NEW YORK (AP) " 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 Thursday after a long illness. He was 76.
His death in an upstate New York hospital was confirmed by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which released "Dispatches" in 1977, two years after the U.S. left Vietnam.
A native of Syracuse, New York, with a knack for eavesdropping and a reverence for Ernest Hemingway, 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.
"If you think you don't want to read any more about Vietnam, you are wrong," critic John Leonard of The New York Times wrote when "Dispatches" came out.
"'Dispatches' is beyond politics, beyond rhetoric, beyond 'pacification' and body counts and the 'psychotic vaudeville' of Saigon press briefings. Its materials are fear and death, hallucination and the burning of souls. It is as if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder."