One of the greatest Vietnam narratives I've ever read. Michael Herr was a screenwriter for both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. It is no surprise after reading this that Coppola and Kubrick would select Herr for this task. He is amazing.

I am a huge fan of Full Metal Jacket. Of course, Gustav Hasford's Short-Timers (an out-of-print book that is impossible to find for less than $80 online) was the basis for that story. However, this book felt almost like an extended sequel or spiritual twin, where instead of being a Marine, Joker was a war correspondent working for Esquire magazine. I could hear Joker's voice channeling through Herr, which I totally dug.

Herr's writing is beautiful and expressive. He brings you a grunt's-eye-view of the action. I never understood what was happening in the battle of Khe Sanh until I read this. I would read five more books about Vietnam if they were all this moving and good.

This was a chore to read. I haven't read many books about the Vietnam war but all of them have been far better than this.

The groovy, poetic, disjointed style felt very dated and the stories at times were so oblique I just gave up trying to understand what the author was writing about and plugged on hoping to make to the end. The author's use of parenthetical comments was another unenlightening irritant.

The darkness, folly and futility of the war came across now and then but while that was probably this book's strength when it was first published it's just not a revelation today. This book's day has passed and there are other, better choices.

I knew little about “Dispatches” before I started reading it, just that it was included in the “Reporting Vietnam” volumes of the Library of America. By default, it had a good reputation. Reading, or rather listening to the audiobook, I fell in to the poetic writing, where I wanted to replay sentences to hear them again. I listened for the construction of the book, how it was put together, what rafters were used to carry the weight of the story. I was surprised in that the construction was not based on chronology, or location, but more on thoughts about everything experienced by the author mixed together – the places, the people, the events big and more commonly small and intimate. Herr put together the book as a series of themes, where the focus of the writing was different, and I found the occasional changes really helped keep attention high while telling the story in not-so-conventional way. As I continued in the book, I really felt the similarities to the movie Full Metal Jacket, and I wasn’t surprised after finishing that the book’s author worked on the screenplay to that movie. The movie made an impression on me. It came out when I was 24 and working for a defense contractor, and I saw it with a friend just a year off of his two year tour in the Army. That short peacetime tour had greatly changed my friend, and I wondered how the intensity of experience of war could change people, stretching and ripping. This book explains that.

I stopped at page 14. Just could not deal with stream of consciousness, cool, hip, groovy, hey man short dispatchy sentences writing style. One day I’ll try again.

What a cool, crazy guy this Herr character. What the f* were they thinking? But yes, it was all one big great adrenaline rush, a brush with death.

This book really (if I may judge) tells you 'what it was like'. New Journalism in late 60's Vietnam, here we go! (As I'm writing from my ivory tower in the Western World, where no radical change ever happens.) It's thrilling how the horror and gore gets put to the side, like they embraced those but also recognized how they obstruct a clearer view of the story at hand.

I read somewhere that not all of it mayhaps be non-fictional a hunnerd pur-cent, but who cares! If that makes the reading more enjoyable, it embellishes the book at the cost of truthful purity. Why would you not want that?

This is "Apocalypse Now" in book form, from the perspective of a friendo of that crazy journalist at the end. My only friend, the end.

Michael Herr's book Dispatches describes the author's experience as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. Dispatches allows the reader to understand the experiences of the soldiers in the Vietnam War. You as reader should experience the emotional side that a GI went through in this war.There was a lot of emotion described of the GI but the writing of it lacked cohesion. It had little structure and I felt disappointed. The first fifty pages are extremely hard to comprehend. There is a stream of information that comes across in bits and pieces of memories that are not sentences but rambling babble. For instance, page 44 "If milk snake could kill you,you might compare the mission and its arms to a big intertwined ball of baby milk snakes mostly they were there that innocent and about the conscious and a lot, one way or the other, had some satisfaction." Can anyone out there who read this book tell me what I have just read? Huh? It doesn't make sense. There are other numerous ramblings on in this book that make no sense at all either. Maybe this book would have a deeper meaning if your are a veteran of that war. It just seems Herr is writing in some drug induced dream. Reference to his own drug use and that of GIs are in this book. Maybe that was the intention of his writing to characterize Vietnam War as one unfocused mess. Thank you Vets that have served in Vietnam. I rather hear the story from you than this one.

