Michael Herr, author of Dispatches has died. Vietnam era author changed how we view war [View all]

[cali]

This book had a big impact on me and on millions of others. RIP, and thanks Michael.

No one had a greater effect on how the Vietnam War has been processed in our popular consciousness than Michael Herr, best known as the writer of the book Dispatches and contributor to the screenplays of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, who died near his home in upstate New York this past Friday. He was 76.

When you go to war, as Herr did, you naturally imagine the possibility of your own death. I’ve thought about mine before, not in a grand way, but just as a sort of curiosity: What cemetery (Arlington National Cemetery, or a local place)? What headstone (standard white granite, or marble)? What internment ceremony (military honors, or nothing at all)? And I wonder if during his years covering Vietnam, and later when he wrote about it, if Herr gave much thought to questions of how he would be memorialized, if at all.

Herr took a circuitous route to his war. He attended Syracuse University—among his classmates was Joyce Carol Oates—and then dropped out to pursue a writing career and to vagabond through Europe like his idol Ernest Hemingway. He picked up some publishing credentials—New Leader and Holiday magazines—and then struck a deal with Harold Hayes, then the editor of Esquire, to write a monthly column from Vietnam. Herr stayed for eighteen months, embedding with U.S. troops before anyone knew what an embed was, and returning to write Dispatches while simultaneously suffering an emotional collapse.

The book was an instant success. Fame followed and, eventually, Herr turned his back to escape it, relocating to England for many years. Yet, his influence on our modern conception of war is inescapable. Decades after he finished writing on Vietnam, an entire generation marched off to war in Iraq and Afghanistan with images from his books and the two films to which he contributed flickering in their heads, snatches of his dialogue trigger-ready on their tongues.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/26/michael-herr-the-author-whose-words-shaped-how-we-saw-our-wars.html