The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

by Marc Weingarten

  Sack was incredulous. “I couldn’t believe that with this vast army in Vietnam … with this huge thing going on … that all it was resulting in was the occasional death of seven-year-old girls.”

  Sack returned to the Continental Hotel in Saigon and wrote up his twenty-seven-thousand-word story. In early June 1966 he sent copies to Hayes and his literary agent, Candida Donadio, in the hopes that she might see the potential to turn it into a book. Donadio turned him down, and Sack was despondent. What was missing? Sack thumbed through some other Vietnam articles in the army library and came across another story on Fort Dix in Holiday magazine by a young writer named Michael Herr, a former assistant editor at the magazine. What struck Sack about the article, called “Fort Dix: The New Army Game,” was his powerful command of language and character, the way Herr infused everything he wrote about with tremendous dramatic power. Herr described things, whereas Sack just reported the facts. Sack was taken by the way Herr wrote about happy hour in the officers’ club and how the senior officers resembled “Rotarians, perhaps highly skilled laborers—lathe operators out for dinner before a night of bowling.” Sack was intent on writing in scenes—that’s the way he had structured the TV documentaries he had made for CBS—but it wasn’t enough to simply string dry scenarios together. Herr’s story made him go back and look harder, push himself to elevate his prose to Herr’s level.

  The next day, after touring an aircraft carrier, Sack returned to the Continental to check his mail and found a telegram from Harold Hayes informing him that his story would take up the entire feature well for the next issue. A second telegram read: “Send any and all pictures of company M both in training and combat. Vitally important please do your best. Hayes.”

  Sack was ecstatic, but he had not taken a single picture during his time with M Company. He would have to go on another operation, possibly risking his life, to get the shots he needed. Borrowing a camera from Associated Press photographer Horst Faas, Sack joined M on something called Operation El Paso, hopping a helicopter along with Dimirgian and a few other soldiers. When the copter landed in enemy territory, Sack quickly jumped into a shell hole so that he could get shots of M disembarking from the helicopters. It turned out to be a cold landing zone—no VC to be found anywhere—but M formed a perimeter, and Sack had a perfect photo op to take advantage of.

  When he returned to Saigon, he had over seven hundred pictures, and he sent them along to Hayes. The Esquire editor was now hearing rumblings from the magazine’s legal department that the story could perhaps trigger an avalanche of libel lawsuits. Sack’s portrait of army life in Vietnam left nothing out; his protagonists’ most closely held thoughts about the war, marriage, combat, leadership in the field—it was all in there. Perhaps, Hayes suggested, Sack could go back into the field and get legal releases from his ten most prominent characters? That way, if anyone else complained about Sack’s story, the magazine would have some leverage.

  Sack agreed, but his mission to track down M Company would be considerably more difficult this time. They were now in war zone C, right on the Cambodian border, an area so dangerous that no helicopters would go near it. Sack’s only recourse was to take the press helicopter, with a pilot who was under orders to fly anywhere an accredited journalist told him to go, but he needed five passengers in order to reserve it. Sack’s girlfriend, a French baroness named Anne Rousseau de Prienne, was eager to break in her tailor-made camouflage outfit and agreed to join him. Sack had learned that M Company was going to burn a huge cache of rice, the largest yet found, in Zone C, and he convinced Dan Rather to bring his crew along.

  That made five, but when Sack showed up at 7 A.M. to fly over, the helicopter pilot begged off: it was too risky. Sack pleaded with him, and they cut a deal: the helicopter would touch down, allowing them just enough time to disembark, but it would take off right afterward. They would have to make it back to Saigon on their own.

  No sooner did they get close to Zone C than they were hit by machine gun fire; a .50 caliber bullet pierced the helicopter blade as they touched down. M Company was surrounded by VC, but Sack had a job to do. The baroness and Rather and his crew headed down the road to see the rice burn, leaving Sack to get his releases signed. Dimirgian, Sullivan, and a few other subjects were there, and Sack made swift work of it. He spotted a brigadier general in a bubble helicopter and hitched a ride back to Saigon that way, leaving Rather and the baroness to fend for themselves.

