Dispatches

Herr went to Vietnam as a correspondent and came back with the most formally radical piece of war journalism ever written — not objective reportage but a first-person psychological descent into what the war was actually doing to the people fighting it and the people watching it from home. The prose is rock and roll: fragmented, hallucinatory, built from the rhythms of the soldiers' speech and the war's own logic rather than the conventions of journalism. He refused the official narrative entirely — not the facts of battles but the texture of what it felt like to be inside them, what the war was doing to minds, what America was doing to itself by fighting it this way. He later helped write Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, which tells you something about where the culture's most honest accounts of Vietnam ended up living. The most important American war book on this shelf and the one that most completely refuses to let the reader consume the war from a comfortable distance. Also the book that gives the P&P Dispatches collection its deepest meaning — reports filed from inside a place before it became legible or marketable to outsiders, in the only language adequate to what was actually happening.