Michael Herr

Even including O'Brien, Dispatches is still the most striking book on Nam I know of. It reads even stronger than it did nearly 30 years ago when it first came out. Herr catches the rush of detail, of tragedy that's too too too too too fast and thick to present as tragedy -- just pointless lethal ongoing murderous misery.

Herr is credited as a co-writer on the Apocalypse Now filmscript. My understanding is that John Milious wrote a script, Coppola made some changes, then shot a movie that was at least as much based on Heart of Darkness as his script. Apparently Herr wrote the VO narration spoken by Martin "Captain Willard" Sheen, apparently in a hotel in the Bay area sometime after most of the filming. However, there's no doubt that parts of Herr's book map to Coppola's movie too directly to be coincidental.

Herr lets one feel the soldiers' heroism without pretending that they're doing anything that makes sense or that they are not regularly committing atrocities -- torture, genocide, infanticide, you name it.

I wonder whether anyone has ever written anything like this for the Vietnamese. If so, I hope it gets translated.