pagesofhistory Dispatches
During the ongoing 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, Don Vaughan looks back on the legacy of author Michael Herr, whose memoir became a classic of war reporting.
H
undreds of print and broadcast journalists covered the Vietnam War, but Michael Herr’s Dispatches
was notable for its visceral depiction of the experiences of servicemembers. Nearly 40 years later, it remains required reading for military journalists. Herr went to Vietnam in 1967 as a cor-
respondent for Esquire magazine and pro- duced a handful of masterful stories over the course of his year in-country. Upon his return to the U.S., Herr began to work on Dispatches but had to put the book aside when he fell into a deep depression. “I flipped out,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 interview. “I experienced a mas- sive physical and psychological collapse.” An evocative combination of memoir,
observational journalism, and fiction, Dispatches was published in 1977 to rave reviews. Observed novelist John le Carré, “Dispatches is the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” Dispatches now is considered one of the seminal books to come out of the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t Herr’s only exploration of the two-decades-long conflict. He also contributed to the unsettling narration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, itself an ad- aptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and coauthored the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with director Stanley Kubrick and writer Gustav Hasford, whose book The Short-Timers served as the movie’s inspiration.
PHOTO: JANE BROWN/THE GUARDIAN
Herr died June 23 following an undis- closed illness; he was 76 years old.
Preserving World War I Memorials s the world commemorates the centennial anniversary of World War I, a national program endeav-
A
ors to preserve related memorials around the U.S. 100 Cities/100
Memorials looks to groups and indi- viduals to identify distressed World War I memorials in their areas, put together conser- vation treatment proposals, and submit plans for possible selection of matching grant funds. Approved projects will be announced in November. The U.S. World War I Centennial Commission and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library are promoting the program with support from the American Legion and the World War I Memorial Inventory Project. For more information on the program, visit
http://bit.ly/2axBuUW.
MO
— Don Vaughan, a North Carolina-based free- lance writer, authors this monthly column.
OCTOBER 2016 MILITARY OFFICER 65
History Lesson On Oct. 26, 1922, naval aviator Lt. Cmdr. Godfrey DeCourcelles Chevalier made the first aircraft- carrier landing on the deck of America’s first aircraft carrier, USS Langley (CV-1).
Author Michael Herr covered the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine from 1967-69 and wrote about his experiences in Dispatches, pub- lished in 1977.
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