His masterpiece, Dispatches, has been out of fashion for a while, but when it was published in 1977, it was widely regarded as the seminal work of new journalism about the Vietnam War. Today, aside perhaps from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it is the seminal work about the war, full stop.

We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.” A cominciare dall’assoluta consapevolezza che nessuno sa contro chi e per cosa sta combattendo, dalla completa coscienza che sia tutto inutile e folle. Jeffrey Keeten before he is to shipped out for...oh wait...damn I always get us mixed up. This is Sean Flynn, actor and soon to be war correspondent. The soldiers could not take their eyes of off him either out of repressed homosexual tendencies or because he looks so familiar. Corrispondente di guerra per Esquire al seguito delle truppe americane durante la guerra in Vietnam, Michael Herr racconta in questo libro dalle dimensioni tutto sommato contenute (poco più di 250 pagine) ciò che ha visto, che ha condiviso, che ha provato in un anno e mezzo trascorso al fronte (dal 1967 al 1969).

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the writing is glib, self-important and embarrassing in that desperate-to-be-cool kind of way, which gets in the way of what is ostensibly the *actual* subject - the vietnam war. instead, it seems that the vietnam war was merely a canvas for the real subject of the book, his own writing, which is unfortunately completely insufferable. I haven't. I've called the local police before, and I've heard the employees who handle the communication between citizens and the police refer to themselves as “dispatch operators,” and I've heard them say “I'll dispatch an officer to your location,” but I can't think of any other use I've encountered in my own life. 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. When I think of this word, I can't help but picture someone typing out a telegram to someone: “Heavy casualties. Need more young bodies. Stop.”

I went through that thing a number of times and only got a fast return on my fear once, a too classic hot landing with the heat coming from the trees about 300 yards away, sweeping machine-gun fire that sent men head down into swampy water, running on their hands and knees towards the grass where it wasn’t blown flat by the rotor blades, not much to be running for but better than nothing.” Three to compare It all happened so fast, as they say, as everyone who has ever been through it has always said; we were sitting around listening to what we thought were Tet fireworks coming from the town, and then coming closer until we weren't stoned anymore, until the whole night had passed and I was looking at the empty clips around my feet...telling myself that there would never be any way to know for sure. I couldn't remember ever feeling so tired, so changed, so happy.

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How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?” After the publication of Dispatches in 1977, Herr worked on the legendary film Apocalypse Nowin 1979. Both the film and novel offer a unique and valuable portrayal of the Vietnam War that differs greatly from traditional accounts. For these contributions, Dispatches remains an essential work of the Vietnam era. Update this section! 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.

Dispatches study guide contains a biography of Michael Herr, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Mostly what you had was on the agitated side of half-sleep, you thought you were sleeping but you were really just waiting.” Dispatches is a New Journalism book by Michael Herr that describes the author's experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the first pieces of American literature that allowed Americans to understand the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War. At a time when many veterans would say little about their experiences during the war, Dispatches allowed for an experience and understanding of the war like no other source to date. The book is noted for a visceral, literary style which distinguishes it from more mundane and accurate historical accounts. Dispatches essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Dispatches by Michael Herr. 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:As a former military member, I feel that he strikes a perfect balance in his depiction of soldiers, a fine line between respect and obsequiousness, of bashing the grunts and cheerleading for them. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk that few war reporters achieve, most don’t even try. Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. Evil is not an absence of the good as proposed by theologians. It is a positive force precisely proportionate to the coercive technological power employed. Power kills people; people don’t kill people; technology does. War is unlimited power; or power limited only by the technology available but certainly not by morality, that is to say, people. Herr saw this at close quarters: “Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” No one who had power understood that the technological machine was impotent to achieve anything other than coercion and its logical extreme, death: “They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.” All or a portion of this article consists of text from Wikipedia, and is therefore Creative Commons Licensed under GFDL.