Dispatches
The definitive account of the Vietnam War, written in hallucinatory present tense that matches the psychedelic horror of the war itself. Herr was a correspondent who embedded with soldiers and wrote what he saw without any pretense of objectivity. Influenced Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket (Herr co-wrote the narration).
The intensity fans love reads to detractors as “glib, self-important and embarrassing in that desperate-to-be-cool kind of way,” Herr's own persona crowding out the war, with similes ornate enough to obscure what they describe, “Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar.” The fragmentation genuinely loses some readers, “an extremely difficult novel to get traction on.” Herr's own line, “Everything in Dispatches happened for me, even if it didn't necessarily happen to me,” concedes the composite characters and reconstructed dialogue sold as reportage, which colors trust in the account. And assembled from magazine dispatches, it reads episodic past two hundred pages.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
