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I was sad to learn that Michael Herr, the author of the Vietnam War memoir\u00a0Dispatches<\/em><\/a>,<\/strong> died Thursday at age 76.<\/p>\n When I first opened a copy of Dispatches<\/em>, it was immediately clear it was unlike any other book about war I\u2019d ever read. For one, it\u2019s partly fictionalized and is strictly not<\/em> a work of history or a study of military operations. Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire<\/em> for 18 months, underwent a psychological breakdown after returning home, recovered and then completed the book.<\/p>\n Dispatches<\/em> is a deeply affecting and painful account of Herr\u2019s personal experience during the Tet Offensive, and written in the New Journalism style shared by Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. To read it requires immersing yourself in the war\u2019s extreme, absurd environment through Herr\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n The book is more about mood, senses and individual soldiers. And there are very few like it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou a reporter?\u201d a Marine asked Herr before one of his early helicopter trips into the field. \u201cI\u2019d said, \u2018No, a writer,\u2019 dumbass and pompous, and he\u2019d laughed and said, \u2018Careful. You can\u2019t use no eraser up where you wanna go.\u201d<\/p>\n Herr\u2019s account, published in 1977, is extremely bleak and went on to influence Apocalypse Now<\/em> and Full Metal Jacket<\/em>, which Herr co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick and Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford. Spy novelist John le Carre called Dispatches<\/em> \u201cthe best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.\u201d<\/p>\n f you\u2019ve never read Dispatches<\/em> but have seen those films, parts of the book may come across as dated and cliche\u200a\u2014\u200aparticularly Herr\u2019s slang and \u201960s counter-culture references. But that\u2019s an unfair reading on my part, owing to having absorbed its language in the media it influenced.<\/p>\n The cliche-seeming passages are only cliches after 39 years removed from the source.<\/p>\n The book also blended horror and anxiety of combat zones with the mundane press conferences of military journalism. The differing perspectives of soldiers and officers, the latter whom regularly deceive reporters as the war descends into madness, is jarring.<\/p>\n \u201cThese official briefings did the same thing to your perception of the war that flares did to your night vision,\u201d Herr wrote.<\/p>\n Read the Remainder at War is Boring<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n