‘The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time’ – John Le Carré

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.

A groundbreaking piece of journalism, part of the Picador Collection, which inspired Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.

"In the great line of Crane, Orwell and Hemingway . . . he seems to have brought to this book the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, Frank Zappa and Francis Bacon" - Washington Post