Declan Walsh begins his captivating new book on Pakistan with an account of how he came to leave the country for the first time, abruptly and involuntarily in May 2013. “The angels came to spirit me away,” is the way he puts it, using the Urdu slang for the all-powerful men of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), whose presence is felt, even when not seen, throughout The Nine Lives of Pakistan.

Besides his uncommonly good ear for reporting what others said, he was also a master of creating his own language. After the first tour, I’d have the goddamndest nightmares. You know, the works. Bloody stuff, bad fights, guys dying, me dying...I thought they were the worst,” he said, “But I sort of miss them now.” A man cleans portrait of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in Karachi. Photograph: Rehan Khan/EPASean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.” But 18 months after his return, he suffered a nervous breakdown and wrote nothing for five years. The book ultimately arrived in 1977, and Hunter S. Thompson’s reaction is as accurate as any: "We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived," he wrote, "but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade."

A minor quibble - I wish that Herr (or his editor) would state the full term for each initialism and definition for each slang word the first time it is used or at least provide a glossary. The writing is uneven. In some places it is impressive, even poetic. Herr's description of a helicopter: Ma qui non si parla unicamente della guerra in Vietnam: si parla della Guerra, di tutte le guerre, anche quelle venute dopo. Some of Herr’s best and most quotable passages read like hallucinations, and some simply are just that: descriptions of being stoned on the front line, like a character in Apocalypse Now, a film classic whose script Herr also contributed to: Herr was a correspondent for the Esquire magazine, who arrived in Vietnam in 1967, when he was just 27 years old - just before the Tet Offensive, one of the largest assault campaigns of the North Vietnamese army against targets in the South. Herr mingled freely with the soldiers, journeying with them, talking with them, observing them; he left Vietnam and returned to his home in New York in 1969, and spent the next 18 months working on Dispatches, his memoir from the war. However, the war caught up with him: he experienced a breakdown and could not write anything between 1971 and 1975. Herr eventually recovered and finished the book, which was published in 1977 - two years after the fall of Saigon, long after the United States army and personel withdrew from the country.We're introduced to “The Roach,” a stoned brother from somewhere in your worst nightmare who is called in to silence a screaming VC out on the wire with his custom-cut grenade launcher. Despite the unfairness of all wars, each war is qualitatively different. This one changed an entire country, the one with the most power. Nothing, everyone learned, could be trusted: from government, from media, from experts, from one’s neighbor. The military was the exception because it could be trusted for consistent incompetence and deceit: “...the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.” This was a new, highly infectious disease that evolved in the jungles and rice fields and was imported in a dormant state on the flights home: “A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before.” This was the war from which that country has never recovered, and perhaps never will. It sanctioned death as unimportant by turning it into a measure of progress: “... they talked as though killing a man was nothing more than depriving him of his vigour.” And for those leaders not at the far ends of power but at its source, power became an idol demanding sacred acts through which they would achieve salvation: “They believed that God was going to thank them for it.” 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.

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! The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists.

But what a story he told me, as one-pointed and resonant as any war story I ever heard, it took me a year to understand it: The upshot was a book, published in 1977, which every journalist and writer – from John le Carré to Robert Stone – who had ever been in a war zone wished they’d written. Comparisons were made with books like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, but this was different: it was by a writer not a soldier, and it was the writer’s sensibility that made his book captivate a whole generation of readers. Another celebrated New Journalist, Hunter S Thompson, spoke for the profession when he said: “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts the rest of us in the shade.” 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.

In the closing chapter, “Colleagues”, Herr describes not only the reporters he knew personally but also the (American) press coverage of the war generally, and he does not mince words. At one point he delivers such a series of well-turned punches (the likes of which I have not encountered since Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Orwell’s “On Politics and the English Language”) that I found myself drawing multiple stars in the margin. He achieves this level of painfully sharp observation many times throughout the book by switching between his time spent with the grunts in the DMZ and elsewhere and his time spent with the Mission administration and their agents in Saigon. 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. It describes the world precisely, but it does not describe it easily. Dispatches leaves you with a keener sense of what happened to Herr and to the soldiers around him, but with this clarity comes a messy, difficult uncertainty, too. We’ve seen this world now. What do we make of it? 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.Whoa. That brings up two more words. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)? John le Carré called Dispatches "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." [1] It was featured in the journalism section of The Guardian 's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011. [2] John le Carré described Dispatches as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time" and it featured in the journalism section of The Guardian's 100 greatest non-fiction book list in 2011. [1] In screenplays [ ]