Książka, która wciągnęła mnie bardzo szybko i pozwoliła na przyjrzenie się wojnie wietnamskiej z zupełnie innej perspektywy. Napisana bardzo sugestywnie, niemal się czuło zapach napalmu, palonej trawki, alkoholu i niemytych ciał. W uszach dźwięczy muzyka z tamtych lat - mocny Hendrix, odlotowy Zappa. No i ten język - niektórzy mogą uznać, że miejscami plugawy, ale... to przecież żołnierze i prawdziwa wojna. Dlatego chylę czoła przed tłumaczem (Krzysztof Majer) oraz redaktorem (Marcin Wróbel alias Marceli Szpak) - uważam, że doskonale oddali język oryginału.
Uprzedzam - to nie jest łatwa pozycja. I myślę, że warto tę książkę przeczytać dopiero wtedy, gdy ma się nieco pojęcia o samej wojnie w Wietnamie, bo "Depesze" nie są książką historyczną. Polecam ją każdemu, kto chce poznać ten mało znany kawałek dziejów ludzkości z pozycji okopu, schronu czy nawet plaży China Beach. Na hełmie żołnierza na okładce mamy hasło "War is hell" - ta książka jest jego doskonałym odzwierciedleniem, drążącym duszę czytelnika do bólu.

I read this book after my last Exam of the Spring semester of 1979 after having been urged to do so by a close friend for most of the previous three months.

Dispatches is a very good book about the terrible tragedy that the Vietnam War was for the young Americans who were serving there and about the muddled direction of the American war effort which made a North Vietnamese victory seem inevitable to anyone participating at the front on either side.

Disptaches was nothing less than sensational at the time it was released. It provided a picture of the Viet Nam war which had simply not appeared elsewhere previously in the English speaking world.

The other posted reviews speak eloquently for this book's greatest value; because of the accuracy of its descriptions and the compassion felt for the American soldiers, it managed to provide great comfort to those who lived through the experience.

Brilliant prose and incredible insights. Easy to see why it's considered one of the best war books ever written

I tend to like war novels, but have not read a great deal of nonfiction about any war. I went into this book knowing that a couple of Goodreads friends had rated it highly, so I was hopeful. And it was even better than expected. Five plus stars.

The Vietnam war has been written about extensively, and recently I have read a few fiction books set in the war. But, Michael Herr's Dispatches is by far the most intimate. It is a close, eloquent and meaningful picture of the war. I was a child during the era and had a mother who turned off the television when these images were broadcast, so I do not have any firsthand or secondhand knowledge of the war. I know only what I have seen in movies and read in books, and I felt like I had learned a lot. This book showed me the details. It showed me the men. It showed me the pain. I felt transported to the war, and I am grateful for his openness. Despite the fact that it is written in reflection, looking back on the war, the intensity is there.

Herr was a war correspondent working for Esquire magazine when he arrived in Vietnam in 1967, at the age of 27 (five years older than the average age of the men fighting in the war). He journeyed with the soldiers throughout the country. He talked with them, ate with them, and slept with them.
He was an observer. He left Vietnam in 1969 and began working on this book. He had a breakdown that kept him from his work for nearly 5 years, but eventually published the memoir in 1977. Herr died in 2016, and it seems as though he came to hate his celebrity. He left the war, but it does not to seem to have left him.

War is forever. This book should be required reading for all politicians.

Łooooooojajebe. Herr, Majer i Szpak wzięli szczotę ryżową i przeczesali mi mózg.

I honestly struggled with this book. At first I was enamored and consumed by the language and imagery Herr presented of his time as a correspondent in the Vietnam War, but the further I read the more alien I felt to what I was reading. As a non-American, the Vietnam War isn't a historical event I was ever taught about in school or university, and so my knowledge of it is sparse. I can't help but feel that if I'd known more about the war and events Herr was describing, I would have appreciated his insight more. But I just felt removed from it, and couldn't really get into the writing after a while. My favourite moments were when he discussed his colleagues though, because I felt like I was really getting to know the people and their own quirks and personalities. Anything about the troops themselves and their movements though left me cold.