Michael Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire Magazine from 1967-1969. I pulled up a list of journalists that were killed during the Vietnam Conflict. The list has almost 70 names including Australians, Japanese, South Vietnamese, French and Americans. The list also shows how they died and they died the same way that combat soldiers died. They were captured and executed. They were blown apart by Bouncing Bettys, claymores, and mortar fire. They were shot by friendly fire. They crashed in helicopters and planes. Two of Herr’s best friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, were captured while riding their motorcycles down Highway One by the Khmer Rouge. They were believed to have been executed a few months later, but their bodies were never found. If the name Flynn conjures up images of Captain Blood there is a good reason for that. He was the son of Errol Flynn. After publishing Dispatches, Herr disclosed that parts of the book were invented, and that it would be better for it not to be regarded as journalism. In a 1990 interview with Los Angeles Times, he admitted that the characters Day Tripper and Mayhew in the book are "totally fictional characters" and went on to say:

Herr was credited in the film for writing the narration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1997 film The Rainmaker.

Abstract

HERR: Normally, I got as close to the ground as I possibly could with my head down. There were one or two occasions where there was no choice but to take a weapon. Made me curious about the spectral kingdoms and extinguished dynasties of pre-colonial Vietnam, the spooky historical geography which haunts Herr from under the French place names and American grids. Contemplating an unreal old map in his Saigon apartment, Herr knows “that for years now there had been no country here but the war”: HERR: It led me into a kind of a protracted state of breakdown where I was required to rummage through these various pieces and determine for myself what I believed and what I didn't believe. You know, that the after effects of that kind of behavior are not particularly healthy or wholesome or conducive to making good art. After the Khe Sanh chapter, it loses a bit of air. The sketches become shorter, sketchier, though still powerful. Herr befriended the son of actor Errol Flynn -- Sean Flynn, who finally went missing on a bike ride into Cambodia in 70. Death, meet wish. And I hear that Herr himself is now a Buddhist monk in the Himalayas or something. That's a lot of meditation, cleaning all this off. A lifetime. Michael Herr left us one of the best accounts of men at war in his book, “Dispatches.” A reporter, he had gone to Vietnam to find a story, but had found something else that would hound him for the rest of his life.

In "Breathing In," the first chapter, Herr counterpoints the relentless mobility of a chopper-driven war, where he first absorbs the gruesome extraction of the dead from the combat-zone, with completely stoned periods in Saigon, where no one's drug of choice ever seems to be in short supply. Photojournalists Sean Flynn and Dana Stone are his fearless comrades on many of these early excursions. General William Westmoreland devised a plan to draw enemy combatants to the Americans. He built a base at Khe Sanh that was close enough to Laos that patrols could harass the enemy there and it was located far enough north that the NVA would be forced to engage. The Battle lasted five months and the whole time the Marines were under a constant barrage of enemy fire. This base made Herr think about the jar in a Wallace Steven’s poem.GROSS: You said that when you went to Vietnam, you were on a different frequency from the rest of the journalists who were there. What were you looking for that was different from what they were looking for? I’m sure there are other reasons for finding temporary peace in a book about perpetual war, but I’m no psychologist so I’ll just leave it there. Maybe the lesson is that experience can't always be sought out, utilized, and then walked away from. But what choice did Herr have, and what choice do any of us have? Because maybe we are just dancers, too. HERR: Well, what I like to think of is the long view, you know. I mean, I was looking for internal voices. I was looking for - I wasn't there for news stories, to write the war story, to write about the day-to-day current events of the war. I was there to write the sort of - the formal story of the war.

I don't think it's any secret that there is talk in the book that's invented. But it's invented out of that voice that I heard so often and that made such penetration into my head.... I don't really want to go into that no-man's-land about what really happened and what didn't happen and where you draw the line. Everything in Dispatches happened for me, even if it didn't necessarily happen to me. [4] Adaptation [ edit ] We should hang this up,” I said to our dog. My wife was asleep and would’ve disapproved, both of the map-hanging and the dog-talking. “It’d be good at parties.” Splendid . . . he brings alive the terror of combat in a way that rivals All Quiet on the Western Front A light, warm breeze blows into his face and Michael Herr, master of war journalism, pulls down the peak of his baseball cap. It's not just that those who line up to praise his book, Dispatches , above all others include John le Carré, William Burroughs and Tom Wolfe, it is that he invented a genre, a new way of writing about war, the cruelty of war, the pity of war and the savage, hollow laugh of the warrior.

Take the glamour out of war! I mean, how the bloody hell can you do _that_? Go and take the glamour out of a Huey, go take the glamour out of a Sheridan...Can _you_ take the glamour out of a Cobra, or getting stoned at China Beach? It's like taking the glamour out of an M-79, taking the glamour out of Flynn." He pointed to a picture he'd taken, Flynn laughing maniacally ("We're winning," he'd said), triumphantly. "Nothing the matter with _that_ boy, is there? Would you let your daughter marry that man? Ohhhh, war is _good_ for you, you can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." He was really speechless, working his hands up and down to emphasize the sheer insanity of it.