The writing did not work for me. Too impressionistic, with too few specific details or actual elaborated stories. The constant generalities and second-person narration made the book feel nebulous instead of arrestingly concrete. Herr is obviously passionate, but I think there are better Vietnam memoirs.

Estaría entre 3,5 estrellas y 4, pero me he decantado por subirlo, por lo que cuenta y cómo lo cuenta.
Seamos sinceros este libro partía con una gran desventaja: hace poco volví a leer "Nada y así sea" de Oriana Fallaci, y no he podido evitar compararlos, entre otras cosas porque Herr y Fallaci estuvieron en Vietnam en la misma época: 1967 - 1968.
Ciertamente "Despachos de guerra" es un gran libro: estilísticamente me ha gustado mucho, Herr escribía realmente bien, y también me ha gustado dónde centraba el foco, a saber, en las experiencias (muchas veces aterradoras) de los soldados, en el infierno que pasaban. Y en otras ocasiones narraba anécdotas de los corresponsales de guerra, esos "locos" que odiaban las guerras, al mismo tiempo que las amaban.
Escrito unos 10 años después de su paso por Vietnam, es un libro muy cerebral, en ocasiones algo frío, escrito desde la distancia emocional, muy similar a la frialdad del objetivo de una cámara.
En definitiva, un libro más que recomendable, para todos aquellos interesados en esa horrible faceta de la historia reciente... ahora bien, si se trata de personas que, como yo, prefieren los libros más viscerales, recomiendo sin duda antes "Nada y así sea".

Sometimes it's not a bad thing to wait to read a book. I started having people urge me to read this one in, let's see, the summer of 1983, and it was only recently that I finally got around to it. I picked up a copy at the former Hanoi Hilton, where John McCain was held prisoner, now a museum, and read the first half on my way from Hanoi to Danang to Saigon (OK, Ho Chi Minh City). There is a fierce originality and honesty to the book, coupled with such intense subject matter, that made reading this a scalding experience, in a good way. I'm going to wait a month or two and read it again.

I've never read a better depiction of war, one that so made me feel it's terror and elation and insanity. Herr portrayed the fruitlessness of Nam and the strength of our every day marines and soldiers masterfully. For these reasons it wasn't an enjoyable book - but it was masterful

Terrible circumstances have been terrifically described.

I often find I learn a lot about geography and history through reading fiction, and though this book isn't fiction but a war correspondent's account of being in Vietnam in the late '60s, I hoped for the same here. My knowledge of the Vietnam war isn't good, and I hoped this book would remedy that. Unfortunately it's not an ideal first port of call, as it assumes a lot of prior knowledge that non-Americans may not possess, and was peppered with initials and acronyms but had no glossary or any other means of explanation. I connected with it only in patches - where the narrative occasionally narrowed its focus down to to a single person, and then it was possible to understand and to empathise, but these sections were relatively sparse. All in all I would concede it is fantastically well written, and worthy of more than the speed-reading I resorted to in the end.

the author devotes a significant chunk of his book to the horrendous battle of Khe Sanh during the Tet Offensive (1968). My brother in law was with the Marines in the middle of it. He had PTSD and died young.

Michael Herr captures the feelings, the violence, and the insanity of the late 1960s. In 1969 I went to college instead of Vietnam and I graduated the year it all came crashing down. A significant portion of my youth was spent trying to understand from journalism what was happening in Southeast Asia; only later would I realize that the understanding I sought was not and could not be available from file-at-five journalism. Herr was accredited to Esquire and was free of that pressure. He explains why he went to Vietnam: “Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you’ve never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did.”

Herr does a great job of capturing the brutal jargon of the U.S. Administration when it spoke of the war. Kill ratios, right there in the paper on the dining table (I saw this in high school). The press got the facts but it missed the story: “…most of what the [U.S.:] Mission wanted to say to the American public was a psychotic vaudeville…” Herr says a very profound thing that I believe is characteristic of journalism generally, and might be applicable to Afghanistan today: “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history.”

Herr’s profiles of his colleagues are worth reading. Dana Story, Tim Page, and Sean Flynn to mention a few.

