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Nearly fifty years after publication, Dispatches still reads like nothing else - not like history, not like journalism, not quite like a novel either. Michael Herr arrived in Vietnam in 1967 as a 27-year-old correspondent for Esquire, just before the Tet Offensive, and spent two years moving freely among the grunts at Khe Sanh, in Hue, along the DMZ. Freed from the daily filing demands of newspaper reporters and the newspeak of official briefings, he simply embedded himself with the men doing the fighting and absorbed everything: the firefights, the dull terror of waiting, the stoned thousand-yard stares, the gallows humour that in any other context would be monstrous. When he came home in 1969 he was too traumatised to write. It took years before he could process what he had seen, and what eventually emerged in 1977 was a book that has shaped the way we think about Vietnam more than any other.

The prose is the first thing that hits you. Herr writes with the ear of a musician and the eye of a painter, in long, looping, amphetamine-paced sentences that take on the force of poetry. The famous opening, in which he lies on his bed in Saigon staring at an obsolete map of Vietnam, announces immediately that this will not be conventional reportage - "conventional journalism could no more cover this war than conventional firepower could win it" is the book's organising conviction. What Herr offers instead is the war as sensation and psychology: the terrible glamour of combat, the seduction of adrenaline, the way the helicopter became "saver-destroyer, provider-waster." The book's deepest subject is not Vietnam's politics or tactics - readers looking for either should go elsewhere - but the dehumanising machinery of war and the gap between the official narrative and the reality on the ground.

What elevates Dispatches above the war reportage of its era is its attention to the ordinary soldier. The grunt - one of thousands, broadly undecorated and unclaimed - is almost always ignored by war writing, and Herr's sympathy for him never feels like a corrective gesture. It is born of genuine fascination, never patronising or tokenistic. His observation that it was never easy to guess the ages of Marines at Khe Sanh, since nothing like youth lasted in their faces for long, carries more weight than whole chapters of strategic analysis. Veterans of later wars have testified that no other writer has identified with such pithy precision the things found abundantly in war and nowhere else - the language, the humour, the absolute insanity.

Now for the complications, because there are real ones. Dispatches was published and received as a memoir, but it is not, strictly speaking, a factual record. Interviewees were tweaked or outright invented - the memorable Day Tripper appears to be a fabricated character - chronology is manipulated, and Herr himself later admitted he never thought of the book as journalism. His own conflicting statements over the decades only muddied the question of whether this is war reportage gone feral or a novel posing as journalism. It is fair to wonder whether the original reviewers would have been harsher had they known of the errors and inventions before filing their raves. Some readers will find this dishonest, and the objection deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away as a quibble about genre. The counter-argument - that the blurred line between fiction and reality defined not just New Journalism but the war itself, and that the fabrications serve a truth of mood and feeling that strict accuracy could not reach - is persuasive, but it asks you to accept the book on terms it never openly declared.

There are also more mundane obstacles. The book is, frankly, a hot mess in places: the chronology is unclear, the military jargon goes unexplained, and the fragmented, hallucinatory structure can feel exhausting. This is not an easy read or a quick one. Some readers struggle to finish it; others find the immediacy nearly unbearable, which may be the point.

And yet the achievement stands. Whether you file it under memoir, fiction, or some unstable compound of the two, Dispatches remains among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature, the book that gave Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket their voices and that opened the door to every interpretative war memoir since. Read it knowing what it is - a deft work of the imagination built on lived experience - and it will still put most of the genre in the shade.