Illumination Rounds is an essay by journalist Michael Herr originally appearing in New American Review #7, 1969, and first collected in Dispatches (1977) by Alfred A. Knopf.
An early and outstanding example of the New Journalism, HerrâÂÂs rendering of his experience as a Vietnam War correspondent was a critical success.
Illumination Rounds was included in The Best American Essays of the Century (2000) Though this non-fiction anthology generally omitted journalistic writings, editor Joyce Carol Oates made an exception for HerrâÂÂs piece.
The title of the essay refers to mortar illumination devices used to expose enemy positions during night missions.
The essayâÂÂâÂÂa hybrid of memoir and fictionâÂÂâÂÂis written in a narrative form known as New Journalism. 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 âÂÂIlluminations Rounds,â is a literary and journalistic amalgamation of his combat experiences: âÂÂâÂÂEverything in Dispatches happened for me, even if it didn't necessarily happen to me.âÂÂ
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.
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:
he passages of HerrâÂÂs work were entitled âÂÂâÂÂIllumination Rounds.âÂÂâ The title itself seized the mindâÂÂs 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.