Dispatches

‘The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time’ – John Le Carré

The groundbreaking work of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket.

Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but even more so in its honesty.

First published in 1977, Dispatches was a revolutionary piece of new journalism that evoked the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam which has forever shaped our understanding of the conflict.

Having read Dispatches, it is difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism, heroism and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear, war and death - William S. Burroughs

We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived - but Michael Herrs Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade - Hunter S. Thompson

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.