"Michael Herr" is an American writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches (book)/Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best "to have been written about the Vietnam War" by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le Carré called it "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Herr later was credited with pioneering the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.

From 1971 to 1975 he published nothing. Then, in 1977, he went on the road with rock & roller Ted Nugent and wrote about the experience in a 1978 cover story for Crawdaddy!/Crawdaddy magazine. Also in 1977, he published Dispatches, upon which his reputation mostly rests.

More Michael Herr on Wikipedia.

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.

God knows, it's all he ever talked about. It wasn't America he couldn't take. It was LA. The only other two places he knew of to make movies in were New York and London, and New York was too hard and too expensive.

I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.