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    Last dispatch

    Michael Herr has died.

    The Vietnam war produced so many books that "mattered", from Washington to Saigon, from David Halberstam to Tim O'Brien.

    It's hard to think of an equivalent list for Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that there haven't been some good ones, but they don't seem to have permeated popular culture in the same way. Perhaps because of the move from pages to images, but perhaps also because Vietnam was Crazy New Shit, whereas the wars in the Middle East have been Same Old Shit.

    Anyway, RIP.

    #2
    Last dispatch

    Very sad

    Dispatches remains an absolutely essential book

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      #3
      Last dispatch

      Dispatches along with HST's Hells Angels and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid... are really essential reading for anyone interested in literary non-fiction.

      I agree that I can't think of an equivalent for the lengthy wars in Iraq but most of that I'd put on me since I've been busy with other types of reading lately. I'm sure, though, that the mix of embedding, the length of the war, and the tentacles of this war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran) mean that something equally as engaging has been written. There was a great piece in the New Yorker maybe 10 years ago about the search for Osama's number two man. Of course, an article is not equal to a book.

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