  Hours went by, and still no sign of Rather or the baroness. At five that afternoon Sack retired to the bar of the Hotel Continental, where correspondents gathered daily for an informal happy hour, and he regaled his friend Dan Minor, a radio journalist, with the day’s adventures. Minor found it worrisome that Sack would just leave his girlfriend and Rather in the lurch like that. Sack told him, “Don’t worry, she’ll prance in here shortly saying, ‘How could you do this to me?’”

  “I’d be worried,” said Minor.

  Sack told him, “No, I promise you.”

  A half hour later the baroness trudged across the square in her tiger suit, stomped into the Continental, and screamed, “How could you do this? I have dinner tonight with the French ambassador at seven. It’s a dress party. I need to put my makeup on, I need to fix my hair, it is six o’clock, and I don’t have time to put on my dress or makeup!”

  When Sack returned to New York in June, he sent his longer, revised piece to Candida Donadio. This time she was sold, and made a book deal at publisher David Segal’s New American Library. Sack spent the summer adding scenes to the book at his aunt’s house in Ocean Bay Park on Fire Island while Hayes and the Esquire staff prepared the publication of his story.

  In the end, none of the pictures that Sack snapped in Vietnam would be chosen for the piece; the story would have no accompanying art at all. Sack’s notion for the cover—pasting Beetle Bailey’s face over the heads of real soldiers—was rejected outright by Hayes, who told Sack, “You don’t understand your story at all.”

  The cover would break ranks with the usual whimsical mockeries that Esquire had become famous for ever since it hired George Lois in 1962. Lois—whose firm, Papert, Koenig, Lois, had revolutionized American advertising with its sharp-witted, graphically bold designs for all manner of consumer products—was a master of bitter irony and the use of typography as a graphic element. The September cover had showed a male underclassman applying lipstick, with the headline “How Our Red-Blooded Campus Heroes Are Beating the Draft.” That was the old Esquire approach to Vietnam. The October headline augured something darker and more menacing, the new twisted reality of the war. It was a slightly altered quote from Sack’s story, written in white letters against a black background—a device that Lois had previously used in a cough syrup ad:

  “OH MY GOD—WE HIT A LITTLE GIRL”

  The True Story of M Company, from Fort Dix to Vietnam

  “I just plucked out the line,” said Lois. “Putting people in harm’s way—that’s what the war was all about.” When Lois first presented the cover to Hayes, “Harold nearly fell to the floor. It was the first antiwar cover in a mainstream magazine.” Lois warned Hayes, “You’re gonna lose a lot of advertisers over this.” Hayes paused, look up at Lois, and whispered, “You nailed it.”

  It was the first mainstream magazine article to discuss civilian casualties at any length, but not everyone at Esquire was thrilled with Sack’s impressionistic technique. Bob Sherrill felt that it was a “fucking good story” that got “mired up in detail.” He took issue with Sack’s lead, which began, “One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders—they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.” It was in Sherrill’s view too fanciful, designed to “lead you away from the story instead of getting right into it.”

  A
mong the editorial staff, Sherrill was a minority of one. Hayes loved the story so much that he threw a party in Sack’s honor at the Esquire offices. “It’s a much better story because you were for the war,” Hayes told Sack. “If you were against the war, it wouldn’t have come across as strongly.”

  Published by New American Library in February 1967, M was the first great Vietnam book, and it’s unquestionably the first great New Journalism war book. Layer by layer, Sack peels away M Company’s thin veneer of resolve and courage, because it was absurd to pretend that soldiers in Vietnam were somehow made of sterner stuff. Soldiers weren’t superheroes; they were just unfortunate conscripts, forced to endure ungodly privations and accept death as a given of wartime life. Sack’s grunts were scared, they were vulnerable, they cared a little too much. This was a major break from the time-honored tradition of war reportage, especially that of the World War II correspondents who pumped up the heroism of our boys on the front until they effaced every vestige of realism.

