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Nornagest comments on October 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm just about done with Michael Herr's Dispatches, a war correspondent's view of Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive.
It's about the opposite of objective journalism: first-person, tightly focused, episodic, vividly emotional and impressionistic. And it does that very well. I'm getting the feeling that it might have been responsible for the particular shade of hellish Kafkaesque insanity that we associate with the Vietnam War after films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket; in fact several episodes and characters seem to have been composited into those movies. In a modern context, unfortunately, that strips the book of some of its potential impact; if you have a passing knowledge of Vietnam in modern pop culture, it's not going to be showing you much that you haven't already seen.
I'd recommend it if you liked Generation Kill but are too young to have seen the 80s wave of war movies, or for people that like emotional intensity in their journalism. If you're looking for a more historical or less conventional approach, though, this isn't the place to find it.
Speaking of Generation Kill, I recently got done reading One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the platoon commander featured in Generation Kill, which covered many of the same events, but with a somewhat different focus (Evan Wright's book aimed at representing the experiences of as many of the Marines he was embedded with as possible, were as Fick's book explicitly about his experiences in particular), as well as Fick's experiences at Officer School and in Afghanistan.
In general, Fick's book is more sympathetic to First Recon's leadership, and to its commander Lt. Col Ferrando in particular, saying that he suspected Ferrando of caring about his men much more than he lead them (and by extension Wright) to believe. On the other hand, Fick agrees with Wright that Bravo Company's commander, whom Wright identifies as Encino Man and Fick just calls "the captain" or "my CO", was dangerously incompetent. Fick also describes having a hostile relationship with the battalion's XO (who was only briefly mentioned in GK), and writes about imagining himself fragging the XO.
Overall, I thought it was engagingly written, and a good companion piece to Wright's book (and the HBO series).