Volume 24, Number 20 · December 8, 1977
Hurled into Vietnam
By Roger Sale
Dispatches
by Michael Herr
Knopf, 260 pp., $8.95
It is more than ten years since Lyndon Johnson told the Vietnamese he had American energy enough to move the New Deal from the Pedernales to the Mekong. Michael Herr, who, when he was himself essentially adolescent, wrote the sentence above, loves that energy, and wants Dispatches to be the Vietnam book that will light up the literature of war for something like a thousand years. Though more than half of his book was published between 1968 and 1970, Herr fussed and rewrote and added—this was to be the book about the war that no one else had written. The results are odd, painful, superb in many places, commonplace in many others.
Review, 1781 words
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