  Guadalcanal Diary, Richard Tregaskis’s chronicle of the U.S. Marines’ crucial strategic battle in which an undermanned division defeated the Japanese and gained control of the Pacific island, was a massive bestseller when it was first published by Random House in January 1943. Tregaskis, a correspondent for the International News Service, attached himself to the First Marine Division during the six-month campaign, the only journalist to do so. Tregaskis’s narrative is a smooth upward trajectory of victories both small and significant, building to a final, victorious crescendo. Tregaskis doesn’t linger too long on the injured and the maimed soldiers; they are just the prelude to a successful counterattack. His soldiers are no different from those cardboard cutouts Sack had referred to in his query letters to Hayes—lean, mean, and looking for a fight.

  [T]he Marines had fought with the greatest ferocity. Corp. George F. Grady (of New York City) had charged a group of eight Japs on Gatuvu Hill, by himself. He had killed two with his sub-machine gun; when the gun jammed, he used it as a club to kill one more Jap, and then, dropping his gun, had drawn the sheath knife he carried on his belt and stabbed two more of the enemy, before he himself was killed by the three Japs who remained unharmed.

  The book is a diary of everything Tregaskis saw or heard, written in a clipped, straightforward style. Any speculative attempts at taking the emotional temperature of the situation are limited to Tregaskis’s own observations. Sack, in contrast, removes all mediation between reporter and reader; the story is not his, and thus not for him to tell.

  “I don’t put myself in the story,” Sack said. “I don’t want the reader to even be aware that I’m there…. I want [the reader] to feel they’re getting undiluted reality—that they’re getting absolutely objective reporting. Of course, this is a trick—because I have my own values, as to what’s important, what’s worth saying, and what isn’t worth saying. I’m choosing what I want to write, and I’m choosing the order it goes in, so though it pretends to objectivity it’s really subjective, and this is a trick on the reader.”

  For Sack, reportorial objectivity was one of the great myths. “If one million people threw roses at Khrushchev when he came to the States, and one person threw an egg and hit him, the Russian press would say one million threw roses, and the American press would say one threw an egg … and both of them would think they were being objective.” It was all about sifting through the information and choosing your own version of the truth.

  To merely describe the activities of M Company in the verdant thicket of Laikhe was insufficient, because inertia and boredom was the story. The enemy was a wraith, unseen but omnipresent. Campaigns became tense waiting games, followed by a flashpoint cataclysm. This, Sack discerned, was slowly driving the members of M Company to seek refuge inside their own heads, which were being cross-wired by the confusing nature of their mission.

  When M did encounter the Vietcong, the army’s rules of engagement faded into insignificance. The intuitive, improvised tactics of guerilla warfare left M Company confused and frayed, with no other recourse but to “burn, burn, burn” everything within reach.

  “Burn, burn, burn,” Demirgian’s captain said. “Yes, that’ll get old Charlie out.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “Charlie’s got no place to hide now. Charlie don’t like open spaces,” the captain said.

  “No sir, that Charlie don’t,” the lieutenant said.

  “That’s the way to end this war. Burn villages—burn the farms,” the captain said. “Then the Charlies’ll have to come in planting and rebuilding instead of just stirring up trouble.”

  Demirgian got the worst of it in-country. After he narrowly escaped an ambush, his animus curdled into something irrational and murderous—and Sack probes his running inner monologue, a continuous reel of malevolence.

  Charlie tries to creep up on me, Demirgian wistfully said to himself—Charlie ever tries that and I’m just going to lie here—yeah! Let him get ten meters from me, the stupid little son-of-a. Yeah, and I’ll have my hand grenade and I’ll pull the pin—Charlie you’re about to have had it! k-k-k!

  Sack wasn’t present during such incidents, but he didn’t make anything up, either. The use of interior monologues in the work of Sack and other New Journalists would become a common complaint among the genre’s critics: how can a writer know what his or her subject is thinking at any given moment? The answer is that the writer merely has to ask. “I hate to use the word reconstructed because the word reconstructed means that I make up the conversation,” said Sack. “But I just mean that … every conversation is something somebody told me they said, and I’m putting that together with what somebody else has told me.”

