---
product_id: 3422387
title: "Dispatches"
price: "€ 32.72"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.at/products/3422387-dispatches
store_origin: AT
region: Austria
---

# Dispatches

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## Description

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" ( The New York Times Book Review ); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.

Review: Excellence in wartime correspondence - 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 the front lines and gives a very real description of wartime. Herr's heart is with the soldiers and this shows in every description and event in the books. By giving the nitty-gritty details of life in wartime he becomes a defender and advocate for those young 19 year olds who underwent this ordeal. When the enemy can disappear into the forests and crowds and homes of the South Vietnamese, when the primary style of warfare is guerrilla warfare, then increased firepower and destruction is counter productive and bound for defeat. The Vietcong controlled the underground world of tunnels and caves whereas the United States controlled the air with our tremendous war machine. When we protect people by destroying their villages, fields, and forests we should not be surprised when they support the enemy. When entire forests and rice fields are destroyed so that the `enemy' has no cover, the war is lost, for those whom we claim to protect have now joined forces with the enemy. The US Forces had a slogan "Only you can prevention forests" that displays the irony these men felt at destroying a country to save it. Entire Vietcong units were supposedly destroyed only to appear in a matter of days elsewhere. Herr relates that whereas we were suppose to be supporting the South Vietnam government, that the corrupt bribe-hungry government could hardly maintain a police force in Saigon. As Herr says, all this means is that the country could not be saved, only destroyed. Herr's observations on racial relationships and tensions are fascinating. He relates how black and white soldiers supported each other in the field under hardships. He also relates what a blow the death of Martin Luther King Jr. was to the black servicemen. Herr does a great job of revealing the strength and patience of black servicemen who were fighting for their country in Vietnam. The chapter on the Khe Sanh base is the most focused narrative work in the book. There is a sense of paranoia as the trapped Marines wait for the assault of the Vietcong upon the base. Herr relates how the American command appeared to be implementing a strategy to draw out the Vietcong to mass troops around Khe Sanh to repeat their strategy against the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. However, by concentrating their forces around Khe Sanh, they offered a better target for American airpower. However the Marines felt out-numbered and completely surrounded as they endured the most brutal artillery barrage of the war. The evacuation roads were completely under the control of the Vietcong and the monsoon season had 6 more weeks to run making retreat much more difficult. Herr relates the considerable tensions that grew as the confrontation built up and reports of increased but unseen Vietcong troops increased. He is at his best as he relates the effects of this tension upon the front line soldiers. The chapter on the war correspondents is also first class literature. Herr doesn't respect all his colleagues by any means since some took the easy way out and reported only what General Westmoreland and his staff wished reported back to US citizens. Many officers felt that Westmoreland made a critical error in allowing so many correspondents to observe the war and report back their observations to an American public that had cognitive dissonance trying to interpret the chaos and horror. However he does observe that the bravest correspondents tended to be the most compassionate. I found the sections on photographer Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn, to be an interesting observation of the role of the correspondent under war conditions. Herr conveys the sense of the time with the mix of contemporary culture that the young Marines experienced including the works of Jim Morrison and the Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, and others. The cultural context of the war and times permeated both the United States and Vietnam and Herr captures this background perfectly. I would end this review with one image and one quotation. Herr relates how after a village that was deemed to be sympathetic to the Vietcong was destroyed, a Vietnamese man holds his dead baby girl in his outstretched arms in the road as the Americans pass. He says nothing; he just looks into their faces and holds up the dead baby for them to see as they drive by. Herr says: "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that is a little history joke."
Review: A Unique Achievement in Writing about War - 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 and the small scale; whether he was talking about the history of the war and our involvement in it "it was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregualrs, working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.... hot on the sex-and-death trail, "lost to headquarters." or about the men on the ground, the actual soldiers, who were an amalgam of every human feeling. They were lost, lonely and lethal--but sometimes, some of them could be kind and caring beyond words "Take your pills, baby, a medic in Can Tho told me. "Big orange ones every week, little white ones every day, and don't miss a day whatever you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavy-set fella like you in a week." or of subjective experience lived inside a savage, inescapable now "Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and make your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet." That last sentence is the mark of Herr's real genius: his voice. Herr's voice in Dispatches is something that every writer, would kill for: pure golden music wedded to an intensity of focused purpose that says "war" more effectively than a thousand words of battle description would. Herr's writing is the true poetry of a war that was unlike any previous war in the American experience; one that had left behind the idea of steeling yourself for battle and facing death in a way that would rush in like the tide, go on for a time and then recede. Herr's voice was the voice of someone on a regular military's side of guerilla war; of being surrounded by the real and constant possibility of dying by surprise, dying before you were ready; by ambush or by booby trap or sniper shot, or simply putting your foot down on the wrong six-inches of unknown ground. Herr sets feeling to the rhythms of his gift so well, with sentences so full of twists, turns and afterthoughts, that you're carried along and you wonder if it isn't all some sort of magic trick: you wonder if Herr could have sat down one day at a desk to describe pink tissue paper, closely, precisely and in a way that would make you want to run screaming... Dispatches is not a good book, it is not a great book, it is unique and everyone who wants to read and feel should read it. It is one of the few books of its time and subject matter that withstands multiple readings and if you are reading it for the first time, you're lucky because it might very well change your conception of reading: you will never have read it before and there will be many, many things afterwards that you will never read the same way again.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #18,430 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #7 in Southeast Asia History #7 in Vietnam War History (Books) #596 in Memoirs (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,162 Reviews |

