It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones. As visitors to a place that could not be mapped (“for years now there had been no country here but the war”), Michael Herr’s readers must quickly acclimatise to the sur-real experience of Vietnam in 1967, as though they have no choice: there’s a war on. Only through this process is it possible to come near to understanding what actually happened in Vietnam. Imagine my surprise when I found it was the basis for not only Full Metal Jacket but also, to some degree, Apocalypse Now. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

Michael Herr was a correspondent for Esquire Magazine, covering the war from late 1967 to early 1969. Herr doesn't take a political position on this war; he assembles his stories of the individuals who are caught up in this trauma. He wore a gold earring and a headband torn from a piece of camouflage parachute material, and since nobody was about to tell him to get his hair cut it fell below his shoulders, covering a thick purple scar.

The topic I chose, "Asia Through Hollywood's Eyes," has exposed me to some wonderful films, a number of which I've reviewed on my blog or written about in my column for 3 Quarks Daily. It's more or less what you'd expect: a war correspondent travels all around Vietnam for what seems to be several years (I'm not sure how long Herr was actually there), talking to the foot soldiers and the officers and anybody else who's willing.

He hadn't been anything but tired and scared for six months and he'd lost a lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself.All or a portion of this article consists of text from Wikipedia, and is therefore Creative Commons Licensed under GFDL.

Work in a little commentary on The Good Earth's Depression-era message about the virtue of hard work on the land, illustrated with stills from the movie and comparing them to iconic photographs from the period. Herr is also skeptical of the war effort, and attempts to provide a humanizing face for the North Vietnamese Army. The book is noted for a visceral, literary style which distinguishes it from more mundane and accurate historical accounts. How many of us have actually used the word telegram in a sentence recently (unless we're historians)? Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war.However many times it happened, whether I’d known them or not, no matter what I’d felt about them or the way they’d died, their story was always there and it was always the same: it went, “Put yourself in my place. Herr hooked up with an English war photographer, Tim Page, and Errol Flynn’s son, Sean, who would later go missing on assignment, and went chopper-hopping round the war zone, taking huge risks, getting stranded in Khe Sanh in the winter of 1968 during its infamous siege (a brilliant set piece at the heart of Dispatches), surviving against the odds. Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so that his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?