Dispatches
by Michael Herr
Summary
Herr arrived in Vietnam in late 1967 as a correspondent for Esquire and returned to New York the following autumn, and Dispatches gathers what he wrote there and afterward into six long pieces rather than one continuous narrative, following American soldiers, mostly teenagers barely out of high school, through firefights, boredom, drugs, and fear in a war Herr makes no attempt to explain strategically or politically. The book's centerpiece is its account of the 1968 siege of Khe Sanh, where Herr embedded with Marines under sustained North Vietnamese bombardment for weeks, and the surrounding chapters move through Saigon press briefings soldiers nicknamed the five o'clock follies for how little they resembled the war Herr was actually watching, into the chaos of the Tet Offensive, and into portraits of the photographers and reporters, some of them killed during Herr's own time there, who covered the war alongside him. Herr writes himself into the book as a frightened, complicit participant rather than a neutral observer, admitting to the same adrenaline and dark fascination with combat that pulled soldiers back out on patrol even after they had already survived enough to justify going home. He acknowledged later that some figures in the book are composites drawn from several real people and that certain scenes were reconstructed rather than reported as they happened in real time, a fact that has shadowed its status as strict journalism ever since without diminishing what most readers actually take from it.
Herr writes in a hallucinatory, rock and roll inflected prose he developed specifically for this material, closer in rhythm to the era's music and drug culture than to conventional war reporting, and it reads less like dispatches sent home from a war than like someone trying, breathlessly, to explain a fever after the fact. It does not move chronologically the way a memoir usually does, and that disorientation is deliberate, meant to put a reader somewhere near the confusion soldiers themselves described living inside for a whole tour.
Historical Context & Significance
Alfred A. Knopf published Dispatches in 1977, drawing on pieces Herr had published individually in magazines between 1968 and 1976. It is often loosely described as a National Book Award finalist, but the record that actually exists is different and no less real: it was a finalist for the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, alongside John McPhee's Coming Into the Country and Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, with the prize going to W. Jackson Bate's biography Samuel Johnson instead. John le Carré called it the best book he had ever read on men and war in his own time, and it has stayed near the top of lists of great war writing since, including a place in the journalism section of the Guardian's 2011 list of the hundred greatest nonfiction books.
Its afterlife runs largely through film rather than through further prizes. Herr wrote narration for Apocalypse Now and later helped write the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, carrying scenes and dialogue drawn directly from Dispatches into both films and, through them, into a much wider audience's sense of what the war actually looked and sounded like from inside it.