An early and outstanding example of the New Journalism, Herr’s rendering of his experience as a Vietnam War correspondent was a critical success.[2][3][4][5]
Illumination Rounds was included in The Best American Essays of the Century (2000)[6] Though this non-fiction anthology generally omitted journalistic writings, editor Joyce Carol Oates made an exception for Herr’s piece.[7][8]
The title of the essay refers to mortar illumination devices used to expose enemy positions during night missions.[9]
Synopsis
Illumination rounds.
The essay—“a hybrid of memoir and fiction”—is written in a narrative form known as New Journalism.[10][11] The reportage comprises twenty vignettes or passages describing events Herr witnessed or recorded from informants during his deployment to Vietnam from November 1967 to 1969 as a war correspondent for Esquire. These vignettes are delineated by a double space and run from a few dozen to several hundred words in length.
Herr acknowledged that the material in Dispatches, including “Illuminations Rounds,” is a literary and journalistic amalgamation of his combat experiences: ““Everything in Dispatches happened for me, even if it didn't necessarily happen to me.”[12]
Herr uses military initialisms and acronyms for brevity: EM ( enlisted man, AVRN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), lz (landing zone), and LOH (light observation helicopter), etc.[13]
Critical assessment
“We were strapped into the seats of the Chinook, fifty of us, and something, someone was hitting it from the outside with an enormous hammer. How do they do that? I thought, we’re a thousand feet in the air!”[14]
In the Introduction to the 2009 Everyman Library edition of Dispatches (1977), Robert Stone recalls his first encounter with the work of fellow journalist Herr while covering the Vietnam War in Saigon in 1971:
That afternoon Judy Coburn, The Nation’s correspondent in Saigon, had given me a copy of the New American Review that contained a section of reportage by Michael Herr, who had come to Vietnam on assignment for Esquire magazine…[T}he passages of Herr’s work were entitled ‘‘Illumination Rounds.’’ The title itself seized the mind’s eye in a moment, moved a reader into a dark space inside himself where remembered parachute flares spread their whiter-than-white slow descending light and the red or green tracer rounds could suggest a celebration.[15]
↑ Stone, 2016: “What emerged in Dispatches was the transcendence of New Journalism in one of the greatest nonfiction works of its time.”
↑ McCrum, 2016: “[T]he definitive account of war in our time, especially the Vietnam war…”
↑ Page, 2016: The narratives “heralded” when they first appeared in Esquire.
↑ Gross, 2016: “[H]ailed as one of the most important books about the war describing the experiences of disillusioned young American soldiers there.” Feliks, 2016: “Herr’s work in Dispatches has been heralded by critics as one of the greatest pieces of writing about the savagery of war.”
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