  The critics had another phrase to describe M: “documentary novel.” “Sack manages to make M Company both vivid and human, deeply human,” wrote Leonard Kriegal in The Nation. “He has written a superb book.” The New York Times’s Neil Sheehan had problems with Sack’s “hyperbolic” style but still found plenty of “fine” and “often powerful” writing. Publishers Weekly was taken with the “satiric bite” of M’s Vietnam experiences; Sack’s “quietly written” humor, the anonymous reviewer wrote, packed “a cumulative punch.”

  M was a watershed story for Esquire, both formally and thematically. Harold Hayes would no longer flinch at confronting the horrors of Vietnam in the pages of the magazine. And the worst was yet to come.

  HELL SUCKS

  The positive critical response to M convinced Harold Hayes that covering Vietnam without tears or irony was the right thing to do. Troop levels had escalated to 485,000 by the winter of 1967; military casualties had doubled from the previous year, to 11,153, with over 100,000 North and South Vietnamese civilians dead. Hayes didn’t want Esquire to tip too far in the direction of far-left publications such as Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts magazine or Paul Krassner’s The Realist, but the magazine’s gentle mockeries of the war were clearly untenable now. John Sack had seen to that.

  No writer was as eager to go in-country as Michael Herr. He wanted not only to cover the war but to produce a modern-day Nostromo. He wanted to write the greatest book to come out of the war. Herr, whose Fort Dix story for Holiday magazine had compelled John Sack to become a better writer, was a native of Syracuse, New York, who had attended Nottingham High School with John Berendt, who would become an editor at Esquire. Herr was charismatic, a natural-born leader, elected president of the student body in his senior year. “Michael was brilliant in high school, already a terrific writer,” said Berendt. “Even then, he had a way of expressing himself that made it clear he was a talent to be reckoned with.”

  The son of a jewelry store proprietor in Syracuse, Herr’s great ambition in life was to become a literary eminence. Herr graduated from Syracuse University in 1961; after a six-month stint in the army reserve, he did some freelance writing, mostly movie reviews for the New Leader—from which he was fired for writing positive notices on films that his editors disliked—and travel sto
ries for Holiday magazine.

  Herr applied for an editing job at Esquire in 1962, only to lose out to his former Nottingham classmate Berendt. He was probably better off not chained to an editor’s desk; the urge to travel to far-flung areas of the world and write about them was too strong. He got his wish after a short tenure as an assistant editor at Holiday when the magazine made him a roving correspondent.

  Herr’s global dispatches for Holiday were competent efforts but hardly an indication of his special gifts. Herr was Holiday’s intrepid adventurer, filing stories from Guam, the Amazon jungle (where he interviewed a snake hunter), Venezuela, Taipei, and elsewhere—solidly written stories redolent of atmosphere and finely attuned to the rituals and folkways of the people. But it wasn’t until Herr observed basic training at Fort Dix in early 1966 at a time when conscription for Vietnam was being ramped up considerably that his latent skills emerged.

  For Herr, Vietnam was the story, but a benign general-interest magazine such as Holiday wasn’t exactly the right forum for what he wanted to do. Aside from M, which Herr admired, no one had really tackled the war by writing what Herr called “higher journalism.” In a May 1967 pitch letter to Hayes, Herr talked of writing “the best kind of journalism” from Vietnam to “make it seem more real.” Herr had a number of potential approaches: perhaps a story on the press in Vietnam, or General Westmoreland, or the Green Berets. He wanted to be Esquire’s man in Vietnam, roaming the country for stories that could be published in a monthly column: “extended vignettes, set pieces, geographical sketches, personality portraits … even battle reportage.” What Herr wouldn’t touch were straight news stories—the piles of statistics and body-count roll calls that explained nothing and which, Herr thought, made “conventional propaganda look innocent.” If Esquire wanted the real news, then Herr would tease it out from the players in a format unmediated by army censors or the dictates of wary editors.