'The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time' - John Le Carré The groundbreaking
work of journalism which inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket
. Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire . He returned to tell the
real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality cutting to the quick of the conflict
and its seductive devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is
haunting in its violence but even more so in its honesty. First published in 1977 Dispatches
was a revolutionary piece of new journalism that evoked the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam
which has forever shaped our understanding of the conflict. 'Having read Dispatches it is
difficult to convey the impact of total experience as all the facades of patriotism heroism
and the whole colossal fraud of American intervention fall away to the bare bones of fear war
and death' - William S. Burroughs 'We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened
to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived - but Michael Herr's Dispatches
puts all the rest of us in the shade' - Hunter S. Thompson Part of the Picador Collection a
series showcasing the best of modern literature.