## Images

![Dispatches - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81WFXSktgRL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Excellence in wartime correspondence
*by C***S on March 24, 2013*

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 the front lines and gives a very real description of wartime. Herr's heart is with the soldiers and this shows in every description and event in the books. By giving the nitty-gritty details of life in wartime he becomes a defender and advocate for those young 19 year olds who underwent this ordeal. When the enemy can disappear into the forests and crowds and homes of the South Vietnamese, when the primary style of warfare is guerrilla warfare, then increased firepower and destruction is counter productive and bound for defeat. The Vietcong controlled the underground world of tunnels and caves whereas the United States controlled the air with our tremendous war machine. When we protect people by destroying their villages, fields, and forests we should not be surprised when they support the enemy. When entire forests and rice fields are destroyed so that the `enemy' has no cover, the war is lost, for those whom we claim to protect have now joined forces with the enemy. The US Forces had a slogan "Only you can prevention forests" that displays the irony these men felt at destroying a country to save it. Entire Vietcong units were supposedly destroyed only to appear in a matter of days elsewhere. Herr relates that whereas we were suppose to be supporting the South Vietnam government, that the corrupt bribe-hungry government could hardly maintain a police force in Saigon. As Herr says, all this means is that the country could not be saved, only destroyed. Herr's observations on racial relationships and tensions are fascinating. He relates how black and white soldiers supported each other in the field under hardships. He also relates what a blow the death of Martin Luther King Jr. was to the black servicemen. Herr does a great job of revealing the strength and patience of black servicemen who were fighting for their country in Vietnam. The chapter on the Khe Sanh base is the most focused narrative work in the book. There is a sense of paranoia as the trapped Marines wait for the assault of the Vietcong upon the base. Herr relates how the American command appeared to be implementing a strategy to draw out the Vietcong to mass troops around Khe Sanh to repeat their strategy against the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. However, by concentrating their forces around Khe Sanh, they offered a better target for American airpower. However the Marines felt out-numbered and completely surrounded as they endured the most brutal artillery barrage of the war. The evacuation roads were completely under the control of the Vietcong and the monsoon season had 6 more weeks to run making retreat much more difficult. Herr relates the considerable tensions that grew as the confrontation built up and reports of increased but unseen Vietcong troops increased. He is at his best as he relates the effects of this tension upon the front line soldiers. The chapter on the war correspondents is also first class literature. Herr doesn't respect all his colleagues by any means since some took the easy way out and reported only what General Westmoreland and his staff wished reported back to US citizens. Many officers felt that Westmoreland made a critical error in allowing so many correspondents to observe the war and report back their observations to an American public that had cognitive dissonance trying to interpret the chaos and horror. However he does observe that the bravest correspondents tended to be the most compassionate. I found the sections on photographer Sean Flynn, son of actor Errol Flynn, to be an interesting observation of the role of the correspondent under war conditions. Herr conveys the sense of the time with the mix of contemporary culture that the young Marines experienced including the works of Jim Morrison and the Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, and others. The cultural context of the war and times permeated both the United States and Vietnam and Herr captures this background perfectly. I would end this review with one image and one quotation. Herr relates how after a village that was deemed to be sympathetic to the Vietcong was destroyed, a Vietnamese man holds his dead baby girl in his outstretched arms in the road as the Americans pass. He says nothing; he just looks into their faces and holds up the dead baby for them to see as they drive by. Herr says: "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that is a little history joke."

