Michael Herr - Despachos

November 1967. At 27, Michael Herr landed in Saigon. "I went to cover the war, and the war covered me." A decade later, he published Dispatches, one of the most intense accounts of the Vietnam War, the conflict that shook the US to its foundations, marking the end of a certain innocence.

This book plunges us into episodes of extraordinary violence, and the reader feels spat into the heart of the turmoil, from Khe Sanh to the Mekong Delta, to the sound of Jimi Hendrix and the explosion of mortar shells.

A work received by the public as a genuine fresco of war, it coldly and lucidly portrays the most intimate impulses of the combatant. Relentless, Herr always tells us what we don't want to hear, confronts us with our ghosts, and leaves us breathless.

By exposing the absurd and monstrous dimension of the warmongering spirit, Dispatches exposes American incomprehension and resentment in the face of the unconquerable.