic implications. It speaks of the bravery and irony and ability to deal with absurdity that is so characteristic of America's young men. It tell of the idiocy when tremendous resources are put into place with little insight into history, culture, human nature, and the ability of ideology to blind leaders so that they ignore reality. Herr's writing style is testosterone-driven, machine-gun paced with clipped character studies of the many men he met in combat.

Of course this is what I got from this book but I came to these conclusions from reading the realistic, earthy, often crude and rough, experiences of front line Marines as they experienced events beyond their control and often beyond comprehension.
This book is gutsy and gives a gritty description of the conditions that our young men faced in a poorly led war. Blood, wounds, filth, anger, violence, irrationality, sex, and poverty are often ugly and messy and Herr does not shy away from straight-forward narration of these all too human conditions. Herr focuses on the soldiers on...

United States on Mar 24, 2013

Mark: A Unique Achievement in Writing about War

The first and most important thing to say about Michael Herr's "Dispatches" is that it difficult to begin to do him justice; by its very nature, praise is comparison and Dispatches is incomparable: when you talk about Dispatches, praise is not praise enough.

A memoir of war-reporting written from the left-wing-peacenik perspective, Dispatches is like no other book and the world knows it credentialing it with reference and imitation.

John LeCarre gave it superlatives, Salman Rushdie quoted it in a speech; scenes from it are the basis of scenes in several of the most successful movies about the Vietnam War and, when one former soldier from the Soviet Union during it's occupation of Afghanistan wanted to write about the soldiers on the ground that his country put there, he used ideas and language garnered directly from reading Dispatches.

Among the things that are most striking about Dispatches are its truth, its depth and Herr's raw talent for transforming experience into a digestible, relatable experience that is so rich and so deep that the reader is filled with a sense of the writer's truth on both the large...

United States on Feb 04, 2011