Michael Herr, the war correspondent’s war correspondent, died today. It could fairly be said that he and David Halberstam were the joint Boswells of America’s ill-fated nosedive in Southeast Asia. But as the English would say, Vietnam had provided both men with a “good war.” David won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting for The New York Times and then went on to write The Best and the Brightest, the defining book about the front- and back-of-the-house drama of the conflict. Michael wrote just one book about the war, but it was a doozy. You don’t need me to tell you that Dispatches, his visceral collection of reports written when he was in his twenties for Esquire, was the seminal book of the war.

Michael didn’t write a ton after that, but when he did it was always choice cut. One of his books, The Big Room, about Las Vegas, was thin but epic. Another was a screenplay-cum-biography of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, a fertile wretch who was also the basis for J.J. Hunsecker, the ruthless columnist played by Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success.

Michael became a Hollywood re-write man, lured to the movies by Francis Ford Coppola to work on Apocalypse Now. That’s his writing in Martin Sheen’s narration. He went on to work on many of Stanley Kubrick’s last films, including writing the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket. Michael used to refer to this sort of rewrite work as “a wash and a rinse.”

He also wrote two long pieces for this magazine in the late 90s. They were both about Kubrick, a collaborator who had become his cherished friend. Both articles were marvels of precision and potent mood.

Back in the day when people did this sort of thing, he and I would talk on the phone for hours. I mean hours. Hours and hours. Once a week. Sometimes more. They say a woman falls in love with her ears, and I will tell you that I completely fell in love with Michael over the phone. He was wise, he was funny, and he was generous of spirit. We used to refer to our calls as 10-cigarette calls, and I could hear the punctuation in the conversation as he lit his. Michael had a smoky, jazzy way of talking, and he was one of the few men who could say “Hey, Man” without it seeming strained. The day Kubrick died, Michael was the one to call me about it. He was about as broke up as I could remember him being.

The thing of it is, we had spent maybe a hundred hours together, but all of it was on the phone. I finally talked him into coming down to New York, a city he had given up for good, from his place in upstate New York. I was anxious that he would find me wanting in the flesh. If he did, he certainly didn’t show it. We would eat at a small Italian restaurant in the Village, not too far from my house, and close to the apartment he used to rent. We would regularly hold the table till the others had chairs stacked on them. His wife, Valerie, came often, as did my wife, Anna. On our last meal together, Fran Lebowitz joined us, and the evening was a 45-cigaretter. This was in those faraway days before that sort of behavior was looked down upon.

War and writing took a distant second place to Michael’s true following, Buddhism. He was a serious one, and for the last decade and a half he had been spending much of his time at a Buddhist retreat in upstate New York. He was done with writing, so far as I know. The friend in me hopes that this was not the case. The admirer in me hopes that he continued to write, and that he just set the writing aside until after his death.