Michael Herr
Born: 04-12-1940
Michael Herr was an influential American writer and journalist, best known for his vivid war reportage. His groundbreaking work "Dispatches" drew from his experiences as a correspondent during the Vietnam War, offering an unflinching view of combat. Herr's narrative style and immersive storytelling left a lasting impact on war literature. Beyond his own books, he contributed to the screenplays of iconic films like "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket."
Book summaries for books written by Michael Herr
Quotes
I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good.
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
It was a bad time. I was there, but I wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere but there.
The stars were dying in the sky, and on the ground my few remaining comrades were dying, too, it was very sad.
I think the human race is going to die, and I'm trying to cut down the body count.
The best part about knowing you're crazy is knowing you're not.
The first thing you learn in a war is that you don't want to be there.
In the end, you can't even really talk about it, because you can't explain it. You just know you don't want to ever go through it again.
There's no such thing as a war story. It's just what happens, and then what people say about it.
It was hard to be around people who didn't know what a monstrous thing had been done to them.
There were too many people in too small a space, and too much had happened to all of them.
You could laugh about it, but it wasn't funny, except that sometimes it was.