So you get to see all sorts of coping mechanisms and rationalizations and characters, including several who'd go on, slightly modified, to be characters in Full Metal Jacket. This is not something that you can leave behind you when you leave the battlefield; like old age it seeps into you and refuses to go, reflecting your old skin and the thousand-yard stare from the bathroom mirror. Levels of information were levels of dread, once it's out it won't go back in, you can't just blink it away or run the film backward out of consciousness.

Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!

The fact that Herr lost friends not only in Vietnam - Sean Flynn, Errol Flynn's son being one of them, but also back home whilst he was still covering the war.

Within 18 months of coming home, he was in the midst of a near-disabling depression, and perhaps the writing of Dispatches became part of his route out of hell. Herr’s stories were not about heroes, they were about every guy – either good or bad – he met on his long way. Those with less power merely die; those with more power often die but all - those exercising power and those upon whom it is exercised - suffer a lifetime of an absence of recourse to power, a bodily reaction to coercion. While all the events of the novel are filtered through Herr, it is also important to note that they are not all factually correct.But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979 and Zia’s Pakistan, instead of becoming an international pariah, was embraced by the west as a bastion against communism. Maybe it was my twenties I was missing and not the Sixties, but I began missing them both before either had really been played out. Herr worked on the narration for the movie Apocalypse Now and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie Full Metal Jacket.

He wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar. When our cruise ship docks in Vietnam and I disembark in Danang, or Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I'll be seeing those places through my cousin Alan's eyes, thanks to Michael Herr.Guys stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics I read it to go along with Apocalypse Now; Herr worked on the screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola and the film conveys his vision as well as Joseph Conrad's (whom he references in Dispatches). Some people think 1963's a long time ago; when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty. Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1940, he began reporting from Vietnam for Esquire in the 1960s, during the height of the war.

And I appreciate his oblique criticisms of the powers that be--juxtaposing quotations from the General Staff and the G. How do you defeat an enemy whom you can't see and sometimes even recognize, and whom you keep shooting and killing, and who keeps coming back to kill you from underground tunnels, from bushes, from caves? I've often wondered what the rest of Herr's life was like, and why he published almost nothing else. Perhaps this is a national characteristic - to hide profound immorality behind a shield of up-beat concern: “It was a characteristic of a lot of Americans in Vietnam to have no idea of when they were being obscene. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans.The year had been so hot that I think it shorted out the decade, what followed was mutation, some kind of awful 1969-X. 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. Christophers, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends’ underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists.