Herr senses continuity only in Saigon, that “unnatural East-West interface, a California corridor cut and bought and burned deep into Asia,” a Babylon of discotheque whoredom and American civilian contractors who rev their Harleys up the steps of Buddhist shrines. By contrast, Huế and Da Nang, seats of the vanished Nguyễn and Champa kingdoms, are like “remote closed societies, mute and intractable.” In Huế after the battle that demolished so much of the city, bouncing over debris in a jeep with a South Vietnamese major and his driver, Herr gets curious about the old Imperial Palace: There is good reason to believe that the country’s present psychosis is its refusal to recognize the injustice it has imposed on the world: “Years of thinking this or that about what happens to you when you pursue a fantasy until it becomes experience, and then afterwards you can’t handle the experience.” I don’t know if Herr is a spiritual person but he provides some splendid spiritual advice: “Going crazy was built into the tour, the best you could hope for was that it didn’t happen around you, the kind of crazy that made men empty clips into strangers or fix grenades on latrine doors. That was really crazy; anything less was almost standard, as standard as the vague prolonged stares and involuntary smiles, common as ponchos or 16s or any other piece of war issue. If you wanted someone to know you’d gone insane you really had to sound off like you had a pair, ‘Scream a lot, and all the time.’” After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.” The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter:

Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn. As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try. As I'd never read a single thing on the Vietnam War before - why it took me this long I've no idea, the last time I would have heard any of these mentioned was probably the last time I re-watched some of the classic Nam movies from the 80s. And that must have been almost 20 years ago. Every writer who has tried his or her hand at war journalism (myself included) would go to meet Michael Herr rather like a student of the cello would approach Mstislav Rostropovtch. Apart from learning by listening, the gratifying thing is to find that one's own follies and fears are echoes of Herr's; one almost feels validated in one's quirks of judgment in the aftermath of war. Walter Winchell: A Novel (1990) ISBN 0-679-73393-0 ( biographical novel about the newsman Walter Winchell) [5]I don’t know what I like more about this book: his almost giddy excitement of riding the crest of the wave of the entire era of the 60s, or his scared shitless depiction of the actual fighting. I first read some of Herr’s Esquire work in high school, but I didn’t come to Dispatches until college. The book changed the way my brain interacted with language. That tactile sense of conveying the weird and mundane experience of life under the constant threat and thrill of death—it was unlike anything else I’d read. “How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?” remains one of the cleanest, most disruptive sentences and ideas I’ve come across. Dispatches captured the messy, foolish waste and glory of postimperial America well before the nation had figured out it was any of those things. We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.He wrote for the pioneering Holiday magazine, also famous for the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, V.S. Pritchett and Saul Bellow. But it was for Howard Hayes's then trail-blazing Esquire that Herr went to South-east Asia. One soldier asked Herr if he had 'come to report on what we're wearing'. 'I needed the accreditation,' explains Herr, 'and Hayes was okay with that.' I struggled with rating this book and finally settled on 3.5 stars rounded up because of the thought it stimulated and my feeling that this is an important work in the cannon of Vietnam war literature. We chugged up the Perfume river atop a barge full of 155mm shells, clung to the side of a hovercraft. We goofed around at the war until the incoming made you as straight as needed.

Made me curious about the spectral kingdoms and extinguished dynasties of pre-colonial Vietnam, the spooky historical geography which haunts Herr from under the French place names and American grids. Contemplating an unreal old map in his Saigon apartment, Herr knows “that for years now there had been no country here but the war”: The upshot was a book, published in 1977, which every journalist and writer – from John le Carré to Robert Stone – who had ever been in a war zone wished they’d written. Comparisons were made with books like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, but this was different: it was by a writer not a soldier, and it was the writer’s sensibility that made his book captivate a whole generation of readers. Another celebrated New Journalist, Hunter S Thompson, spoke for the profession when he said: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts the rest of us in the shade.” The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now. HERR: I don't know how they felt about it. But I felt that they had to protect me. I mean, it's a point I go into in the book, where, in effect, they were my guns, you know. They were my armed escort. And it left me with a feeling of enormous obligation to tell a certain kind of truth about what they were going through.That's wonderful, but that has nothing to do with the guy sitting at the desk, you know? It's out of his hands, beyond his control and is, in a way, absolutely not personal. You know what I mean? It was at this point that I began to recognise every casualty, remember conversations we'd had days or even hours earlier, and that's when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He'd been hit in both legs, both arms the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to take a picture of him like this to send to his wife. We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher.