Dispatches (Paperback)

by Michael Herr (Author) "There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie..." (more)
Key Phrases: Khe Sanh, Day Tripper, Special Forces (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War, We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic.

From Publishers Weekly
American correspondent Herr's documentary recalls the heavy combat he witnessed in Vietnam as well as the obscene speech, private fears and nightmares of the soldiers. "Herr captures the almost hallucinatory madness of the war," said PW. "This is a compelling, truth-telling book with a visceral impact, its images stuck in the mind like shards from a pineapple bomb."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 6, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679735259
• ISBN-13: 978-0679735250
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (111 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #110,320 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Vietnam War at ground zero., June 6, 2003

By	James Ferguson (Vilnius, Lithuania) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Certainly one of the most visceral descriptions of the Vietnam War. Herr dispenses with politics to get to the heart of the matter - the soldiers in the field. He tells so many compelling stories of the front line experience, which served as fodder for both "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket," co-writing the movie scripts. What makes the book stand out is the empathy Herr had for the soldiers' experiences, subliminating himself in the course of the narratives.

Khe Sanh is indeed the centerpiece of the book. He describes the battle from ground level, drawing comparisons to the infamous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which brought the French chapter of the Vietnam War to an end. Commanding officers bristled at the comparison, yet here were the Americans entrenched in a remote outpost, with the mysterious presence of the Viet Cong all around them. Herr gives you the perspective of a handful of soldiers he was in closest contact with, following up on their fates in later chapters.

Herr doesn't try to make sense of the war, simply presenting it as the maelstrom it was. Chaos reigned. All you could do was keep your head down. He ties you in to some of the other reporters covering the war, including the flambouyant Sean Flynn, who would ride into most any situation with the aplomb of his legendary father, Errol Flynn. It is such a fantastic range of dispatches giving the reader a real feel for what went on in Vietnam.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still Worth A Read, July 21, 2002

By A Customer

A classmate gave me this book in 1980, when I was a 13 year old girl with a voracious reading appetite. Strange as it may seem, girls do like war books and this one still stands out in my mind as one of the best written from a nitty-gritty, no-holds-barred point of view. Our history classes never quite made it to an in-depth look at Vietnam even though we were born of an era that witnessed Vets coming home, injured, despondent and forever changed. This book gave me my first understanding of what it was like to be a "grunt" in that war, which the antiseptic history books would never do. It also gave me respect for all who were stuck in that quagmire and how war could make anyone go quite loony. It's very compelling and hard to put down, even for a 13 year old.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best written Vietnam era books., November 30, 2004

By	George G. Kiefer (Sevierville, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam during the months of the Hill Fights of `67 through the winter to the Tet Offensive and on past the spring months of '68. In his memoir, "Dispatches", he focuses primarily upon the Battle for Hue and the Siege of Khe Shan but there are glimpses of other battles. He covers Vietnam reflecting upon everything from the bar scenes of the large cities to the terror of incoming while in trenches of firebases in an outpouring of confused and conflicted memories. Like a rock skimming across a pond he touches upon the drugs, the blaring of rock and roll, the freaks and the street-talking young toughs. In a few well-written sentences he eviscerates the information officers and the official line but spends several introspective pages exploring the parasitic nature of war correspondents. He rarely offers an opinion; he just tells in a stream of consciousness what he saw and heard. But this is not a book of great battles and heroic deeds. It is a book about average troops and a handful of war correspondents, for whom he held deep affection, and what they had to cope with and how some of them died.

"I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn't wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he'd live it out old."

Reading this book you feel and are touched by Vietnam and several excellent passage leave you feeling empty. Hard for a book to evoke that kind of response but this one does. Excellent writing, a damn good book.