Michael Herr, whose 1977 book Dispatches was "a glaringly intense, personal account of being a correspondent in Vietnam that is widely viewed as one of the most visceral and persuasive depictions of the unearthly experience of war," died June 23, the New York Times reported. He was 76. Herr also contributed the narration to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and with the director Stanley Kubrick and Gustav Hasford wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, adapted from Hasford's novel The Short-Timers. Herr's memoir Kubrick chronicles his long friendship and collaboration with the filmmaker.
Novelist Richard Ford, who was a friend of Herr, said Dispatches "gave an emotional, verbal and aural account of the war for a whole generation--of which I am a member--particularly for those who didn't go. His nose was right in the middle of it, and he wrote exactly what it was like to be in that place and to be that young."
Claudia Herr, an editor at Penguin Random House, said that although her father was extremely proud of Dispatches, "he came to resent his celebrity, especially when reporters or television producers wanted him to relive his time in Vietnam," the Times wrote. "Among other things, a retrospective light shining on him struck him as disrespectful to the men he wrote about. He gave few interviews. In the last years of his life, he became a serious devotee of Buddhism and no longer wrote, his daughter said."