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Michael Herr's Dispatches has, more than any other book, shaped the way we think about the Vietnam War

July 02, 2025

When Michael Herr came home from Vietnam in 1969, he was too traumatised to write. That’s a problem for any author, but especially for one intending to publish a book based on what he saw covering the Vietnam War as a correspondent for Esquire. Stricken by horror and guilt at what he had witnessed, it would be several years before Herr began to process his feelings about a conflict that seemed to defy logic.

But when Herr eventually reimmersed himself in Vietnam, he emerged with a masterpiece. Dispatches, first published in 1977, is the great study of the conflict in Vietnam and its impact on combat soldiers – and the American psyche – as well as one of the world’s finest books about war.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Dispatches was published by Folio in an illustrated edition for the first time, with Herr’s prose complemented by the visceral yet humane photography of British war photographer Tim Page. The edition comes with an exclusive introduction by Frances FitzGerald, one of the few female journalists in Vietnam to cover the war at the time. She won a Pulitzer for her 1972 book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.

‘Just like Michael Herr, so many people came back with PTSD because of what they saw in Vietnam,’ says Frances from her home in New York where she still writes daily. ‘It was utter shock at the carnage they saw going on around them. Some books attempted to address that in a serious fashion and Dispatches is one of them. It’s about his own experiences and how the war affects individuals and societies – but it’s also very funny. I don’t know anybody who accomplished that combination other than Joseph Heller with Catch-22.’

After publishing Fire in the Lake, Frances – like Herr – needed to escape Vietnam and anything that could remind her of the trauma of an ugly war. She knew Dispatches had gained a reputation as a searing piece of reportage but feared she’d find a macho narrative that failed to explore the messy reality.

She was instead amazed at the power and humanity of Herr’s prose, particularly his ability to capture the way the soldiers in Vietnam articulated what they experienced. ‘It’s the language,’ she says. ‘Especially the language used by the Marines, or the “grunts”. I heard that language myself and he really captured it. It’s marvellous, it’s funny, it’s extraordinary.’

Herr’s mesmerising voice captured the experience of the soldiers – the humour, madness and drugs – and has informed the way that the Vietnam War is seen today: a drug-filled, psychologically messy and logic-defying conflict. Following the success of Dispatches, he was asked by Francis Ford Coppola to write the narration in Apocalypse Now and he later collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Full Metal Jacket. Both these epics reflect the sort of war photography captured by Tim Page, who took advantage of the military confusion to get up close and personal, recording astonishing photographs of US Marines in Vietnam.

‘It captures the soldiers' experience: the humour, the madness and drugs’

Page was a daredevil and was wounded several times – at one point he was even declared dead. Like his friend Herr, he flew to the front line alongside the troops dropping into fire zones on helicopters. Page was one of the inspirations for Dennis Hopper’s unstable photographer in Apocalypse Now, and memorably pops up in the pages of Dispatches.

‘He took some amazing photographs, in part because photographers had a lot of freedom,’ says Frances. ‘That was also true for writers. In Vietnam, journalists could get right up close to the conflict, something that never happened in a modern war like Iraq, where the military had much more control and would only take them to places that were safe.’

Since Herr died in 2016 and Page in 2022, Folio has wanted to bring the pair together in an illustrated edition for some time. ‘The 50th anniversary of the end of the war seemed the ideal moment,’ explains Mandy Kirkby, Folio’s Non-Fiction Publisher. ‘We looked at some of the other great Vietnam War photographers but kept coming back to Tim Page because his work seems to match Herr’s book really well. Herr even writes about Page in the book, so we are able to bring these two great figures from the war together in one volume.’

Dispatches is not a narrative of the war as much as a series of scattered memories covering a period of around 18 months. Herr arrived in Vietnam just before the Tet Offensive of January 1968 and was present at bloody encounters such as the battle to retake the old city of Hue. He was also there at the siege of Khe Sanh, a classic Vietnam War battle in that the territory was fiercely defended by Marines who were told it was essential – before it was abruptly abandoned after hundreds of Marines had died. Herr makes little attempt to place these in any overall military or historical context, because one of the themes of the book is how the dreams and ambitions of the generals were constantly being undermined and reshaped by the brutal truth of battle.

Scornful of official briefings, Herr instead dug in alongside soldiers, often to the astonishment of Marines who did not understand why anybody would willingly place themselves in such danger. At times, he was even handed a rifle and forced to defend himself. ‘I only had to use a weapon twice,’ he once said. ‘And I had to, I had to. It was impossible not to.’

Even in the midst of death, Herr writes compellingly about the adrenalising appeal of war. This includes soldiers who cannot wait to get away, yet somehow keep on signing up for another tour, incapable of escape, scared of how they will be perceived back home and unwilling to leave behind their colleagues. It’s something Frances understands all too well. ‘You feel that nobody will ever understand you because it’s very hard to articulate what it was like,’ she says.

Dispatches was influenced by the 60s writing style known as ‘gonzo journalism’, as pioneered by leading writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, which introduced elements from fiction into non-fiction, and rejected the traditional dispassionate voice of journalism as a lie. Immersed in the blood of battle, Herr’s swirling, impressionistic sentences become the ideal form for conveying the head-spinning, psychedelic chaos of Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, Hunter S. Thompson himself was a huge fan of Dispatches.

‘There were unique elements about Vietnam, in that the Americans really did not understand the other side at all,’ says Frances. ‘It wasn’t just about the difference in language, it was that they couldn’t understand why the Vietnamese were fighting and they couldn’t really understand why they themselves were fighting. It’s tough to read about war – any war – but I think it’s essential. There are wars going on across the world today and it’s important that people see how terrifying and awful the whole thing really is.’