Herr, Michael. Dispatches. 1977.

This staggeringly powerful book about war correspondent (of sorts) Michael Herr’s experiences in Vietnam reads like an endless breathless run-on sentence, a bottomless machine gun clip of jargon, jarring images, and irony so acute it is often oblique and insensible. It is not clear who, if anybody, this stream of writing is aimed at. It creates its own context. The book does not orient the reader to the war or provide an overview or much in the way of facts, and it is filled with references that must surely be hard to get, whether they are military terms, or war stories whose poignancy can only be understood by one who has been there: “Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.” It does not follow a noticeable chronology, and its thematic organization is not always intuitive. Dispatches is as much prose poetry as journalism or memoir, and the most beautiful and difficult book I have read on the Vietnam War since Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry collection Dien Cai Dau. If you want to know what it was like being in the Vietnam War, and if you are willing to accept that the answer is something that you cannot really understand, read this book.