Here he records the conversation of some airborne troops that had survived the high casualties of the Dak To operation, as they wait for airlift out:
“You guys are so full of shit it’s coming out of your fucking ears!” one man was saying. PRAY FOR WAR was written on the side of his helmet, and he was talking mostly to a man whose helmet name was SWINGING DICK. “You were pissing up everything but your fucking toenails, Scudo, don’t you tell me you weren’t scared man, don’t you fucking dare, ‘cause I was right fucking THERE man, and I was scared SHIT! I was scared every fucking minute, and I’m no different from anybody else!”
t“Well big deal, candy ass,” Swinging Dick said. “You were scared.”
t“Damn straight! Damn straight! You’re dam fucking straight I was scared! You’re about the dumbest motherfucker I ever met, Scudo, but you’re not that dumb…”
tHe started to get up but his knees gave under him. He made a quick grasping spasm out of control, like a misfire in the nervous system, and when he fell back he brought a stack of M-16’s with him. They made a sharp clatter and everyone jerked and twitched out of the way, looking at each other as though they couldn’t remember for a minute whether they needed to find cover or not…they were all laughing, and Pray For War was laughing harder than any of them, so hard that it filled suddenly with air and cracked over into high giggles. When he lifted his face again it was all tracked with tears.
t“You gonna stand there, asshole?” he said to Swinging Dick. “Or are you gonna help me up on my fucking feet?”
Swinging Dick reached down and grabbed his wrists, locking them and pulling him up slowly until their faces were a couple of inches apart. For a second it looked like they were going to kiss.
t“Looking good,” Pray For War said. “Mmmm, Scudo, you are really looking good, man. It don’t look to me like you were scared at all up there. You only look like about ten thousand miles of bad road.”



My aspirations for a military career died with the Cambodia invasion of ’70. Without setting foot in Vietnam an American could scarcely avoid some kind of impact in those years. The morally bankrupt venture poisoned every aspect of life. Michael Herr captures it better for me than anyone.
t

This book is very special. I wouldn't recommend it to any newbie as introduction to Vietnam War. It's raw, biased, consisting of handpicked mosaic of worst insanity. Herr doesn't care about analyses, he doesn't go to archives, he even admits that he doesn't give a fuck about politicians, diplomats, or other stakeholders – he can't even speak to them as they use “different language”. Also, the book almost completely avoid topic that mattered the most – ordinary Vietnamese, their faith, struggle, culture or history. Dispatches are solely limited to narrow view of the scared observer who experience brutality of war side by side with the ordinary soldiers – the “grunts”. And Herr excels in this role – he see things that others don't see, he is fascinated by morbid details that others would rather forget in order to keep sanity. What goes to Herr's credit is, that as a reporter, he is far from glorifying war reporters. He openly admits that “press corps in Vietnam was as diffuse and faceless as any army regiment” and that “some people thought we were nothing more than glorified war profiteers. And perhaps we were.” I can't assess if this is true, but I'm sure that from all books about Vietnam or war in general, the Dispatches are different, original and will always have special place in my library. A class for itself.

I've read this book six or seven times and it feels new every time. As good a book as any written about Vietnam, visceral, smart, hallucinatory, funny, drenched in rock and roll, and absolutely serious. Herr pretty much invented the writing style that defines the 60s to me--sort of like Dylan in prose. What makes it more than a tour-de-force is Herr's absolute clarity--Baldwinian--that death is at the center of it all and that the real American tragedy is our refusal to admit or deal with it.

Ojej, ale to jest dobre. Nie porównywałem wersji polskiej z oryginałem, ale polski przekład sam w sobie czyta się doskonale, w czym zasługa panów Majera i Szpaka.Jako tłumacz bardzo doceniam płynność tekstu, świetne oddanie mowy potocznej czy tak ważnych dla tego dzieła wulgaryzmów.
Wiem, że nie jest to reportaż, bo Herr dodał tu sporo rzeczy, które powstały w jego wyobraźni. Nie powstałyby jednak, gdyby sam nie przeżył wiele z tego, co opisywani żołnierze, bo koszmaru Wietnamu nie można sobie wyobrazić, jeśli ktoś nie znalazł się w samym jego środku.
A zarzuty, że treść jest poszatkowana i chaotyczna? Cóż, na wojnie daleko od ładu i porządku, więc i jej opis nie musi ich zawierać.