Apocalypse Now and Dispatches writer dies
MICHAEL HERR, whose non-fiction novel Dispatches exposed the ravages of the Vietnam War in the Seventies, has died in New York after a long illness. He was 76.
The Oscar nominee’s Vietnam War memoir, about his time working as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine in Vietnam between 1967 to 1969, is considered a literary classic.
Author John le Carré previously described the literary work as “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time”.
Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson also had high praise for the book. “We have all spent 10 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,” he said. Herr later became a Hollywood writer, lured to the movies by Francis Ford Coppola to work on Apocalypse Now, the director’s 1979 film about war and madness which was partly based on
Dispatches. Herr wrote the trance-like narration (voiced by Martin Sheen) and also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay to the 1987 film Full Metal
Jacket with director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford.
Published in 1977, almost a decade after his year-long sojourn in Vietnam and after he had recovered from depression brought on by his war experience, Dispatches was partly fictionalised, though its authenticity was regarded by critics as indisputable.
Herr’s daughter Claudia said that her father came to resent his celebrity, especially when reporters or television producers wanted him to relive his time in Vietnam. He gave few interviews. In the last years of his life, he became a serious devotee of Buddhism and no longer wrote.