Michael Herr, who has died aged 76, was the author of Dispatches (1977), by wide consent the best book about the Vietnam war, described by no less a critic than John Le Carré as “the best book ever written about men at war in our time”. Herr also made vital contributions to two of the best films on the war, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.
It took Herr eight years to write Dispatches, in part because he went home from Saigon with a bad case of what might now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. He had gone to Vietnam as a correspondent, incongruously, for Esquire magazine. An American general asked him whether he was there to write about military fashion, and another whether he was there to write humour. No, he told them. He wrote little for Esquire, but took advantage of the US government’s decision to allow correspondents extraordinary access – they could catch military helicopters, Herr said, like taxis – to go to war with the grunts. He shared their discomforts and their fears, witnessed their death and mutilation and recorded their language.
His own language, a stream of consciousness pulsing with energy, but masterfully controlled, captured the fear and the horror, but also the excitement, of the war in the jungle and paddy fields. “So much beauty”, he recalled, “and so much pleasure”. He recorded with a connoisseur’s expertise such details as the many ways in which soldiers would wish each other good luck, and the degrees of madness that were deemed acceptable – and those, such as booby-trapping the latrines with a powerful explosive, that were not.
He identified with the young Marines – at 27 he was older than most of them – and learned in the first few days that you could not affect neutrality. “If you are neutral,” he said, “you don’t get it.” He generally did not carry a weapon, though on occasion he did fire at Vietnamese in emergencies. The young grunts, he said, “are my guns”.
The power of the book, perhaps, comes from Herr’s insistence on describing the war, or more precisely his own responses to it, rather than protesting against it. It also comes from the ceaseless accompaniment of two elements, drugs and music – more particularly rock music, and especially the music of Jimi Hendrix. Herr himself spent drug-fuelled weekends in a flat in Saigon, staring at an ancient French map of Indochina, and he never caught a helicopter without a Hendrix cassette.
He met soldiers with a left pocket full of Dexedrine, the “upper” officially administered by the army to get them into battle, and a right pocket full of “downers” to get them through it. Dispatches did not come out until 1977, when the country was beginning to have its mind on other problems, but it did more, perhaps, than any other book to freeze an image of despair and a sense of waste about the war, rather as the trench poets of 1914-18 did in Britain.
Herr also made vital contributions to two of the most influential Vietnam films. He wrote Martin Sheen’s voiceover for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and later wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. His work, in the book and the two films, has been seen as part of the process whereby the US came to see itself and its history no longer merely through traditional literature, but in sounds and images, in ways that prefigured the internet.
He also contributed to the New Journalism genre, in which the writer became part of the story. He found the instant celebrity that greeted its publication in 1977 almost as hard to take as a bombardment in Khe Sanh. Quiet and intense, he experienced what he called “deep paralysis”, which he dealt with in part by affecting to have lost interest in Vietnam. At one point his wife, Valerie, whom he married the year Dispatches came out, left him for a year, then returned.
In 1980 Herr moved to London, where he stayed until he moved back to the US in 1991. It was there that he met Stanley Kubrick, who became a close friend, though Herr counselled against doing business with him. Herr wrote Kubrick’s biography, but he wrote surprisingly little else after Dispatches – Walter Winchell: A Novel and a nonfiction book about Hollywood.
Herr was born to Jewish parents in Lexington, Kentucky, where his father was a jeweller. The family moved to Syracuse in upstate New York, where Herr attended high school and Syracuse University. After dropping out of university he travelled in Europe, working as a magazine writer, focusing on film and music. He had, by his own account, a “Hemingway complex”, and persuaded his friend, Harold Hayes then editor of Esquire, to send him to Vietnam, though the magazine did not expect or demand much from him. He was repelled by what he called the “horrible glamour value” Dispatches had won for him in New York City. After he returned from London he lived in Delhi, New York.
Herr is survived by Valerie and by two daughters.
• Michael David Herr, writer, born 13 April 1940; died 23 June 2016
