Michael Herr helped to write the voiceover narration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, pictured in this movie still, and also co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.
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, has died at the age of 76.
His death on June 23, in a hospital in Delhi, N.Y., after a lengthy illness, was confirmed by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which released Dispatches in 1977, two years after the U.S. military left Vietnam.
"Dispatches is one of the seminal works of the 20th century and the most brilliant treatment of war and men I have ever read," said Knopf chairman Sonny Mehta. "It is a work that secured Michael's legacy as one of our great writers of narrative nonfiction."
Taken from Mr. Herr's experiences during his stint as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine, Dispatches was published at a time when many veterans were reluctant to publicly reveal the horrors they experienced in Vietnam.
A native of Syracuse, N.Y., and graduate of Syracuse University, 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, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History and a handful of other 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," Mr. Leonard wrote.
The book's origins date to 1967 when Mr. Herr persuaded Esquire magazine editor Harold Hayes to let him travel to Vietnam and write a monthly column. He ended up staying more than a year, producing few columns at the time, but gathering the material for what became Dispatches, profane, impassioned and knowing reports that helped capture a generation's sense of outrage and disillusion.
"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 one chapter prefaced with lyrics from a Bob Dylan song.
"You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of these grunts would run around during a fight when they knew there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot for the networks."
While continuing to write for magazines after Dispatches, Mr. Herr also began a career in movies. He helped to write the voiceover narration for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Mr. Herr later wrote a book about Mr. Kubrick, one of the industry's most reclusive directors. His other books included Walter Winchell, a 1990 novel about the powerful and irascible gossip columnist.
He leaves his wife, Valerie; daughters Catherine and Claudia; and extended family.
With files from Reuters