Michael Herr's account of his time as a war correspondent in Vietnam created a new form of war writing—subjective, hallucinatory, attuned to rock music and drugs and the particular madness of that conflict. Herr spent months with troops in the field, absorbed their slang and their terror, and returned to spend years processing what he had witnessed into prose that captures the war's surreal intensity. The book eschews conventional narrative for fragments: portraits of Marines at Khe Sanh, helicopter rides into hot landing zones, the strange seductions of combat, the guilt of surviving when others didn't. Herr's sentences pile clause upon clause, mimicking the overwhelming sensory experience of the war zone. His insights into the war's absurdity—the body counts that measured nothing, the search-and-destroy missions that destroyed only American boys—anticipated later revelations about official mendacity. But Herr resists both jingoism and simple antiwar positions; his subjects are complicated men who did terrible things for complicated reasons. The book influenced Vietnam films—Herr co-wrote Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket—and established a style of war writing that acknowledges the writer's own psychological transformation. Readers seeking to understand what Vietnam felt like to those who fought it, or how one of the twentieth century's finest prose stylists turned experience into art, will find both here. This remains the essential literary document of the Vietnam War.