Michael Herr, author who contributed to Vietnam films, dies

NEW YORK — Michael Herr, the author and Oscar-nominated screenplay writer who viscerally documented the ravages of the Vietnam War through his classic nonfiction novel “Dispatches” and through such films as “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket,” died after a long illness. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., with a knack for eavesdropping and a reverence for Ernest Hemingway, Mr. Herr was part of the New Journalism wave that included Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer and advocated applying literary style and techniques to traditional reporting. “Dispatches” is often ranked with Tim O’Brien’s novel “The Things They Carried,” Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” and Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History” as essential reading about the war. 'Dispatches’ is beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond ‘pacification’ and body counts and the ‘psychotic vaudeville’ of Saigon press briefings. Mr. Herr spent much of his 20s traveling and working for magazines before persuading Esquire magazine editor Harold Hayes, in 1967, to let him travel to Vietnam and write a monthly column. “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by 17 years of war movies before coming to Vietnam and getting wiped out for good,” he wrote in a chapter prefaced with lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. “The reception (for ‘Dispatches’) couldn’t have been better, frankly — it couldn’t have been more wonderful,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990, around the time he released “Walter Winchell,” a novel about the famous gossip columnist. Admirers of “Dispatches” included some prominent filmmakers, and Mr. Herr began a career in movies.