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Unique Achievement in Writing about War
*by M***K on February 4, 2011*

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 and the small scale; whether he was talking about the history of the war and our involvement in it "it was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregualrs, working in remote places under little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.... hot on the sex-and-death trail, "lost to headquarters." or about the men on the ground, the actual soldiers, who were an amalgam of every human feeling. They were lost, lonely and lethal--but sometimes, some of them could be kind and caring beyond words "Take your pills, baby, a medic in Can Tho told me. "Big orange ones every week, little white ones every day, and don't miss a day whatever you do. They got strains over here that could waste a heavy-set fella like you in a week." or of subjective experience lived inside a savage, inescapable now "Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn't 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and make your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet." That last sentence is the mark of Herr's real genius: his voice. Herr's voice in Dispatches is something that every writer, would kill for: pure golden music wedded to an intensity of focused purpose that says "war" more effectively than a thousand words of battle description would. Herr's writing is the true poetry of a war that was unlike any previous war in the American experience; one that had left behind the idea of steeling yourself for battle and facing death in a way that would rush in like the tide, go on for a time and then recede. Herr's voice was the voice of someone on a regular military's side of guerilla war; of being surrounded by the real and constant possibility of dying by surprise, dying before you were ready; by ambush or by booby trap or sniper shot, or simply putting your foot down on the wrong six-inches of unknown ground. Herr sets feeling to the rhythms of his gift so well, with sentences so full of twists, turns and afterthoughts, that you're carried along and you wonder if it isn't all some sort of magic trick: you wonder if Herr could have sat down one day at a desk to describe pink tissue paper, closely, precisely and in a way that would make you want to run screaming... Dispatches is not a good book, it is not a great book, it is unique and everyone who wants to read and feel should read it. It is one of the few books of its time and subject matter that withstands multiple readings and if you are reading it for the first time, you're lucky because it might very well change your conception of reading: you will never have read it before and there will be many, many things afterwards that you will never read the same way again.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A gritty, eye-opening view of war from the front lines.
*by H***T on August 22, 2014*

A vivid portrayal of life at the front of the Vietnam War. Michael Herr, working for Esquire magazine, picked up his notebook and headed out to where the was happening. He was at the Citadel in Hue during the Tet Offensive; he also travelled to Khe Sahn. He talks about being afraid but moving forward anyway "I didn't go through all that not to see." (p 256) Herr does an exquisite job of describing the grunts (he spent most of his time with the Marines). Of a 19 year old Marine he says "He had one of those faces, 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". (p 16) Herr, writing in the 60s and 70s, is extremely critical of the war and the way it was waged (but then weren't most people?). He knew that "A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed, and they locked into that with breathtaking concentration." (p 59). He discusses some of the difference between the Army and Marine approach to the war: "That belief [that one Marine was worth 10 dead Vietnamese] was undying, but the grunt was not, and the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans." (p102) It was interesting to read this after having read Gregg Jones' "Last Stand at Khe Sanh: The U.S. Marines Finest Hour in Vietnam." Jones does an excellent job of describing the tactics and flow of battle giving details based on interviews with survivors years later. Herr's story is much more immediate. While you don't get a sense of the ebb and flow of the stand, you get a gritty, realistic view of life in the mud of the bunkers and trenches. I read this book back in the 70's and was glad I picked it up again. If we are going to put our young men and women through pain and misery that will last a lifetime, sometimes a very short lifetime, we should be damn well clear that it is worth it for us.

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*Last updated: 2026-06-07*