“What They Understood And Their Leaders Refused To Acknowledge Was That Battles And ‘Victories’ Didn’t Add Up To Anything. The Number Of Communist Dead Meant Nothing, Changed Nothing”
“There Is A Point Of View That Says That The United States Got Involved In The Vietnam War, Commitments And Interests Aside, Simply Because We Thought It Would Be Easy”
Michael Herr, who wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into what many people consider the best account of the war to date, when published in 1977. He captured the feel of the war and how it differed from any theater of combat ever fought, as well as the flavor of the time and the essence of the people who were there. Since Dispatches was published, other excellent books have appeared on the war--may we suggest The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam--but Herr's book was the first to hit the target head-on and remains a classic.
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